THE SPACE FORESTS

by Peter Magliocco

The German WALD:  dense, arboreal, riddled with ghosts, began to strangle Sp/4 Gracinauto the night his gate shack nearly burned down, thanks to his hung over negligence.  It was primordial being out in the middle of a black forest guarding U.S. Army bunkers filled with hi-tech munitions, highly classified, while freezing through another bitter night.  Nature was now a bitch, screwed-up by scientific experiments futilely aimed at reversing global warming; and rendered more disastrous by the nuclear terrorist attacks in neo-Western Europe during the space colonization wars the U.S. waged with a revitalized Communist Russia in the 21st Century.

Through the long night Gracinauto smoked his narcotic hemp.  The ancient kerosene heater burned fitfully.  On the wooden floor dangerous flammable puddles lingered like ineradicable presences.  All the while Gracinauto waited, hoping to glimpse The Forest Spirit again -- or whatever phantasm haunted with keen malice the epicenter of his waking dreams.  Whatever goaded him to consider his own hellish immolation should __~__ pass his way again.

Crystals of digital DNA complexity floated before Gracinauto's eyes.  "The Enemy is nowhere and everywhere," the post orders for Gate 11:aV read (though blistered and barely legible in a warped green folder decorated by the graffiti of all the G.I. sacrifices preceding him).

Anything his mind determined the phantasm as being evaporated.  There were notations in the gate log book by others who recorded testaments of their experiences with whatever they saw -- and each one differed as night did from day. 

Now Gracinauto's vision was excising reality, seeing only __~__ ...  "Blank."  Or a blank the dendrites of his brain connected into a mental painting of a nature truly more alien than human:  a void becoming the lightshow of illimitable ages, as trees mutated outside into exotic arborous creatures swaying from some fulsome germination beneath the hard earth, where secret roots multiplied like Cyrillic letters in an unstoppable flow of new linguistics born unrelentingly.

"She" was :__~__.   The spirit from roots possessing him, along with everything else, from within & without ...

&__~__ told Gracinauto all time was imminent, a turning more drastic than moons falling into unseen lakes beyond ...

& __~__ was without name, or features, so the G.I. sentinel created "Her" -- the one who became The Forest Spirit everyone witnessed and sought.  The way slaves once sought freedom, before realizing true freedom was an anarchy of enslavement.

Gracinauto lit his pipe, still waiting.

*     *     *

Gracinauto became __~__:  blankness out of which his thoughts reemerged as these words do now, either immobilized or spoken by wind.  The Universe was beautiful.  It was either progress or retrogression -- or both.  Flowers sprang up within "Her" cleavage like iridescent weeds parting hillocks.  Gracinauto wasn't afraid to live or die any longer.  The paradox of confluences became a union with all disparate matters, immaterial or otherwise.

He became younger the more he aged, filling up the space from another sky that once negated him and the sounds his words made in the long night which now ended again in the indefinable symbols his mind made reinventing everything the earth gave to him:

"__~__
__~__
__~__,"

all the symbolism "Her" teachings presented as well, until language & thought became unnecessary.  Renaming birth, Gracinauto walked through the Gate now, as confident as one walking through a parting Martian sea invented by 19th Century astronomers.  Becoming all the seas and all the forests from any planet that existed or was ever thought to exist, Gracinauto saw "The Spirit" as primeval cave dwellers once saw the spark of first fire from a lightning strike, until the smoke became everything ...

"The Enemy is nowhere & everywhere.  'She' is the most beautiful Spirit in a void becoming more blank the more you see it, and more full when you don't," enunciated Gracinauto into the tree book.  Turning the page, he read himself becoming a once human soldier doing mundane tasks during a wartime never to come again.

Contact Peter Magliocco: magman@iopener.net