It tasted of rotting fruit and decay, an anti paradise of an Eden left abandoned and overgrown.

Like that forgotten apple long ago, the one that bore the bite of sin, sappy juices seeping from its incision, the forest too was a symbol of evil. A thing once whole who’s fleshy peel had been breached by naïve, greedy teeth.

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Thick canopies of moss fanned across the earth, it’s outstretched tendrils not unlike the sticky netted trappings of a spider’s web. The viridescent velvet coated everything, blanketing long forgotten carcasses and tree roots that curled along the floors like gnarled fingers.

Flat, broad leaves palmed from thick stems like tabletops, their surfaces unnaturally dark, navy and sheened with luster like the backs of beetles.

Dotting the trees, growing around their thick trunks or atop forgotten bones, were the all-consuming fungi. Some white, some mucus yellow, and others, bright red beads of fresh blood seeping from fissures in the umber underbelly of the terrain.

Within and throughout all this ugly, flowers still bloomed, tiny white and periwinkle blossoms that studded the heavy fullness. They were beautiful trivial things, fingernail small with petals that curled towards their centers at nightfall and bloomed into papery fans by day. These blossoms, sprouting from the crooks of rough bark or pushing through soupy undergrowth blinked like lucid eyes, forever forced to endure the vileness of the first mistake of man.

But this contrast, this carefully sprinkled delicacy amongst all the unkempt darkness, did not work in the forests favour. Instead of being a symbol of thriving beauty it instead, resembled something sinister, something uncanny; like funeral flowers lain upon a fresh grave. Their powdery sweetness filled the gardens with the sickening cloy of sun – baked fruit spent too long in the heat.

The creatures that roamed the forest had furred or hairy flesh, bristling bodies that scratched against the vegetation like brush bristles against leather, shining the leaves to reflective disks.

One would imagine that without this second skin, they would feel the thick wet heat that hung in the air. This tangible ambience that bound to flesh like latex stretched thin over heaving lungs, suffocating and choking.

In a place where sunlight often failed to hit, the forest appeared murky, drained of vivid hue and rendered in shades of grey, navy, and black. The rare exceptions to all this waxy darkness were the spots of glossy wetness that drenched the tongues of unfurled leaves. The silvery dew drops that surfaced the leaves shone like mirrored jewels, a failed attempt to conceal the dreariness in a veil of gaudy splendor.

For all its lack of colour, the forest was still very much heady with sensation. A pulsing thrum seeped from the damp soil, creeping into bones and blood, and anything living. It slithered along the skin, this second heartbeat, burying itself deep under meaty tissue so that one might imagine a second forest soon blooming inside their own bodies. A forest festering with thousands of tiny crawling legs and feathery leaves that brushed against their throats, threatening to consume even their tongue and teeth.

•••••••••••

In the aftermath of the great fall, this is what will be left behind.

A single red apple gone rotten that will metastasize, proliferating its ichor like a disease, a dark decay that will eat and eat until nothing remains.