The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies

by John Langan

It may be that you think of the forest as little more than an abstraction; it may be that you are one of the people who believe in the forest as a pristine natural paradise, Robert Frost’s woods so lovely, dark, and deep. If either of these is the case, take your car on one of those ten- or fifteen-minute drives, until you arrive at one of the digits the forest pokes into the world. Park your car. Leave your cellphone, your Blackberry, your iPod in the glove compartment. Lock the car. Be sure you put your keys someplace safe—someplace you can get to them quickly should the need arise—and walk out into the trees. Don’t stop after ten or fifteen minutes: keep going for an hour, two, until you are deep in a place you have not seen before. Feel free, should you like, to lean against a tree, sit on a log—mind it isn’t rotten, though. Now, here, feel how far away you are from everyone and everything you know, feel to what distance your life—which is to say, the routines you inhabit—has receded. Look at the trees around you. They almost seem to form a maze, don’t they? Feel how exposed you are. Something could be watching you, couldn’t it? It sounds silly to say, yes, but something out behind one of these trees could be watching you. Try not to jump when you hear that crashing in the undergrowth. Most likely, it’s a pair of squirrels chasing each other, or a fawn still clumsy. Do you think you can find your way back to your car? You did walk in a straight line, didn’t you? What d...