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Deena wakes on a cold, Australian morning to a spontaneous forest, sprung up overnight while she slept.

The other tent? Gone. 

Friends? Gone. 

Phone reception? None. 

Temperatures? Falling. Fast. 

Now Deena must figure out where the forest came from—and, more pressingly, how to make it go away again—before someone dies. Herself, for example. 

For everyone who longs for something more—regardless of the price. 

DREAMING OF FORESTS

THERE WAS A FOREST. That was the simple fact of the matter: there was a forest now, and there hadn’t been before. Deena let the tent flap drop clo-sed in front of her, inhaled steadily, and tried again. 

Nope, still forest. She bit her lip, debating: go out and explore, or hide in the tent? 

In the end, exploration won for the simple, prac-tical reason that nature, as it were, was calling. So she caterpillared her way out of her downy sleeping bag, pulled her hiking shorts on over the black, fleecy leggings she’d slept in, zipped up her polar fleece jumper, crammed her grandmother’s knitted beanie over her brown hair, and pushed her way outside. 

The other tent was gone. For a moment, that made her pulse race—but then the reality of her surroundings overtook her senses. The air inside the tent had been warm, musty. The air outside yester-day had smelled of the sea, a salty tang with just a hint of rotting seaweed. 

Today, the air smelled like sap, and living things, a green smell she associated with her grandmother’s garden thanks to that summer she’d spent there when she was twelve, when they’d spent hours of days of weeks pruning and twining and tending, re-turning to the house only for meals and sleep, hands crusty with black dirt her grandmother called gold, under-nails caked with the stuff, elbows and knees stained black—and green. 

This, Deena thought, was what every green scratch-and-sniff thing should smell like. Forget your apple, forget your lime; thiswas green. She inhaled deeply, and despite the oddity of the situation, felt her eyes light up as her body relaxed, melting into the space while at the same time inflated, buoyed, full. Something about this wondrous, spontaneous forest was familiar—and right. 

She had no idea what the trees were, but they were tall, straight as ship masts or indigenous spears, thick and thin, rough-barked but paler than stringy barks, a brownish-grey, and the tiny, emerald, coin-sized leaves looked soft as butter, soft as petals. 

Deena had tried keeping plants in their third-floor apartment back home, but somehow she could never remember to water them enough, or else she watered them too much as they died, thin and pustulant. She cried, every time, as her mother shook her head and made Deena walk them down to the communal skip bins in the alleyway behind the complex. 

Her grandmother had consoled her on the phone each time, had promised that one day she’d have plants aplenty, more than she knew what to do with. 

But one day wasn’t soon enough for Deena—which was why she’d taken up hiking, of course. If she couldn’t have plants at home, by golly was she going to surround herself with them in her spare time. So a forest? Amazing. 

The other tent, her friends, vanishing? Less so.