For all it was his idea, the old man carried less of the body’s weight than me. We stumbled across sprawls of uneven roots and underbrush snares with it dragging between us. The creepers and ivy of the Forevergreen hung a few feet off the ground, neck level for six-foot bipeds. And there was only one animal like that in the region.
One critically endangered species.
We struggled through the overgrowth—the old man would have said negotiated, like he was the Forevergreen’s equal—until I saw our shelter. He called the half-moon of metal sticking out of the earth the Needle. With the rolling waves of poison ivy and thorns swallowing it, I preferred the Nettle. Now spring, orange-red flowers burst across the Nettle’s humps, spitting seeds when we touched them. The old man called them jewelweed, which was probably why he called this place the Emerald City.
We dropped the body in the shade. It must’ve been starvation, from its state. Birds had already been at it, the eyes absent and skin missing. “Why?” My voice was quiet, carefully rationed out. The old man didn’t listen. What was rationing to his generation, when everything was limitless? I repeated the question, louder.
“She’s a person is why!” The old man shrieked. “She deserves more than to be food!” Turnabout is fair play, I didn’t say. “And see that coat, kid? White coats mean scientists!”
The coat didn’t look particularly white to me. Gulls, gull shit, and sand were white. That coat was gray at best, yellow with smeared pollen, brown with mud, and recently red with blood. It could have been camouflage—not good camouflage, but an attempt to make up for evolutionary absence. If I tried to mention any of this, it would be spoken over—not from a generation of listeners, our old man. They didn’t teach that in Haver Business School—three words the old man said often enough and seemed to mean nothing at all. There were a lot of words he said, like scientist or city, that meant nothing.
Not like real words: soil, growth, rot, death, food, water, sickness, Forevergreen.
He scrabbled over the body, putting his hands in its not-white coat. He shrieked an “Aha!” and pulled some mildewing skin-wrapped thing out. Not our skin, of course, maybe not even real skin, because with the old man sometimes there was fake fur or skin. Camouflage, I suppose?
He hunched over it, muttering to himself and ripping the paper—that was real skin, tree skin. I brought him berries. He chewed them sourly. “They tasted different when I was a boy.”
“You tasted different when you were a boy,” I responded. “Turnabout.” He scowled. I frowned. I should’ve done without speaking the last word—rationed better. To make him feel better, I asked, “What did the body teach you?” He liked talking about those arcane messages wrought in tree-skin, the ones beyond me.
He brightened or approximated it. “Well, meaty texts take time to chew through. But it could be the most important work ever. It’s the Forevergreen—how it all happened. About batshit and nitrogen and this German Haber in the 1900s—so probably a Nazi.”
And the only word I knew that excited him was “batshit,” and that word I knew well. The old man never realized what he said meant nothing. He didn’t speak to be listened to but heard speaking. And it gave him some little comfort, and didn’t always endanger us, so I let him.
“You see, it was always about batshit. The only way we could feed everyone was to collect batshit from across the world and put it in our dirt. If we didn’t nothing would grow”—and that was absurd, because I knew for a fact that you didn’t need batshit for anything to grow—“but he figured out how to get batshit from the air.”
“Where it normally comes from.”
“Not like that! And then he got distracted throwing it at other people, but then he was back on track and making food with it and suddenly no one starved anymore—probably. But that meant that if we stopped eating all the food, or if we all died, all that extra batshit-air in the ground would make plants spillover.”
“Which happened,” I said. An arcane message wrought on human skin in pox, boils, and sores—turnabout—and suddenly the king had no throne. For the land, turnabout, a Forevergreen, for all the wounds and poison and choking. Before my time. “So, the world changed because of batshit.” Not because of the man, a maybe something-or-other.
“But maybe we can change it back!” The old man said, petting the pile of tree-skin and getting it under his fingernails. When he returned to it, I left to sleep beneath the stars. Upwind, because the swarms would descend for the body. The old man claimed back-in-his-day, they killed such clouds, poisoned or choked them like they did the trees and the fish. But now the insects ruled the world, and wasn’t that also turnabout?
The old man’s screaming woke me. I rose slowly, because if it was a puma, he was dead. I crawled towards the sound and heard underneath it the song of the swarms. I made out words, frothing rage. “How could you do this to us?! You stupid smart bastards were supposed to protect us! How is it too late? It’s never too late!”
He was punching the body’s face. The bugs surrounded them, biting both living and dead. One hand was around the neck, choking where there was no air. He didn’t want to hear the excuses of the dead or the living. “Where’d it go? The glass and steel and caviar?! I thought forever was hyperbole. How could we do this—to us? We were kings! We—I—was supposed to inherit the earth. The land was ours…”
I left him to it. Because the word that was his answer he hated hearing, and I knew to ration my breath.
Writer | Mike Rosenthal ’27 | jrosenthal27@amherst.edu
Editor | Alex Womack ’27 | awomack27@amherst.edu