The new year rolls over, stretches, sits up, and looks around. It notices with a slight blush the bare limbs of its trees. It notices the layers of ice and snow that the old year had piled on before its departure. It is a look that the old year had the maturity to wear well, but the new year finds it gaudy.

It’s time for a change, the new year thinks, and it begins the slow process of peeling back the blankets of snow, of shaking the sleepy world out of its stupor. Out with the white, in with the green. Hello, everybody!

The old year looks back. It remembers when it was so young and thought everything was flower blossoms and babies. The new year would learn soon enough. It would find out there were more interesting things to be done with leaves, and then it would get bored with them entirely. The old year could try to tell the new one that it would all just end up in the same place, but there was little point. The new year wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t believe. It had to learn for itself.

Time marches forward. It never looks back.

When at last the morning sun streamed in through his cabin’s window, only then did he look out to see that the trees had up and left in the middle of the night. Scattered about were leaves and branches, and even a few young saplings and the trunks of dry old trees that had fallen along the way.

Shaken, the woodcutter packed up his meager belongings and left the land that had been a forest. Some of his fellows left, too. Some stayed behind, determined to harvest what fallen wood was left and then make something of the land that remained. He headed west, for the badlands where nothing larger than scrub could grow. There he became a ranch hand, and eventually a rancher. Some nights when he was in his cups he would tell the story of his former occupation and how he had come to leave it.

“But why come all the way out here?” his disbelieving friends asked. “If there was all that empty land that used to be forest, why not claim it for yourself?”

“If trees can walk, they can do other things,” he said. “I wanted to put myself beyond their reach in case they came back.”

“Why would they come back?” someone asked.

“If they didn’t hurt anyone the first time, why would you have anything to fear if they did?” another asked.

“There were a lot of us,” the man who had been a woodcutter said. “We had sharp tools and fire at our command. That they left suggests they were afraid of us, and rightly so.”

“So what do you have to fear?”

“There were a lot of us, but there are a lot of trees in the world,” the man said. “I had it in my mind that maybe they just went for reinforcements.”

What it is in fact is the world’s largest known carnivorous plant. Like the sundew or the Venus fly trap, it lures in its prey and then closes its appendages around them in order to supplement the poor nutrition in the soil with what it can plunder from the corpse.

Unlike its smaller cousins, the whispering willow does not subsist on insects. It requires larger prey. Its scent is said to be inviting, but as scent markers do not have as strong or direct a hold over humans as they do over insects, the willow offers other inducements and this is where the other part of its name comes from.

In ages past, travelers walking alone through boggy parts of the world might have heard a soft voice on the breeze bidding them to come and rest their heads in the shade of an inviting tree, or one promising love and riches and all the secrets of the universe. The trees are fewer in number these days, but they are still out there, still whispering, still tempting travelers to stray from the path, to stumble in closer.

“All natural male enhancement,” whispers the hangman’s tree. “Fuck her like a pro today. Work from home. I made fifty-seven thousand dollars from Google. You can, too. Your insurance company doesn’t want you to know. Housewife’s secret: whiter teeth today. Learn the one method to a flat stomach. Cialis tabs…”

No smoke rises from the farmhouse chimney. The frozen tide of snow has piled up against its windward side, almost completely obscuring the windows on that side. The snow has made inroads onto the other sides, creeping up to cover much of the bottom panel of the front door. There is no path cleared between the house and the barn, or anywhere else.

Not far from the farmhouse, a wolf paws at a snowy burrow, scenting its slumberous occupant. Soon it will catch another scent, and it and its fellows will make their way towards the farm.

Spring always comes, but not always in time.

She goes to the box and picks it up. She starts to open it when she notices the key in its side. There is no reason to think that a music box would work after being left lying out in the woods… in fact, that was probably why it had been left there, she thinks… but on the other hand it seems to be in good condition, and if it does work it seems like it would almost be a crime to not wind it before opening.

So she does so, and when she opens it she is not at all surprised to see the tiny, perfect figure of a ballerina.

With slow, graceful moves that gave no hint of mechanical origin, tiny ballerina raises her arms above her head and goes into a perfect plie. She curtsies to the little girl… or straight ahead, the girl realizes, then makes a quarter-turn to each side and repeats the motion. Tiny tinkling chimes begin to play as the little figure’s hands go behind her back, and pull out a pair of cymbals.

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

The girl shrieks, her eyes closing as if to shut out the loud and terrible sound. When they open, the cymblas are gone, and the ballerina is reaching behind her back again.

This time she pulls out a gun.

The music box is still there in the woods.

On the day it ran out and he spotted the tall silhouettes of the palm trees in the distance, he simply silently adjusted his course towards them but he did not alter his pace. He did not think “Ah, there is water there.” It was simply as good a direction as any.

It was only when he got closer, close enough to see the green of the leaves that he allowed himself to feel a flicker of hope, a flicker that was kindled into a flame by the sight of sunlight glinting off a silvery surface as he came over a high hill.

He didn’t have it within him to break into a run by that point, but the glorious sight gave him a jolt of energy and determination that kept him on his feet, kept him moving forward. It was there, it was real. He had not fooled himself.

A refreshing breeze sprang up as he approached the oasis, and he smiled a smile that froze and then faded. The fronds of the trees did not stir. There was no scent of wet earth or vegetation or anything alive, just the dust of the desert carried on the wind. He looked up at the greenery and saw that it was blocky, solid. The trunks looked waxy or plasticine. He stepped forward, cautious now… an artificial oasis was unexpected, but it might still save him. If someone had taken the time to decorate this patch of desolation, they might still be in residence. If not, they’d probably have built their tiny paradise around actual water.

That hope was dashed when he passed under the resin boughs of the artificial trees and found a “lake” of hard plastic with a rippled surface. A wooden post stood near the edge of it. It bore a placard. He stepped up to it and read it, his parched lips moving silently as he drank in the words:

La Mirage (R. Pescatero, 2017) – This outdoor installation piece, created during the artist’s prolific “asshole phase”, is intended to call to mind images of a lush desert oasis, an island of life in the midst of the most inhospitable terrain. The piece calls to mind the fleeting and transient nature of hope by luring travelers in with an illusory promise of sustenance and succor. Like the artist’s related works, Rotating Signpost (2015) and his ambitious Retreating Rescue Lights (2022), La Mirage has been known to invoke feelings of frustration, desperation, and even despair in viewers.

It has slept for a long time. Now for the first time in ages it awakens in pain, pain such as it has never known. The air is hot and thick, strangely invigorating but unfamiliar. The beetles which live on the forest’s trees, thinning them at a reasonable level and then dying in the winter, have not been dying, and so the trees are in agony. The forest is not the trees, but the trees are of the forest and it feels their pain. It acts. Taking in a deep breath of the newly vitalizing atmosphere, the forest acts. It adjusts its trees, changing their sap to be thicker and more abundant, better suited to repelling the insects.

It’s a start, but a slow one.

I can do better, the forest thinks, taking in another mammoth breath.

It reaches out and it awakens some of its children. There are spiders in the forest, and insects that hunt, and birds with long, clever beaks. They can be adjusted, too. Made cleverer, made hungrier, made more numerous. The forest is alive with activity now, fully awake and alert It reaches out within itself. The wolf packs that once roamed it are all but gone. The great bears are dwindling in number and lazy. Long paths have been cut through the forest’s body, and in some cases covered over with rocky earth and barriers of metal. Its boundaries have retreated inward upon themselves.

The forest exerts itself like it is giving a great shrug. Roots extend towards roadways, seeds find their way into cracks. The effects of this are not immediately apparent. The plant parts of the forest are not as quick as the animal parts, even with the refreshing effects of the altered air.

The forest touches the bears and the wolves, along with the bats and the owls and the blackbirds and the raptors and the raccoons and the badgers in their dens. It reaches out to all of them, along with the deer and the rabbits and the squirrels and the mice. All the hunters, all the scavengers, all the foragers. They are all awake now, attent and waiting for the forest to act.

I can do better than this, the forest thinks again, and it adjusts them all. They remember when they were larger, when they were wilder and fiercer, stronger and smarter. They remember when the forest they were a part of was a thing of greatness and they themselves become greater.

There are men in the forest. It didn’t notice them at first, because there have always been men in the forest, though they stopped being part of the forest long before they adjusted to their present shapes. Its attention is on them now that the initial shock of pain that jolted it to consciousness has subsided. Some of the men are felling trees, not with stone and fire or even with iron but with strange metal implements that shriek and spin. Trees are being dragged off by great mindless metal beasts that belch out precious carbon and toxic-flavored fumes. Elsewhere, the forest’s insects are being killed by poison, the forest’s birds are being frightened back into their accustomed timidity by the roar of men’s strange devices, and the forest’s beasts are being hunted with things it can’t even begin to describe.

Shocked, the forest reaches out… and receives yet another shock. Across the world, its brethren have all been similarly penned in, reduced, or even destroyed. Their cousins, as well. The wetlands: drained and built over, or starved, or poisoned. The undulating prairies: fenced in, ripped apart, made to bear tamer seeds from other places. Rivers channeled and dammed, and everywhere men have laid their rocky paths and spun webs of metal carrying lighting and water, built their odd angular lodges, and constructed their roaring engines.

We can do better, the forest says, and it starts to wake the others up.

“Do you ever worry,” the larger man said to the smaller, “about posterity?”

“About what?”

“You know, your legacy.”

“Oh,” the smaller man said. He held up a gaudily jeweled ring. “I think I’ll leave a fine one, if any bastard of mine ever tracks me down to claim it.”

“What I mean is, we are outlaws, criminals. We rob and plunder, and sometimes kill.”

“When it is needful to kill, only,” his companion said.

“When it is needful,” the big man agreed. “But needful or not, how do you think history will look back on you?”

“Kindly, I should think,” the man said. He shrugged. “I’m not particularly bothered about it.”

“Kindly?” the big man echoed. “Kindly?”

“Yes, kindly,” the thief said. “They think kindly enough of their absent king, whose wasteful wars necessitate the taxes that turned folks like you and I out of our homes. They lay the blame for that at the feet of his poor, duty-bound brother, who does his best to keep the realm running and feed the starving beast abroad. If my meager depredations are remembered at all, they will no doubt also be blamed upon John.”

“Or you’ll be cursed alongside him.”

“I think not. Who will curse us? The many and common poor folk who form the meat and blood of this lands? We have done nothing to them,” the man said. “It is the gentry they revile… the taxmen even more. They are vilified for the same reason that we rob them: because they have money that others do not. And if they’re villains to the multitudes,and we direct our evil against them, does that not make us good?”

“Does it?”

“Of course not,” the smaller thief said. “But posterity is a tidy custodian… it likes to keep things neat.”

“So you do not worry about posterity because you think you will be regarded as a hero?”

“No, no, not a whit,” the smaller man said. “I do not worry about posterity because I do not expect to be around to greet it… save in passing, as it were. I am an honest thief and would not misrepresent my intentions to anyone, for anything. That would make me no more than a common swindler.”

“Do you mean to say that if you could set down how you would be remembered throughout all of history, you wouldn’t do so?”

“Of course I would, but I can’t, so it’s no use worrying about it. Although, since the subject is up…”

“Yes?”

“It would be very kind if some considerate scribe were to write for me a lady-friend.”

During the day there are trees, of course, but that’s all that they are. They have been thinned out, pushed back, and pruned and trimmed. Their branches are only permitted to spread out high enough to provide shade for picnics and afternoon pstrolls.

By day, it seems that the trees have been tamed. They are carefully managed… bound in our parks, fenced in or kept out.

At night, the woods come out, dark and vast and terrible. They block the cold, meager light of the moon. They reject the sterile glow of the street lamps. They muscle right up to the edge of the sidewalk and lurk menacingly on the edge of the consciousness of all who hurry past them. Branches that are not permitted to cling and block and grasp at passersby reach out in shadow form at night… a feeble ghost of what they should be, but a ghost that has power and presence nonetheless.

Those whose ancestors once dwelt in the shadows of primeval forests understand that trees at night give shelter to all manner of things. The night woods are alive with witches and wolves, goblins and ghouls, shades and spirits.

We have slain the great giants that once straddled the earth. We have formed the framework of our civilization from their bones and and built our cities on their graves.

Is it any wonder that we find ourselves haunted?

“With the nymphs and the golden apples of immortality?” I replied.

“Yeah,” she said. “And the apples are supposed to be guarded by this hundred-headed snake/dragon thing.”

“Ladon,” I said, nodding. “Yeah.”

“I don’t think he’d be a very effective deterrent,” she said. “I mean, if the apples make you immortal, you just have to get one of them and you’re set for life, right? Very long life.”

“I don’t know if they worked that way,” I said. “I think maybe you had to keep eating them or something.”

“Well, that’s not forbidden apples of immortality,” she said. “That’s forbidden apples of living slightly longer. Anyway, if the apples did make you immortal, I don’t think a giant serpent would be the way to go.”

“Oh? And what would you propose instead?”

“Instead of a hundred-headed snake?” she said. “How about a hundred worms?”

“Worms?” I repeated.

“Yeah, worms,” she said. “You know that old joke, ‘What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?’”

“Finding half of a worm,” I said.

“Yeah, and what would be worse than that?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Finding half a worm in your apple and realizing that it’s going to be alive forever,” she said.

“Ew,” I said.