Her dark hair is tied in a ragged lace handkerchief, and her curved jawbone is lit with large, false-pearl earrings, as if these headlamps from another world might show the way. The mother especially-watch how she leads them on, pale-eyed, deliberate. Later on you’ll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. This forest eats itself and lives forever.Īway down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees.

IMAGINE A RUIN so strange it must never have happened. Orleanna Price SANDERLING ISLAND, GEORGIA And over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Barbara kingsolver the poisonwood