sketch: the enchanted forest

The Enchanted Forest by Jonathan Yaniv

Violent purple leaves,
Obtrusive yellow bodies,
Five-eyed creatures, playing with the limbs of their prey,
Giant leather skinned warriors chasing their tails with a relentless tenacity...

The forest is full of pits,
The pits are full of hot bubbling acid,
Bubbling with the jovially of minds high on utility...

A silhouette speaks, “The Enchanted Forest is a place of curiosity. Note the fascinating evolutionary characteristics of this Carrollesque wonderland of super-saturated colors. It is obvious that there is something askew, for these creatures disobey the laws of evolution! There must be some catch, but we haven’t discovered it yet. The only thing that we do know is that on the surface, these creatures seem like they don't have purpose. I know it’s ridiculous” the figure says sarcastically. “Nevertheless, what other impression does one get when one sees a creature with just one giant foot and no organs? It's called a Liandomorph. All it does, this absurd creature, is hop about until it trips. Once it does... it dies. From its corpse, emerges another creature whose genetic makeup is almost identical to its predecessor's.”

The Forest is full of enchantments,
Magic that is useful only for those with nothing useful to do,
Useful meaning “matters of great consequence”
This sorcery builds cities.

The Forest is alive,
Alive with laughs saturated with the cranial juices of madmen,
Alive with the dripping in one's stomach after not sleeping a full night,
Alive with the contradictions of the mythology that plagues the contemporary world.

He looks skittishly at the camera, “It's confusion. Yes. Neither real, nor false. But there is purpose, oh yes, purpose.” He pauses for dramatic purposes, and then continues slowly, expertly manipulating the silence stretching the drama, twisting his audience's fingers. “The Forest has no logic. It doesn't reason inductively, for it isn't a human. The Forest evolves with emotions. THE EMOTIONS! Imagine... creatures that develop purely to feel, to experience a pure surge of emotion. When the Liandomorph tripped over its awkward beefy leg, and spilt open messily over the ground, it experienced something HUNDREDS of times more extreme than what we know, as child birth. It experienced a lifetime of parentage in a split second. Transferring love, caring, worry, nurture, panic, adolescence, parting, and death. Pure, unfiltered, un-interpreted, unprocessed, emotions.” The professor’s class is in a rapture. It seems, that the creatures that throughout their childhood they would giddily trip and ecstatically watch splatter all over the ground, were the most beautiful things they ever understood. The same animals that as kids they would peevishly shoot with bee bee guns and happily watch explode like gut filled water balloons. They were drawn to tears. They never really cared to understand the planet that they lived on, but now they cried for its suffering.

The wood burned,
The Fire licked,
Nonchalantly crawling up the bark.

Scathing arms of heat,
Wrapped around the moist interior,
The tree smoked,
Drops formed where the eyes and the nose touched.

The professor chose to continue. “Now my friends, these creatures, are all but extinct. We have one left. The only way that we can keep it alive is by isolating it in a special chamber in which there is enough pressure to keep it in one piece, but not enough gravity for it to fall over and die. As you already know, they lost their ability to reproduce after the Yudac gas ship crash, causing the extinction of most of the Forest's native life.”

The creature lay down,
Curled,
A pig embryo in a jar,

No voluntary ingestion,
No voluntary movement,
A forced breath,

Cornered,
Sleep and reality intertwined,
A faint buzzing noise,
An eternity of quiet.

He looks at each student in the eyes, “You are the last generation to remember the creatures of this planet. It is unfortunate. But I have begun to see the reasoning behind this. There are many different kinds of life forms. On Earth, there was something called a fungus, a decomposer constituted of many little life forms. They worked together to extract all the useful minerals from another creature. Similar is the nature of man, except on a much larger scale... for we colonize a planet, and in exchange for our survival, we must suck the life out of the planet which we inhabit. Like a virus, except fully alive. Every planet we inhabit turns into an Earth disaster. All vegetation, atmosphere, and native life… destroyed. All that is left, is our inventions, creations, structures. Our fungus.” The students are looking at him blankly. Each eye shining like a well polished mushroom, or a freshly shined apple from a 1950's Disney animation.

Yellow lines,
Blue lines.
The blue signifies parking for handicapped drivers.
The yellow signifies general parking,
Unless a sign on the side walk says otherwise.

Metal moving up
Metal moving down

Plastic bags rustles,
Stuffed to the brink with polyester.

Growls of needy organs
Only to be satisfied by a paste of other organs.

Gases rise

Pillars of thick blackness rise like titans into the cloudy afternoon sky

Congestion

Synthetics.