I bowed my head to prevent the specks of glitter from falling in my eyes. Glitter danced all around me. It fell throughout the forest, dusting the ice. Fascinated, I hopped off the metal platform and shuffled my feet. Glitter collected between my cold toes. Cheerfully distracted, I quickly forgot about the frozen bodies beneath. I playfully cupped my hands and lifted them toward the sky. When they began to overflow, I dumped the glitter and watched it swirl through the air and add to the sparkling piles that had begun to accumulate.
The light dusting that had begun only moments before had quickly evolved into a full-scale glitter downpour. The trail I made had already been erased by fresh glitter. And by the next time I heard the ricochet of the metal branches, I found myself lost in a glitter blizzard. Glitter stuck to my hands. It stuck to my hair and eyelashes. It pasted itself to my skin. I shielded my eyes with my forearm as I stumbled about blindly.
Abruptly, I felt a cold jolt in my back, followed by a stinging pain. I reached behind me to find I had finally been pierced by a metal branch. I stood paralyzed for a moment, skewered in place. I feared that I’d soon be tossed across the forest with the next shimmy of the blade. So before I let that happen, I thrust forward, successfully dislodging from the tip. I collapsed to the ground and felt for the wound, but glitter had already begun caking into it.
I crawled along the forest floor, attempting to find my way back to safety, back to the tree with the pedestal. But I could barely keep my eyes open. Soon I was forced to shut them altogether. I hopelessly felt my way across the ice. Coats of glitter covered my skin until I myself was as silvery as the trees. And like them, I eventually became immobile, frozen to the landscape like their metal trunks.
Stranded in the middle of the metal forest with the moon bleeding glitter, I could’ve easily been overcome. But at that moment, more than ever, I knew I needed to concentrate. I began by reaching in my mind for what was most familiar. I thought of forests with leaves. Green leaves. And bark. Bark that peeled off trunks when weathered. I thought of a breeze rustling branches high above treetops, causing them to sway gently in the wind. And I thought—of Everett. Of course! I did have a purpose in that forest. I had been given a mission.
By then, the glitter was up to my elbows. But my renewed clarity energized me. I clawed the glitter from my eyes and forced them open. I dove into drifts of the thick stuff. On my hands and knees, I felt along the ice, searching. I swept methodically, back and forth across the surface, standing every so often for gasps of glitter-free air. I could cover the whole forest in sections, I reasoned, and eventually I’d find what Everett had sent me to find.
My search, however, was prematurely halted when my hands suddenly became wet. I stood cautiously and brought them to my face. Water ran from my palms, bringing trails of loose glitter down my wrists. My sweatpants were soaked. A puddle of water sloshed beneath my numb feet. All became still. The trees had stopped posing. The glitter had stopped falling. I too stood completely still, bracing myself as if nearing the crest of a hill on a roller coaster. I took only a few light, terrified breaths. And then, the surface of the forest left me. As easily as I had been standing on ice, I was in the next instant underwater. My legs were suddenly tangled in metal roots and the limbs of the dead, freed from their frozen prisons, while my head bobbed among the mass of floating, shimmering glitter.
With glitter no longer being dumped from the sky, I realized I wasn’t very far from the tree with the jutting platform. I swam toward it, grimacing as my legs were cut by sharp metal and felt by dead hands. I used the metal ridge to hoist my torso above the floating glitter. Yet the piece of metal I so desperately clutched began to bend under my weight. It drooped toward the water as if it were slowly turning to liquid. In a desperate move, I let go and swiftly wrapped my arms around the massive trunk. I hugged it as tight as I could. But unable to fully reach around its girth, my arms trembled, and I began to slide. As my chest slid past the weakened outcrop, it finally tore away from the tree and plopped into the water.
I struggled to keep my head above the glitter. And as if my situation wasn’t grim enough, small pieces of metal began pouring out of the freshly torn hole. The flat, round pieces bounced off my head and then plunked into the water. I soon realized they were coins. Hundreds of them sprayed over me as if I were trapped beneath a giant slot machine. They pelted me with such intensity, I was forced to give in. Finally, I released my weak grip. I slipped through the layer of glitter and under the water, where the plinks and plunks of coins dropping all around me became the only sound.
I allowed the overwhelming feeling of weakness to subdue me. I welcomed it actually. In that moment, I only wanted to fall. I only wanted to drop farther and descend gently into the abyss, like the coins passing me by. I closed my eyes and imagined I was one of them, slipping past the dead bodies and jagged strips and twists of metal. The deeper I sank, the more I relaxed. My breathing was steady. I could breathe under this water! I continued my descent without opening my eyes. I didn’t want to see the chaos above. Instead, I concentrated on my breathing and allowed myself to drift for miles.
6
The Organic Forest
Slowly I opened my eyes. There was Everett like I knew he would be, sitting at the foot of my bed. He saw my eyelids lift and immediately flashed his smile. I was just thirteen then. He was fifteen. He had set up a weight room in the basement and already had a solid build for his age. “My feet are freezing,” I said. I leaned back on my elbows to see my bare feet sticking out from under the covers.
“Oh yeah?” Everett leaned forward and sandwiched my foot in his armpit. “Is this better?” he joked.
“Gross,” I said with a laugh, yanking my feet away from him.
Instantly he turned deadly serious. “Did you find it?” he asked. I couldn’t contain my smile. Everett slowly shook his head, impressed. “I knew you would.”
“It took me most of the night. And it wasn’t easy. But I think so.”
“Let’s go!” He bolted for the door, eager to see if I had in fact completed his mission. But a gnawing feeling of unease soured my excitement. I remained on the bed, my hands clamped on to my frozen feet. “What is it?” He turned back and sat next to me. “What else did you see?”
Everett had always been curious about my dreams. He’d listen to me recount the bizarre and fantastic situations I’d find myself in. He liked hearing all the strange details. In one dream, I found myself floating outside the second story of our house. I was unable to lower myself safely to the ground, so there I hovered, desperately moving from window to window, pounding furiously for someone to let me in. About a week later, we were at the store, and Mom had locked her keys in the car. Embarrassingly, she was forced to ask the manager for help. The resourceful man eventually unlocked the door by removing his shoelace, tying it into a lasso, and slipping it through the crack in the window to grab and pull up the knob.
I didn’t connect the dots. But Everett was convinced I had predicted it—that me attempting to get into the house through the windows symbolized us attempting to get into the locked car. “You were just a bit off. That’s all,” he said. “That’s the way it works with futures. Dreams are tricky. So details are important. Even if they don’t seem important at the time, you’ve got to pay attention. You’ve got to remember the details.” He’d keep track of it all to see if any meaning could be later extracted. He told me my dreams weren’t ever going to be crystal clear because I’d never know exactly what to concentrate on, and the dream could easily lead me astray.
But Everett had an idea, a way around having to wait for an event to happen before sifting through details. What if I did know what to concentrate on? What if I were to focus on the present rather than picking up ambiguous clues to a murky future? And that’s how he came up with the idea of giving me a task to complete. He figured if I was given a mission to concentrate on, my dreams would be more specific, and their accuracy would improve. According to Everett, having a targ
et, a focus, would make it easier to glean useful information. Even so, spending the night in the metal forest didn’t seem easy.
“I was in the woods,” I reported. “But the trees were metal. The moon was as big as the earth. And the ground was made of ice. Under the ice were people. Dead people. Frozen dead people. It started snowing. Only the snow wasn’t real snow. It was glitter. And it dumped all over me.”
“Slow down,” he pleaded, trying to record his mental notes.
“Then the ice melted. I had to swim with the bodies. And you weren’t there at all!” I scolded.
“I was busy in my own dreams,” he countered with a wink. “Nothing can hurt you in your dreams, you know.”
“I know,” I said solemnly. “But this woman—”
Everett stopped me from going any further by bringing his finger to his lips. Sure enough, the stairs were creaking. The one rule he had was that we didn’t share my dreams with anybody. I liked being in an exclusive club with Everett, us having secrets no one else knew about or could participate in. It felt like Everett and me against the world. A moment later, Mom darted her head into the room. “You boys coming down for breakfast?”
It was Sunday. On Sundays, she’d always make a big breakfast since it was the only day we’d all be together. Dad was a truck driver. He’d be gone most of the week, hauling all kinds of tobacco products through parts of Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana. Mom was a secretary on the cardiology floor at the hospital. She worked second shift. So most days after school, it was just Everett and me.
We scarfed down Mom’s thick pancakes as fast as we could before taking off through the field of tall grass and weeds behind our house. Many years before, cows grazed there. Later, corn, cabbage, and alfalfa grew on the spot. Mr. Peterson, an old farmer, used to own much of the land surrounding our house. When he retired, his children weren’t interested in inheriting his farming business, so he sold most of it off piece by piece to those in the neighborhood. My parents snatched up the acre and a half directly behind our house. The only land Mr. Peterson kept for himself was the small strip of forest that lay between our field and his farmhouse.
Our neighbor Mr. Newberry decided to try his hand at farming field corn with the land he acquired. His cornfields grew on either side of our field and along Mr. Peterson’s woods. In the middle of the largest cornfield sat a rusted pile of old farm machinery that had originally belonged to Mr. Peterson. It was apparently too burdensome to move, so Mr. Newberry simply planted around the old plows and tractors heaped on top of each other. Everett and I would climb on the equipment. When we were younger, I’d sit on the seat of one of the upright tractors, bouncing up and down, pretending I was driving. Sometimes we’d lie on our stomachs on top of old cushions beneath the rubble and imagine we were in the cockpit of a spaceship, flying high above the cornfield, shooting laser beams at targets below.
The morning sun made the tall weeds glow with a golden hue. We made our way along the thin dirt trail we had made with our bikes. “Let’s race!” Everett announced.
“You’ll just beat me.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s find out.” With that, he took off sprinting through the field. I ran after him, quickly falling behind. It looked as if the tall stalks had swallowed him as he cut into the cornfield. I could see the yellow tassels swaying ahead of me as he ran for the woods. I leapt into the corn after him. It was darker in the cornfield, where the morning sun couldn’t easily penetrate the dark-green plants. The dewy leaves slapped my face as I dashed through the thick maze. My face was red-hot, but the air was cool. Stalks rustled in the distance. “C’mon!” he called. I ran faster, panting, following his voice and the rattling stalks.
When I could no longer hear him in front of me, I slowed my pace—and eventually stopped, bent over with my hands on my knees to collect my breath. Clearly, he had made it to the woods. There was no use trying to catch up. In the middle of the cornfield, the only sounds were the pounding of my heart and the tops of the stalks gently caressing in the breeze. In the distance, in every direction, was a collage of green leaves and stalks. I looked up to the striking blue sky. Inside the cornfield was a different world. If I had a ladder, I could’ve brought the outside world into perspective. I had a pretty good idea where I was in relation to the house, our field, and the woods. But still, there was an unsettling feeling not being able to truly confirm my bearings.
I squeezed through a thick cluster of stalks. My pant leg became caught in the tight mesh. As I untangled myself, I caught a flash of white streak by. Realizing I must’ve caught a glimpse of Everett’s T-shirt, I quickly pulled myself out of the tangle and began running again. When I figured I had run far enough to be parallel with the woods, I cut back to the edge of the cornfield. It wasn’t long before I came to the narrow strip of no-man’s-land that divided the woods from the corn. I stood outside the edge of the forest for a moment before exchanging one world for the next. Wild grapevines draped over the trees like a curtain keeping the forest secure. I knew Everett would be in there, waiting.
The small forest was old. Not many young trees had a chance to take root. The few saplings would eventually die because the tall, mature trees blocked the sunlight. Because of this, there was also little foliage. Yet in the spring, bellflower and nightshade grew along with other wildflowers. And in the summer, the forest floor was carpeted in large patches of mayapple.
Even if not as fantastical as the forest of my dream, to me, it was the most whimsical place on earth. Ever since we were children, we had made it our playground of make-believe. We had constructed countless forts out of dead trees. We’d play war. We’d pretend we were vampires, our lair hidden beneath a hollowed mound. When the forest would flood in the springtime, we’d imagine the stagnant water filled with mosquito larvae was liquid acid, powerful enough to strip the skin from our bones should we fall in. We’d make a game out of finding ways from one end of the woods to the other without touching the water. This involved balancing ourselves across a network of fallen tree trunks that connected sporadic mounds of dry land. But on that day, we were no longer playing pretend. Our mission was real.
I peeled back the thick layer of grape leaves and stepped inside. I scanned for Everett while at the same time comparing the organic forest to the forest of metal and ice. I was surprised how accurate the reproduction in my dream was. Sure, the floor of the organic forest had random mounds and slight hills, whereas the floor of the metal forest was a smooth sheet of ice. But much like reality, the metal forest was virtually barren except for the silver trees. And to the best of my recollection, each organic tree seemed to have an uncanny metallic counterpart, similar in position, height, and girth.
Suspiciously, Everett was nowhere in sight. Alone, I passed the remnants of our most ambitious fort. We had built it on top of one of the largest mounds. With the forest a virtual lake in the spring, we had our very own island. It had been several seasons since we last worked on it. Although it had mostly deteriorated, its skeleton, made up of short logs and sticks, was still intact.
I was drawn to the small clearing, where in my dream I had seen the frozen woman. The ground in this spot was remarkably clear. No mayapple grew. The forest floor was virtually exposed, covered only by a thin layer of scattered twigs. I pressed the tip of my shoe into the clearing and kicked up a layer of dirt. I couldn’t help but imagine her just below the surface. Her eyes pleading for her release. Her gaping mouth. Her clawing hands.
A rush of movement from the edge of the forest startled me. Branches bowed and swayed as Everett burst inside. “Man, you’re fast!” he said as he hurried toward me, effortlessly leaping over a downed tree trunk. “You take a shortcut?” I smirked, knowing full well he had hidden in the corn until I had made it inside the woods. “So what’s this?” he asked.
“It’s where one of the bodies was. A woman. Her eyes looked right into mine. She was afraid. She was fighting, screaming when it happened.”
“When what h
appened?”
“When she was killed, I guess.”
Everett knelt beside me and patted the earth. “Well, she’s not here now. Don’t let it bother you.”
“There were many others,” I muttered, “trapped under the ice.”
“Remember, it’s different this time. We have focus. So let’s focus.” He spun me away from the patch. “Now, where are those coins?”
“Over there,” I pointed.
Several years before, old Mr. Peterson had hired Everett to cut down the thicket taking over the outside of his dilapidated barn. Everett spent nearly a week in the hot sun cutting through the growth with a rusted scythe he had found and yanking down the creeping ivy. When he finished, he was invited inside the old farmhouse. On the counter sat several pickle jars filled with coins. Everett waited patiently as Mr. Peterson counted out quarters and dimes before begrudgingly sliding three dollars worth across the counter as payment. Everett fumed for days, swearing he’d never work for the old man again. “I’d make more money picking up pop cans along the highway!”
Not long after, Everett was working on adding a bridge to our main fort when he spotted Mr. Peterson tromping through the woods. We knew the old man didn’t take kindly to trespassers. In fact, our parents had warned us not to even play in his woods. But Everett wasn’t easily dissuaded, even after we were chased off on a few occasions. Everett crouched in the fort, peering through the camouflage as Mr. Peterson passed by muttering to himself. He strained to see what the old man was up to and noticed he was clutching one of his pickle jars. But when he passed by the fort again on his way out of the woods, he no longer carried the jar.
Together, we searched in hollow logs and in foxholes. We even dug shallow holes in the area Everett thought he saw Mr. Peterson last holding it. But the jar remained elusive. Eventually, we gave up. That is, until Everett charged me with the task of locating the infamous hidden pickle jar filled with coins.
Where the Cats Will Not Follow Page 4