The prompt:

Whose forest is this?
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NO TREES

By Pam Bolton

She was gone that day. November 7th. Down to be with the grandkids. So it was just he and the tree guy and the tree guy’s ex-wife’s stepson. They’d decided it would be okay. She and he had decided. She thought. Later, she wasn’t sure. Did he really say yes, his own yes? Or was it just because she said it was time?

She’d been on this land for 41 years. Came here a late-twenties mom, in a back-to- the-land move with the first husband, their two-month-old daughter, two dogs, Buffy the cat, the goats and chickens. She’d grown up on Robert Frost, “Whose woods these are I do not know.”

She had also talked to the trees for the first thirty. Let them know where she stood. Right along side them. No trees shall be cut down. And she and he still stuck to it. Took downed wood for the stove, and pruned. But no whole trees, except for a young one before Christmas, and even that not every year.

These firs were tall, big old firs that the folks way before her time hadn’t touched. There weren’t that many. When you want to come down, give me a sign. Come in my dreams. Talk to me. She knew it would happen some day. And then he could build the studio, or the addition, or something.

He wasn’t so sure. He’d been with her in these woods the last 29 years. Even though he complained about the kids, the thousand Doug fir seedlings grown quickly to saplings and then into a forest of dog-hair firs, he never took one. An afternoon shroud to her garden, they covered goat hill, what the goats had kept clean until she gave them up.

When the bay branch leaning over the power line broke, the fire went up the hill fast, under the old-timers. Just one didn’t recover. This was the sign. They chose the five elders positioned in a semi-circle toward the back, same goat hill, but a ways away from the offspring.

As soon as he saw how it was all coming down, the noise, the suddenness, the machines, the impact of the felling, the pulling, tearing, cutting, he turned from the hill toward the house, hand on his stomach, nauseous. Couldn’t stay there, watching. Like when his brother was hit by his mother (his brother’s step-mother) with the fork at dinner, jabbed again and again.

He didn’t look again or signal or wave. Only walked the route straight through the garden, past the barn, across the dirt bridge, up the path of the no-rain-yet-yard, opened the door of the kitchen and moved on, to the stairs, without stopping, though he had to duck at the third and fourth steps to avoid the overhang. In their bedroom at the back, he lifted the covers and fell under them. His chest ached.

The next day it was his side that hurt, maybe a pulled muscle. The day after, splotches of red burned a curved line around his middle, from his navel up across his side and back down to his low spine. Shingles. Worst case the team of acupuncturists had ever seen. He didn’t dream of wolves this time. Not like when he was a kid.

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ASHES

By Ann Hillesland

Whose forest is this? The silvery trunks loom up into the mist, branchless, dead. When Saint Helens blew and the mud thundered past, the trees were rooted in place, like Lot’s wife. They don’t notice the young firs at their feet, tickling to life out of the ashy soil. Like a graveyard, the forest belongs to the spirits of the dead trees, fogged soundless. Haunted.

I know the swathed silence of the empty house, where the refrigerator grunting to life splits the stillness. She is everywhere, in the scraped linoleum under her place at the table, in the white bedroom curtains breathing with the wind, in the trough on her side of the bed I tumble into in dreams. Her eyes held all the colors of the forest — green and brown and the specks of blue between high branches.

She cried when the Johnson’s clearcut their acreage next to us. Our house had been cupped by trees, but it was an illusion. Our trees were just a thin layer; beyond that, the deep, tangled depths of the forest belonged to the Johnsons. She picked blackberries there and once saw a cougar. “It looked at me, then was gone. Wild eyes.”

After the clearcut, our row of trees couldn’t hide the stumpfield beyond, the glaring light where once shadows fell, the mud and sickly grass where blackberries had grown. At the post office, she refused to talk to the Johnsons. “I wanted to hit them,” she said later. “I wanted to ram their truck.” After the clearcut they bought a giant, extended cab pickup, a silver behemoth so tall Mrs. Johnson had to scramble in with the aid of a special step. “All those trees gone, just so they could buy that gas-guzzler. It makes me sick.”

I do think it was the clearcut that made her sick. Like the trees took something vital from her that let the cancer in. The hard lump that took over her whole body, till it calcified her from the inside.

The Johnsons came to her funeral. I told them to get back in their shiny truck and go back to their stumpfield. At sunset I walked through our layer of trees, into the mud and churn of stumps. By law, you have to leave a few trees standing, but the loggers always leave the sick ones, a few spindly firs slowly browning in the unforgiving sun. You also have to replant, but most of the little firs died right away, brown baby skeletons next to their sick mothers.

I’ve brought her ashes, here, to Mount Saint Helens, so I can leave her with the other ashes, on forest protected from loggers, from everything but nature itself. I’ll sprinkle her among the fog-haunted woods, where she can nourish the young trees the same color as the greenest part of her eyes. She’ll be here with the cougars, with the lupin and the scrambling blackberries. In the slice of forest we all own.

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