What am I? Drugs dissolve all the boundaries, doctors’ probe and question – but the forest is silent for now. Severe voices echoing in bland, echoey rooms say adjust the dosage, before the frowning professionals, shaking their heads, ask more questions. Aloof with their studied, practiced scepticism, they are fencing me in. What’s a ‘wallaby’ they ask, what do they symbolise? What is the function of what you call this ‘forest’? They tap away at their keypads but I can’t make them understand we are; the forest is for itself. It exists. They don’t like when I ask what they are for. They pinch their noses: make us understand. They demand function, utility, and definition, and I give them feelings, memories of eucalypt scents, and impressions of my mind. When I do try to tell them, they say: no trees, no magpies, and no koalas. There’s no place like that on earth.
You’re sick they tell me.
I’m endangered I reply. Protect us else I’ll die.
I tell them this place is wrong. It’s pastel walls killing us. The forest fights their words, repels invasive species at its edges, reflects the fear projected into its perceived blankness. The wilderness… they want me to tell it. Tell on it. Tell of it. How can I show the sound of the wind whispering through rustling leaves, or snakeskin shrivelling on a sun-warmed volcanic rock? How to describe how their timid human perspectives are violating borders they set?
They stopped me attending art therapy. I painted charred remains: orange suns through smoke haze, flames twisting through broken branches, burned animals caught on wire fences they bounded us with. They said if you can’t paint something real, something natural and good, then you shouldn’t paint at all. My hands shook as they pried the brushes from my hands. What are they made of? But they refused to answer. I couldn’t stop the tears running down my face, like rain over charred bark.
They stole my colours and teach what is left of nature is dead, dissected, desiccated, and safe behind glass. My prints smudge the panes and I smash this barrier too, because although I don’t know much, I know I’ve always existed on the edge. I laugh at the bright red staining the clean tiled floor, watching it run along straight grout lines, blood as real as resin dripping from wounded trees.
When I get better, they’ve promised me an apartment. Wonderful views they say, of the city’s streets, the skyline. You’ll have everything you need, they say, once that forest is cleared away.
Rebecca Dempsey’s fiction, poetry, and articles have been published around the world, recently in Elsewhere Journal, Miniskirt Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and The Raconteur Review. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, but can be found at WritingBec.com. urne, Australia, but can be found at WritingBec.com.