The Day of the Triffids

The year he turned twelve, summer stuffed with science fiction movies and books, the unpaved road below the boy’s house split along the shoulder, guardrails slumping level with the gravel. Nearby, a dump deepened with tires and trash, appliances, mattresses. Beyond it, the state game land was a place, when entered, to gather fear like berries. When leaves smothered the sky, he was underwater; when branches snapped, the played-out mines were graves, his mother’s “Never alone in there” insistent as a smoke alarm.

In July, he was in love with the Triffids, the alien trees that advanced like guerillas after the world went blind from watching a meteor shower. The forest became malignant.  The Triffids flourished in the Earth’s soil and had an appetite for all those sightless humans. He watched it twice.

The paths he followed in the game lands were half-eaten by locust and sumac. Just outside of its boundaries, mine entrances were labeled like poisons; a thin canal carried runoff to dunes of silt.

On screen, the Triffids were so easily killed by salt water, they might have arrived from West Oz. The world was saved. Every tree in the woods was rooted or dead. When August began, the boy read the novel, where nothing in the final scenes ended those aliens, even on the last page. 

One late afternoon, among a thick stand of pine trees, the boy found a striped shirt and black socks soaked and faintly rotten as if they had wintered there. The shirt hung so small in his hands, that whoever had worn it began to scream. The boy listened hard for heavy steps. He checked the trees for movement.

And yes, although nothing happened except fantasy following him home, he picked up a heavy branch and carried it toward the road, clutching it like bravery. In his room, the novel still lying beside his bed, the boy closed his eyes and sat in his wooden chair that strangers had cut and shaped and fitted into something so common that one would always surround him. He kept his eyes shut until he cried.