Read Gone to the Forest: A Novel for Free Online Page B

bed.
    Father knows best. The scales on Tom’s skin erupt for the first time
     in many years. It is a bad attack. He cannot sleep for the itching. He patrols the house
     instead, scratching at his hands, he does it for hours and it is only when the sun isrising that he goes to bed. His bedroom is on the opposite side of
     the house to his father’s. There are hundreds of yards between them. But now he
     goes to bed and the sounds follow him to sleep. He hears it all—the mysterious
     thumping, the shouts and moans, the loud, loud bellowing.

3
    A cross the border there is a mountain—and
     one morning the mountain explodes. First there is an enormous boom. The boom is not
     hollow but dense with noise. The natives come out of their quarters. They are standing
     outside, looking and listening, when the boom repeats and then dissolves into a rumble.
     They are watching when the top of the mountain opens and disgorges fire.
    They have never seen this before. Violence from men they understand well,
     but from the land itself—the mountain now retching, the innards of the earth
     shooting up—they do not know what to think or how to understand it. A giant cloud
     of smoke pushes up and covers the sky. Bolts of lightning snap through the cloud. A
     column of red and orange forms in the middle. The fire pours straight into the sky and
     fills it.
    They feel the explosions that follow from across the border. The ground
     bucking beneath their feet. They thrust their hands into the air. They try to regain
     balance. The explosions follow in quick succession and above them the sky is purpleand orange and gray and white. They watch. Their hands are shaking
     and they kneel—are thrust to the ground—in prayer. Even the ones who have no
     religion to speak of.
    The volcano erupts for four days. In the chaos of the four days and
     darkness the farmers let go of their routine. The livestock go unfed and then are fed at
     strange hours of the night. It makes them bellow in fear. They stampede across the lot
     and then huddle together and then stampede again. Also, they shit constantly. Streams of
     shit pouring out of their bodies as they squeal and grunt.
    The natives are sent out to calm the herds. They press themselves between
     the animal bodies. They step into soft piles of shit—the shit goes as high as
     their ankles, it goes as high as their calves. They stroke and soothe and croon but
     cannot take their eyes from the sky. They wonder if it will last forever. If it will
     never stop. The animals can sense their distraction and are not comforted.
    When four days pass the mountain’s contractions slow. It takes
     another two days for the cloud to ease and they see patches of sky for the first time.
     There is sunlight. The contractions slow again and then stop. The animals are
     calm—the natives and farmers alike take that to be a sign, but they still doubt
     the sun and sky. Four days and they are numb to the life that came before.
    The mountain had been silent for a thousand years. They did not know it
     could explode. They had been trained to worry about other things. The ravages of
     colonialism. Man-made apocalypse, nuclear disaster—they have seen pictures, theyhave heard stories. They are not educated people in the valley
     and the natives in particular are prone to modern superstition. They worry about their
     skin and hair and wonder if they will drop dead in ten years’ time, a reaction
     delayed.
    They are reading the wrong signs. The right signs have nothing to do with
     history or culture. Two days before the eruption the snakes fled down the mountain. They
     slid, then dropped into the river and drowned. Within hours they were washing up on the
     dirt banks of the river. Stiff and twisted like small branches of wood, their bodies
     rigid in death.
    The news of the snakes moved slowly. The villagers in the neighboring
     country were too busy gathering the bodies of the snakes, which they collected with