Activity

Forests are falling to many things—drought, fire, sudden oak death, gypsy moths, pine and engraver beetles, rust, and plain old felling for farms and subdivisions. But there’s always the same distal cause

That night he makes her read to him about a tree that once ran in great vertical veins of living ore from Georgia to Newfoundland, out through Canada, and past the Great Lakes to where they camp out together by lamplight. She tells him about giants four feet wide, their trunks shooting eighty feet …

One crystal blue fall morning, a bellow comes from the other room. Her nickname, stretched out to the length of stillness, without the final consonant: Daaa . . . Her skin creeps. It’s worse than the bellow he makes when he fouls the bed and needs her to come clean him. Once more she runs, as if th…