How to Get Back to the Forest

How to Get Back to the Forest

Sofia Samatar

I’ve looked for you on the buses and in the streets. Wondering if I’d suddenly see you. God, I’d jump off the bus so quick, I wouldn’t even wait for it to stop moving. I wouldn’t care if I fell in the gutter. I remember your tense face, your nervous look, when you found out that we were going to have a check-up.

“I can’t have a check-up,” you said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because,” you said, “because they’ll see my bug is gone.”

And I just – I don’t know. I felt sort of embarrassed for you. I’d convinced myself the whole bug thing was a mistake, a hallucination. I looked down at my book, and when I looked up you were standing in the same place, with an alert look on your face, as if you were listening.

You looked at me and said: “I have to run.”

It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. The whole camp was monitored practically up to the moon. There was no way to get outside.

But you tried. You left my room, and you went straight out your window and broke you anlke.

A week later, you were back. You were on crutches and you looked… wrecked. Destroyed. Somebody’d cut your hair, shaved it close to the scalp. Your eyes tood out, huge and shining.

How to Get Back to the Forest. Photo by Elena

“They put in a bug in me,” you whispered.

And I just knew. I knew what you were going to do.

Max came to see me a few days ago. I’ve felt sick ever since. Max is the same hunched and timid; you’d know her if you saw her. She sat in my living room and I gave her coffee and lemon cookies and she took one bite of a cookie and started crying.

Cee, we miss you, we really do.

Max told me she’s pregnant. I said congratulations. I knew she and Evan have been wanting one for a while. She covered her eyes with her hands – she still bits her nails, one of them was bleeding – and she just cried.

« Hey, Max,” I said, “it’s okay.”

I figured she was extra-emotional from hormones or whatever, or maybe she was thinking what a short time she’d have with her kid, now that kids start camp at eight years old.

“It’s okay,” I told her, even though I’d never have kids – I couldn’t stand it.

They say it’s easier on the kids, going to camp earlier. We – me and you and Max – we were the tail end of Generation Teen. Max’ kid will belong to Generation Eight. It’s supposed to be a happier generation, but I’m guessing it will be sort of like us. Like us, the kids of Generation Eight will be told they’re sad, that they can always be reminded of what they’ve lost, so that they can remember thay need what they have now.

I sat across the coffee table from Max, and she was crying and I wasn’t hugging her because I don’t really hug people anymore, not even Pete really, I’m sort of mean that way, it’s just how I turned out, and Max said “Do you remember that night in the bathroom with Cee?”

Do I remember?

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.