In The Trees, Claudia Peña Claros piercingly renders a world in perpetual tumult, marked both by convulsive disputes over property and power and by nature’s resistance in the face of human injustice. Shifting the focus of the short story away from the urban realm, she locates her vivid anti-narratives in the countryside and in small rural towns. Each story is its own uncanny ecosystem of reality-altering presences; each finds startling ways to catalogue ongoing tension and transformation. Staring deep into the past without taking her eyes from a future that may never arrive, Claudia Peña Claros raises her subtle, arresting voice with intimacy and power.

Forest

We hadn’t noticed, but a kind of water started trickling from the trees, from the branches to the leaves and onto us, our heads, our shoulders. It’s rain, and it may be powerful and thunderous up there, with bolts that light the crown of the boundless woods, but it reaches us as mere drops of mist. That’s how down below we are.

Soon it’s dampened everything. Contrary to what we believed, mud can get slicker, and the torn things disintegrating under our feet can rot even more. The smell climbs denser, heavier, into our nostrils. The air is made of water that envelops us.

Drops of something like sweat rise from my neck, which is a single mass packed with dirt and all kinds of waste and bits of fruit or bark, how can I be sure, spilling down from up above. The droplets seep from my head, mark furrows in my face. Maybe it isn’t sweat, maybe it’s water or some other exhalation of the plants, of unknown animals up above, watching us, regarding us patiently, following our progress, unnoticed by us.

My clothes are completely drenched, stuck to my skin. I’m constantly aware of my own stench and that of my fellows, and when I stop to think about it, about smells and what causes them, I feel even more lost, me in the middle of the woods, clumsy, useless. We’re warped, dirty beasts advancing into forbidden densities. We’ll never get out of here.

When had it crossed our minds to go in? After all, our place was a different one, a place where we could control things and calculate time. Here, by contrast, time is a ghost whose presence you feel when it moves, cold and invisible, but you can’t use it, or measure it, or name it. We have hands, but they’re ungainly around all these trees. What our hands can do out there is futile here; what we need them to do, our hands can’t do it. We have feet and they keep going, but we don’t know the route or where we’re bound. What’s the use of glancing around to prevent some tiger from attacking, why bother peering through the leaves. Do we even know how to look in this quivering world?

The holes in my boots are wider since yesterday, and now a knotty clump of dead leaves or a chunk of earth can slip in and scrape my socks, which are already chafing the soles of my feet, which are already rubbing against all the roughness until they bleed. The earth insists its way through the tatters of my clothes, forceful as claws, boring into the folds of my skin, piercing hour after hour into the red of my flesh. All you can do is not think about the pain. There’s a place in the mind that can silence harm, but the cost is sorrow seeping everywhere.

We make arduous headway and I’m on the verge of tears. I don’t care about the salty current trickling earthily down my face, I just wipe my eyes once I can’t see. Because maybe I don’t want to see. There’s no point. In any case, I won’t have time to figure out if that length of branch is a slithering snake, curling around my mud-caked ankles, climbing the legs of my foul-smelling pants. By the time the fangs have sunk, in the middle of everything, into my flesh, my eyes will be no good to me either. It won’t make sense to tear off a scrap of shirt, tighten the tourniquet above my knee, hurry, yell.

I think we’ve forgotten why we’re walking, why we’re still pressing forward. But why bother asking. Do any of us even know when we’ll arrive? We’ve emptied out our senses. It’s fate, we said, it’s divine punishment. Punishment for what? we asked. And then: Whose fault is it? And we thrash in the dirt, cursing each other. A kick to the side, a ruptured lip. We’ve rummaged in the belly of every question and nothing has come out. Everything is hollow.

Once in a while, a branch shudders and the leaves burst against my face; some scratch and quicken the pain, others stroke my lids and soothe them. But we say nothing. It’s possible that the one walking in front, the one whose name we no longer say aloud, still knows where he’s going and why. I catch glimpses of him through the green smudges. Sometimes he slips away among the trunks or vanishes into the foliage, but then his body appears again, or the rustle of his progress, or something undefined, the trace of his presence in the humid mist engulfing us.

My arms are crawling with ants, lured by the sweet, sharp scent of dying trees that have daubed me with their sap. Like the ground, I’m a receptacle for the waste snubbed by the trees. As the days pass, the forest coats us with its excess skin. We slowly cease to be this person or that, and we take on a resemblance to the density we’re trying to cross.

The one in front stops short. Then the one behind him, and he stumbles, dizzy. He grabs hold of a trunk, adjusts his aching body so he can rest his back against it. He pants and closes his eyes.

I look at the other one, the one who stopped first: he puts his hands on his hips, spits mud, and wipes his forehead with his arm. I stop walking and all the colossal plants suddenly fall onto me, crushing, endless. I try to lift my head, but the weight of the forest overtakes me. My veins are rivers of gravel in my legs.

Another man appears, though I’m not sure where he came from, maybe from behind or alongside me, I can’t be sure, I hadn’t sensed him there. Dried blood streaks his head from crown to ear, and he’s bootless. His filthy socks show his toes, his blackened nails, his bruises gone darker with dirt and scabs.

I want to call out to the one in front, to plead with him: we can’t stop, we won’t be able to keep walking again if we do, we’ll abandon our strength in the helpless appraisal of our wretched bodies. But there’s no use talking.

I listen. My heart beats slowly in my chest. Outside, the trees sound, the roots creep as silently as snakes, surrounding us. Where are those birds, those monkeys in the distance, how many are there, shrilling with rage.

The one with no boots stands there open-mouthed. His eyes look vacant, overwhelmed. I catch sight of a dark tongue behind his lips, a mass of flesh that drools and can’t still the trembling. He’s not bleeding from the head anymore. His hands are bruised like mine, like the one who rests against the tree and weeps, panting, like the one in front who turns his back to us now.

I hear the muffled sobs of the second one. He’s still leaning against the trunk, and there’s something dark in his face. Looking up, I strain to find the canopy of the tree he clings to, try to distinguish it from the others. Tiny droplets spatter my face. All I can see is a single green and shadowed thing, dense to the point of blindness. The man weeps and his body slumps away from the tree; his knees buckle and he lets himself spill onto the ground.

We’ll hunt in the woods tonight, Antonio had told us, I know a guy, everything’s ready. It was late in the afternoon and we were drinking under the eaves. We saw the path, the front gate of the house, the pasture in the open air. Beyond all that was the horizon of trees, and it looked easy to walk out there in our new boots, carry a rifle, a flashlight. Antonio had spoken to the tracker and he’d take care of everything.

Then we made our way single file, stopped to share a drink. We’d walked for about three hours and nothing had happened, we were angry, thinking that the tracker wasn’t as good as we’d been told. There’s nothing to hunt out here, he’s worthless. Maybe he isn’t even a tracker. Then we lost him. We felt our way forward for a little while, shouting his name, but we never saw him again.

The one in front turns around and looks at us. We’re numbers: he counts us. This morning, I saw that he still had his shotgun, but now it’s gone. His empty hands hang beside him, rub his eyes, drop down again, dangle motionless. There are four of us left, but we’re all tired. He tries to make out some sky, a scrap of dark cloud, but all he sees is the tangle, brown and yellow and green. The branches drip with a rain that isn’t falling anymore.

A mosquito clings to my ear. Now there are two, but I don’t care. My arm doesn’t move. My hand doesn’t pat. My ear doesn’t protest the wild sting as it spreads deep into my brain. The pain must be scattered.

Without looking at each other, we’re all thinking the same thing. It’s the density of the forest. There’s no free space here, no place where our exhaustion can spread itself out. We all hear the fear that reaches us like whispers through the trees, filling the hollow trunks, the eyes of wasps, the dead leaves. They’re the same sounds as yesterday, and before yesterday, and the day before, and the first day: the water’s steady beat, the branches trembling when they release a weight we never saw, the shrieks from somewhere not far off.

We listen to the insects roaming our blood invisibly, anticipating our decay. We listen to the wriggling of the worms, the beak of some bird cracking the tender flesh of fruit.

Nothing new crosses the ruthless wall, and the one in front, who has finished telling us, turns his sickened back once more and starts to walk away. The blood is sticking to my socks, but I follow. My pants are torn. The wound on my thigh starts to bleed again. Where are the eyes that hungrily track this slash in me?

I shake my head and a pair of yellowed leaves falls from my hair, drifting ponderous toward the earth. Everything rots and there are no words for it. The one with the dried blood on his head begins to walk.

I close my burning eyes, my feet advance, but I can’t go any faster. A trembling branch settles back into place, showing me where the one who tells us went, where I must go.

Slowly, I make my way toward the weeping man. He’s sitting on the ground, and if I reached out my arm, my open palm could brush against his jaw, stroke his cheeks, wipe them clean of dirt. I wouldn’t have to remember his name or any other words. I could console him beyond the beasts that crouch in wait for us among the leaves.

Coated in mud and sweat, streaked all over, he’s the same color as the one crumbling on the ground, and his head looks like a misshapen tree stump rising interminably skyward. I look at him as I pass. My body no longer has anything that could be his.

All he says is that soft whimper, like a dog’s, and his dry eyes. He doesn’t look at me, but of course he feels the nausea my body emanates. I think I should think of him, remember a time we did something together. What was his face like? We’ve all known each other since we were small, when the days were radiant. Once again, tears furrow my face. I wipe my eyes. I won’t stop, and maybe he already knows it.

When I press on, the branches will close behind me, the leaves will go still, and the air will halt again, as if nothing had ever crossed any path at all. The rotted leaves will swallow my tracks and all the stenches of my body will vanish in the damp. I’ll leave no trace that he might follow, no footsteps to track and decipher. Then he too will dissolve by that tree. Leaves will tumble down, and the waste will slowly cover his face and shoulders, and his bitter sobs will tangle with the roots, and they’ll creep over the ground together, until they jumble and meld and become one with everything.

It won’t be long before the night comes back again.

Translated by Robin Myers

The Trees is out now from Relegation Books.