Fruitpicking
Guel is the only one small enough to crawl into the Bloom to save his starving family. What he finds there will change him.
The Jungle was especially loud that day. Guel tried to keep his leg from shaking. It had been two days since his family had a bite to eat, and he was the only one small enough to get through the dense foliage along the border between Flagstaff and the Great Jungle. The news called it the Bloom, and his parents just called it “that thing,” but Guel called it the Great Jungle. It felt like the name it deserved.
His cousins, all bigger than him, told him the wall of vines was so densely packed because the jungle people piled up all the dead chilren at the border to keep the humans out. Guel knew there was no such thing as people living in the jungle. His cousins were too big (or chickenshit) to go into the jungle anyway.
But he was small, and his family was hungry, and Guel knew what he had to do. He was thirteen now, a teenager — he had responsibilities.
So he stood, his leg shaking in front of the massive wall of trees and vines that no amount of cutting or burning could breach. He looked left and right, seeing nothing but the same aquamarine canopy and reddish-brown trunks, punctuated by brilliant hues of purple and yellow and red flowers. The scale and its colors overwhelmed him. The jungle stretched for miles in both directions, and the news said it had grown further south too — as far south as Camp Verde, according to the satellite photos.
All surrounded by the same wall of vegetation that might as well have been concrete, it was so impossible to pierce.
The colors were the worst — they reminded Guel of the red cabbage his mom used to buy before the jungle reached the outside of Flagstaff and the city was abandoned by suppliers, then its residents. The strangeness of the colors alienated him and made him salivate.
Guel walked along the vines and trunks, looking for the opening that he’d found last week. He wasn’t sure, but the wall of vines looked different than it had only a few days ago. There, he thought. The gap between the trees. Two trees had merged into one another, forming an archway between the two trees roughly the size of a dog door. Guel measured the hole with his shoulders and found that it was a tighter fit after just a few days.
As he squeezed himself through, he wondered how long it would be until the hole closed completely. For a brief moment, he imagined the hole closing while he was inside the Great Jungle, trapping him inside. He’d be one of the Jungle People, and his cousins would probably tell all the kids left in Flagstaff about their little cousin Miguel and how he eats kids who sneak in after him.
He crawled through the hole and brushed the soil off his body. The first thing he noticed was how much cooler the inside of the jungle was. It was still hot and much wetter, but still, almost pleasant. The air was thick and sweet, like breathing through a perfumed pillow.
If he’d thought it was loud before, it was practically deafening now that he was inside. It sounded like the inside of a massive birdcage — a concert of a million different voices whistling, hooting, buzzing, hissing. None of it sounded familiar.
Guel remembered visiting Yosemite with his family when he was little (before it burned up, he’d brag to classmates), and he remembered the forest being loud with birds and lizards and crickets and toads at all hours. This felt like that, but if it was sent through a bad translator.
Guel grabbed the thick roll of twine from his backpack and tied it to a tree near the opening. He attached the twine to a carabiner on his waist, like a toilet paper roll. He crouched at the base of the tree, took a breath, and tried to ‘feel’ if he was being watched like his dad said. He did his best, but Guel didn’t know what that felt like to be watched. He just felt alone.
He felt like crying, but he took a breath and remembered what his father said: “Bring back anything round and large growing on trees. If you see anything half-eaten on the jungle floor, find wherever its growing. Avoid bundles of anything, like bananas. Something is probably living in there. If you see large leaves growing close to the ground, dig up the root ball — it might be edible.”
Guel’s dad was a botanist for the National Park Service before Arizona’s parks were taken over by the Army. He was one of the first scientists to study what was happening in Arizona during “the Bloom,” when a small piece of Arizona outside of Tucson became a rainforest overnight. Everyone thought the terraforming institute had a breakthrough, but then it kept growing and growing and spreading north, until there was talk of abandoning Flagstaff.
That was three years ago. Now Guel’s dad was like everyone else: hungry, unemployed, and with nowhere to go.
The 13-year-old man got to work. Walking deeper into the jungle with a sharpened trowel, he dug up roots looking for something like a potato or a turnip. After an hour, he’d found a bunch of brownish-red balls that looked like giant radishes and smelled sour, and he’d traveled a good mile or so into the densely-packed foliage.
He needed to get enough food for the family (and for the hamster, for safety testing). There was no telling how long the hole would stay open. After an hour of digging, he turned his attention to finding fruit. Only a few minutes of that yielded a squash-shaped, grayish-green fruit that smelled sweet and was heavy. With juice, I hope, Guel thought. Against his father’s advice, he picked up some tiny fruits that resembled golden grapes. He shook it vigorously, ensurng nothing was hiding in the bunch.
(He also, after some trepidation, cut one open to make sure he wasn’t taking bug eggs out of the jungle.)
His pack was almost full, and he smelled something acrid in the air. Guel was too green to identify the scent of fear in his sweat, the odor produced by small things rightfully afraid of being in a hostile, unforgiving place. He was scared of feeling alone, but all he wanted now was to keep feeling alone.
Guel shoved the last few fruits into his oversized backpack and started pulling himself along the twine. It was then that he noticed how slack it was, how pulling the twine made it no tighter. He pulled frantically with both hands, but gently out of fear that he would rip it from its place.
Then, from around a tree, the end of the twine dragged cruelly into sight.
Guel’s hands were shaking. His legs felt like jelly. Maybe I can just find my way back by the holes I dug. But every step he took in an uncertain direction felt like walking into quicksand.
He took out his backpack. Maybe my dad packed me a compass. But no, there was no compass.
He took a breath, closed his eyes. What are my options? He could try and find water; his cousins showed him a trick where you could put a pin in a floating leaf and it would point north. Or was it putting water into a bowl-shaped leaf? But now he wasn’t sure if his cousins were messing with him. Even if they weren’t, he hadn’t seen any ponds or puddles since he’d arrived.
His other option was the stars. His mom showed him how to find directions using the stars, and he just needed to go north until he hit the wall, then he could find his way along it til he found the gap. But that meant he’d need to stay the night. No one ever, ever stayed overnight in the jungle. No one he’d heard of, anyway.
But what other choice did he have? If he kept going without knowing what direction he ws going, he’d get lost before nighttime anyway. If he stayed here, he wouldn’t stray any further.
He zipped his pack, took another deep breath, and looked for somewhere to stay the night.
Guel found an ancient-looking tree and checked its hollow for bugs or creatures. Nothing living (or moving, anyway). He sat there until the late afternoon, getting used to the sounds of the jungle. He leaned back against the tree, sweet and pungent fragrances in his nostrils. He looked up, finding a spot in the canopy where the stars would show. He rested his eyes.
It was a screech and an enormous flapping that woke Guel, but it was the scream that made him realize where he was. He was standing before he realized what was happening. There was something stalking in the foliage behind him. He climbed the tree he’d slept beneath, half-awake but scrambling like a cat.
There were no more screams after that — just rustling noises and the ceaseless insect chorus. Guel was on his belly on a high branch, keeping his eyes and ears open for whatever might have been walking through the woods.
There. He saw a shape on all fours, stalking between the trees. Its back was to him. It moved in unnatural-looking fits and starts, like an animal that had been assembled with all it limbs in the wrong places. Guel clenched his teeth — he was doing his best to keep his arms from shaking too loudly. If you’ve ever been in a room and you know someone is there — someone that doesn’t belong — then you know what Guel felt in his bones at that moment.
Whatever creature he was looking at, it didn’t belong. Or maybe it did, and Guel was the intruder.
Then, suddenly, the creature stood.
Guel saw it turn, swinging its shoulders and twisting its hips while its feet stayed planted. It looked around, and for a brief moment Guel caught a glimpse of its eyes — or at least something reflective where its eyes would have been. He stopped breathing, letting the air in his mouth hang still while he did his best to sink into the bark of the tree.
Minutes passed. The creature stayed as still as Guel, waiting, waiting. Then a rustle in the foliage on the other side of a clearing, and the creature was gone.
He didn’t know how terraforming worked, but he at least knew that you were supposed to create life that was familiar, comforting, vital. The darkness and this creature burned away the earthly illusion: this jungle was not terraformed. It was something else entirely. It was wild and dangerous like any other jungle, but Guel felt like it was hostile. There was no peace, no communion to be had here — Guel would either leave or be swallowed.
The boy stayed in the tree. It wasn’t for an hour or so that he realized he’d wet himself, but by then the urine was nearly dry.
It took two hours for Guel to unfreeze his legs from the tree, quieting every instinct to get down the tree and look at the sky. He used stones to make an arrow pointing himself in the correct direction.
The next morning, he saw where the sun had risen, realizing with shame that he could have used the sun’s movement to figure out where north was. But the sun was up, and his spirits began to lighten. After heading northward for an hour, he was beginning to feel better. He’d survived one night in the jungle, and he felt stronger, more capable. He didn’t like the jungle any better, but it felt less alien in the daylight.
Was that an illusion? Guel thought of how angler fish use light to draw in prey, how animals will mimic their victims. The jungle more and more resembled a single organism. The back of his neck chilled remembering that he was carrying the jungle’s fruit in his backpack.
Still, his stomach growled, and he considered eating some of the fruits in his pack and picking more. Some alchemy turned his good mood to courage, and he was about to stop and eat when his foot hit something hard on the ground.
A…a frying pan? He marveled at it for a moment, until his eyes took in what he was looking at. There, attached to the frying pan, was a hand. It gripped the handle as though it were still preparing food, like the owner had been interrupted suddenly and savagely.
The blood from the hand was dry and black, and the surface of the wound was smooth and circular. If he were older and more experienced, Guel might’ve realized the hand had been cut, not torn or bitten. But for now, the sight of the hand was horror enough.
He walked forward into the carnage. It was the remains of a campsite — an expedition of at least three people. It was hard to tell, given how much of everyone was everywhere, and Guel wasn’t inclined to counting hands. He abstracted it all, taking it in pieces without allowing them to coalesce.
He had walked through the entire campsite when he nearly walked into it. Four long poles, and at the top…
At the top.
Four heads, all caught in their death scream except one. The last one looked contented, even cheerful. Guel felt ill — that was the frying pan’s owner, no doubt.
He felt himself fainting, and willed himself to walk past the heads. It wasn’t a jungle. It was hell.
He walked in shock until he reached the border, crouching along until he found the gap he’d come through. He squeezed and flailed his way through it, leaving a long but shallow cut on his calf.
When his parents saw him walking home from a distance, they ran out to him sobbing. Even his aunt and uncle were there—his cousins looked like they’d been crying. Guel walked with them to the house, showered, and went straight to bed.
He never ate the food. While his family never got sick from it, he never ate anything that came out of the jungle. Eventually, the National Guard arrived with rations from the new capital, and they never needed to make another trip to the jungle.
When his father mused aloud about planting the seeds in the garden, Guel gripped his glass so hard it cracked.
“No,” he pleaded roughly.
Without a word, they complied. To their credit, no one even considered planting the seeds ever again. Even when the rations ran out, and they left their homes nine months later, no one considered planting the seeds. Whatever had been planted in Guel was more than enough to convince them the jungle needed no help growing further.
Other work by David Rhoades:
