Field Guide to the Haunted Forest (Haunted Forest Trilogy)

by Jarod K. Anderson

It flowed red through the blood of a leaping deer, but it was still the star. The long, dark journey. Crimson in the veins of a sleeping child, but still the silent explosion. And it brought what it was wherever it traveled.

I’m not trying to write a tailored suit. I’m trying to write boot socks, warm from the dryer. There’s an endless autumn in me, scenting my thoughts like campfire smoke.

Your dreams, dark and strange as sprouts curling beneath a flat rock. Your regret, bitter as the citrus rot of old cut grass.

The forest. The meadow. The sweeping arm of a galaxy. You are as natural as any postcard landscape and deserve the same love.

The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be an ocean soon enough.

The Chain You were once very much part of your mother’s body. The same is true for your mother and her mother and so on back to the beginning. It’s a biological chain that stretches back to the first living cell awakening in a young ocean millions of years before the first spoken name. We are links in that chain. Can you feel its weight? A clear path back to ancient waters. You are here. In modernity. As familiar as thirst. Just remember what else you are. Your mother. Her mother. The ancient seas beneath a thin, new sky.

They say cut all the wood you think you will need for the night, then double it. Cut it during the daylight when fuel seems irrelevant. Dead limbs hanging low, sun-dried, hungry for fire. The night can be longer than we expect. The wind can be colder than we predict. The dark beneath the trees is absolute. Gather the fuel. Double it.

The landscape is not scenery. It’s family. Notice the resemblance.

You are not born to this place. You are born of this place.

We can’t wait for our climax. We don’t have character arcs. We live and then we don’t.

Don’t fear you won’t be good enough. Just be here. Present in this dance between joy and sorrow. The plot is happening now. Today is the story of you and me.

You can’t think your way out of depression any more than you can think your way out of drowning. Asking for a life-jacket is more important than knowing the physics of buoyancy.

You are a unique sentence built from the alphabet of our universe. The letters were here before you and the story will march on long after you’ve been read, but you will forever be a part of the definitive text of existence. It’s too late for you not to matter.

Vision is a kind of divination shaped and fueled by a cosmic inferno.

I wish I could wander back through my ancestors like a steppingstone path. To Ireland. To Africa. Past organisms that were never named by humans.

To the sunlit waters where life began to feel its own strange power. To the forest of hands that lifted me up into my own simple life. I wish I could know the whole, so I could love it more completely.

Sometimes, atoms arranged in a certain way just get very, very haunted. That’s us. When an explosion explodes hard enough, dust wakes up and thinks about itself. And then writes about it.

The soft susurrus of jellyfish who have never known the shore. The sharp sizzle of deer fleeing through autumn corn. These sounds belong to the same unfinished poem as you and your fistful of years like copper coins.

Unwritten 50,000 years ago, an elk was struck by lightening and lived. The ache of it stayed in her bones the rest of her life. There was no human there to see it or record it in words, yet it’s just as much a part of earth’s essential history as any song lingering in a billion human minds.

Fossil The fossil is not the animal. The fossil is not the bones of the animal. The fossil is the stone’s memory of the bones of the animal. And that’s a poetry older than words.

They let us tame an ancient, devouring force of nature, older than life, and stick it in a little jar on the shelf. A candle is a pet god.

We are creatures born to thrive on the borderlands of ruin. Home is a valley between saw-toothed peaks of loss. Here we sow failure and harvest miracles.

A dream with teeth.

We borrow our atoms. The universe owns them.

Relativity There. Now. A sharp stone juts from an icy sea. crowded with gulls screaming accusations at a flinty sky, the wind hides daggers and beneath the waves something rich in teeth swims lazy circles. Here. Now. I hope this truth makes your current surroundings seem more warm and welcoming.

Your Maker The sun isn’t alive. It’s better than alive. It swims, self-sustaining, through endless void. All we in its orbit think and do is a byproduct of its audacious existence.

Ownership Fish flashed in mountain streams long before the first human. Honey was sweet and falling snow was graceful before a person noticed such things. This world is not here for us. We are simply fortunate to live here.