Before the Light

You have been here since before the light. Back then, the air tasted like brine, and smoke from village fires. There was no petroleum haze; no asphalt riverbeds. You were far from the ocean, but you knew it was there, just beyond the hill, sparkling with bioluminescence each night. You liked to think of it, out there in the black expanse. You could taste it on the wind.

In the forest it was just you and the hemlocks, tucked into thickets of twinberry and skunk cabbage, the soil thick with clay, and always damp. Most mornings the sun was caught behind clouds, a layer so thick it reminded you of cottonwood pollen. When it rained, a layer of fog rose up from the ferns, billowing slowly, like smoke. You were enshrouded in this, wrapped in it like a curtain. So many morning of this. So many days. Year after year after year. You heard stellar’s jays and spotted towhees, and the whistles of osprey, and you watched black threads of geese migrate gently overhead, their voices loud, revolving, soaked into canopies of moss.

And then there was the thud. First one, then another. You knew it was the sound of death. You saw the swinging branches; the green crowns cracking against metal. You felt the wind as it changed, as it became bigger, a cleared-out-wind, an open-air wind. You reached out and tried to find the others, but most of them were gone. You began to hear the clink of machines; the smell of strange glues. The birds grew quieter.

This went on so long. Too long. There were many years of this slow destruction, until one day you realized that all of your neighbors were gone. Only a pocket of forest was left, a small strip, and you, miraculously, had been spared. Yes, there you stood, after all these hundreds of years, creased and powerful, your arms still folding up toward the sun. You were the only one left; the one who remembered the world before; the one who remembered what the stars looked like before the light.