Forest World Read online

  With love for Curtis, who travels with me, and with hope for all the young wildlife conservation superheroes of the future

  Cada persona es un mundo.

  “Each person is a world.”

  —Cuban folk saying

  SUMMER 2015

  A time of change

  Family Disaster

  EDVER

  Miami, Florida, USA

  I thought I was prepared

  for any emergency. Fires, floods,

  hurricanes, rogue gunmen, bombs,

  and worse—we’ve covered them all,

  in scary student emergency training drills.

  We’ve shut down the school,

  painted our faces with fake blood,

  and practiced carrying one another

  to an imaginary helicopter, moaning

  and screaming with almost-real fear

  as we pretended to survive crazy

  catastrophes.

  Nowhere in all that madness

  did I ever imagine being sent away

  by Mom, to meet my long-lost dad

  in the remote forest where I was born

  on an island no one in Miami

  ever mentions without sighs,

  smiles, curses, or tears . . .

  but travel laws have suddenly changed,

  the Cold War is over, and now it’s a lot easier

  for divided half-island, half-mainland

  Cuban American families

  to be reunited.

  Mom is so weirdly thrilled,

  it seems suspicious.

  From the moment she announced

  that she was sending me away to meet Dad,

  I could tell how relieved she felt to be getting

  a relaxing break from her wild child,

  the troublemaker—me.

  If she would listen, I would argue

  that it’s not my fault a racing bicycle

  got in my way while I was playing a game

  on my phone and skateboarding at the same time.

  That’s what games are for—entertainment, right?

  Escape, so that all those minutes spent gliding

  home from school aren’t so shameful.

  As long as I stare into a private screen,

  no one who sees me

  knows

  I’m alone.

  Tap, zap, swipe,

  the phone makes me look as busy

  as someone with plenty of friends,

  a kid who’s good at sports

  instead of science.

  In that way, I’m just like Mom, who hardly ever

  looks up from her laptop on weekends.

  She just keeps working like a maniac,

  trying to rediscover lost species.

  She’s a cryptozoologist, a scientist who searches

  for hidden creatures, both the legendary ones

  like Bigfoot, and others that no one ever sees

  anymore, simply because they’re so rare

  and shy, hiding while terrorized by hunters,

  loggers, and poachers who sell their stuffed

  or pinned parts to collectors.

  Yuck.

  But what if there’s more?

  What if Mom’s real reason for peering

  into her secret online world

  is flirting to meet weird guys

  who might not even be

  the handsome heroes

  shown in their photos . . . ?

  What if she’s dating,

  and that’s why she needs

  to get rid of me, so she can go out

  with creeps

  while I’m away?

  Our Fluttering Lives

  LUZA

  La Selva, Cuba

  Green

  all around me,

  blue

  up above,

  and now my little brother

  is finally on his way

  to visit!

  I’ve heard about Edver all my life,

  from Abuelo, who misses his daughter—my mamá—

  and from Papi, who speaks so mournfully of a time

  when we all lived together as a family, rooted

  in our forest, and winged

  with shared dreams.

  Now, as I step down to a clay bank where clouds

  of blue butterflies have landed, brightness pulses

  as the radiant insects sip dark minerals from mud,

  performing a dance of hunger

  called puddling.

  Las mariposas—the butterflies—remind me

  of miniature angels, skyborne, glowing,

  magical and natural at the same time.

  Do they know how fragile and brief

  their airborne lives

  will be?

  After we travel to the city to meet my brother

  at the airport, maybe I’ll come back to this mossy

  riverbank and sculpt a vision of people

  with upside-down wings

  beneath leafy green trees

  rooted in sky. . . .

  Or even better, I could just stand here and wait

  for a tiny colibrí to arrive, a hummingbird no bigger

  than a bee, the world’s smallest bird, one of the many

  living treasures that make Papi such a great

  wildlife superhero, protecting our forest’s

  rare creatures

  from the hunger

  and greed

  of poachers.

  Saying Good-Bye to My Real Life

  EDVER

  On the last day of school before summer vacation,

  I move like a shadow, trying to hide from all the kids

  who saw that video of me crashing my skateboard

  into the racing bike.

  If I ever learn how to code my own truly cool game,

  I’ll fill it with shadow people whose feelings

  can’t be

  seen.

  Tomorrow I’ll fly to Cuba.

  Maybe getting away is a good thing.

  If I stayed home, all I would do

  is hide in my room

  and play games

  alone.

  Raro

  LUZA

  ¡Qué raro! How strange!

  Yes, it feels truly surrealistic

  to set out traveling like this,

  happily ready to meet a stranger

  and call him

  my brother.

  I hope he feels the same way about me.

  Rare.

  Like a forest bird

  in the city.

  The Isolation of Islands

  EDVER

  The plane lands.

  A flight attendant leads me to a line.

  Questions.

  Answers.

  Another fidgety wait.

  More questions.

  I show my passport.

  My backpack is inspected.

  The dissecting microscope

  is passed around by men and women

  in uniforms, some blue, others green,

  until eventually everything

  is returned to me

  instead of stolen.

  I sigh with relief,

  but by now I’m so nervous that all I want to do

  is calm my mind with the soothing clicks, zaps,

  and whooshes of electronic dragon flames

  in my favorite game, an online world

  filled with griffin slobber,

  troll breath, and the oozing farts

  of lumbering ogres.

  Imaginary animals are almost as bizarre

  as the real ones, like that iridescent green

  jewel cockroach wasp

  I wrote about

  for a nonfiction
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  book report.

  The wasp injects poison into a roach’s brain,

  turning the bigger insect into a zombie

  that can be ridden like a horse,

  using the antennae as reins,

  until they reach the wasp’s nest,

  where guess what, the obedient roach

  is slowly, grossly

  eaten by squirming

  larvae.

  No beeps or ringtones now.

  No web of games and calming clicks.

  No Internet at all, for researching

  hideously fascinating natural stuff.

  Being phoneless is my punishment

  for that stupid bicyclist’s injuries,

  but Mom says I wouldn’t be able to find

  cell phone signals in Dad’s forest anyway,

  and hardly anyone on this entire island

  has ever been on the Internet.

  So I might as well be visiting the distant past

  instead of a geographic curiosity, this antique place

  where I was born.

  All around me, Havana’s José Martí Airport

  bustles with joyful, abruptly reunited families,

  all the shrieks,

  sobs, and hugs

  of long-lost relatives

  as they find one another

  for the first time in ten, twenty,

  or fifty years.

  I miss my phone.

  How can such a loud island

  be as electronically silent

  as prehistory?

  Futurology

  LUZA

  Papi is so dedicated to patrolling our forest

  that he won’t leave for even one day.

  That’s why the villagers call him el Lobo—the Wolf.

  He never gives up when he’s tracking a poacher

  who wants to eat a rare parrot, or steal

  a bee-sized hummingbird

  and sell it

  as a pet.

  So Abuelo and I are the only ones

  who make the long trip to meet my brother

  at the airport.

  Fortunately, my grandpa knows how to find rides

  the whole way, as we bump and rattle along potholed roads

  in old cars already crowded with other hitchhikers,

  all of us weary after an ordeal of waiting, sweating,

  and praying

  beneath the blazing sun.

  This is verano, summer, the rainy season,

  but for some unknown reason, we’re in the middle

  of our island’s worst drought.

  Is it climate change, the disaster Papi

  keeps talking about?

  Rivers of clouds

  above rivers of water

  have suddenly dried up,

  leaving tropical parts

  of the world

  uncertain.

  To pass the time, I imagine a future

  of cave-dwelling, toolmaking rats

  that will someday rule everything

  unless deforestation

  is stopped.

  What a dilemma, Abuelo points out—we need

  transportation, but we also want limitations.

  We need farmland, but we can’t chop down

  all the wild, natural treasure of trees.

  Drought in the rainy season is this year’s curse.

  Last year we had too many foreign tourists

  stealing plants from our forest to use

  as medicines, or to plant the prettiest orchids

  in greenhouses, or simply because people

  are greedy, and Papi can’t patrol

  every trail

  all the time.

  Even a wolf

  needs a pack,

  a team.

  If only Mamá had never left.

  Together, the two of them

  could have been

  fierce.

  Bigfoot and Other Possibilities

  EDVER

  If Mom weren’t a cryptozoologist,

  I probably wouldn’t be a science nerd.

  Maybe I would have more friends,

  play on a team, get invited to parties,

  and hang out at skate parks,

  instead of crashing into bicyclists.

  Mom travels the world looking for animals

  that might not exist, and others that were firmly

  believed to be extinct, until they were suddenly

  rediscovered, becoming Lazarus species,

  like that dead guy in the Bible

  who was brought back to life—a miracle,

  only these rare creatures have been found

  by the hard work of stubborn scientists

  who keep on and on, searching.

  The Vu Quang ox, for instance.

  It’s a unicorn look-alike

  in Vietnam and Laos.

  It was classified as gone, then rediscovered,

  and now it’s endangered again, because the forest

  where it lives

  is shrinking.

  So I guess if Mom ever finds Bigfoot or the yeti

  or the Loch Ness monster, she’ll have to list them

  as threatened.

  She says there are only two possible

  twenty-first-century attitudes

  toward nature:

  1. Use it before you lose it.

  2. Protect it while you can.

  In an effort to make me love the father

  I don’t remember, she tells me he’s a superhero,

  the perfect example of a wildlife protector,

  sacrificing everything to guard a single

  mountaintop, along with all the bugs,

  birds, bats, snakes, and lizards

  that live there.

  When she talks about him, her voice

  slowly grows a little bit amazed, as if he’s

  a hidden fossil washed to the surface

  by flash floods.

  I wish she would talk about me that way

  instead of urging me to go play outdoors

  like a kid half my age.

  She says it doesn’t make sense,

  the way I love science but don’t know

  how to explore.

  Mom doesn’t make sense either,

  like right before the Miami airport

  when she told me I’d soon meet

  someone special—a surprise,

  but she said it isn’t Dad,

  and she just got quiet

  after I demanded

  details.

  I’ve never been a fan of Mom’s

  spontaneous surprises.

  They’re usually embarrassing,

  upsetting, or worse,

  like that time when she made me

  change schools without warning,

  or the Christmas when cousins

  from far away tried to visit

  and she refused to open the door,

  insisting that she needed

  to work.

  What will it be this time?

  I don’t even want to make myself

  dizzy and miserable

  trying to guess.

  Fragmentology

  LUZA

  When poor people hitchhike,

  each ride is a gathering of attitudes.

  Some whine about hunger.

  Others share fruit.

  Many sing; others remain silent

  or tell wild stories, making up

  fantastic lies.

  Abuelo just speaks quietly, privately,

  trying to prepare me for meeting my brother.

  Why did the mother I can barely remember

  choose Edver to go north with her,

  while leaving me so far

  behind?

  Two fragments, two children, divided up

  like leftovers

  after a big picnic.

  It happens all the time in Cuba,

  families breaking up
<
br />   into tiny remnants, like feathers

  carried by wind

  long after the bird

  has died.

  If I’m going to be a broken wing,

  let me flutter at least once

  before the magic

  is lost.

  Face-to-Face

  EDVER

  Beyond the airport’s noisy baggage carousel,

  a skinny old man holds up a sign with VERDE,

  my real name, the word that didn’t change

  until kindergarten in Miami, when everyone

  made fun of me for being called Green.

  So I reversed it, only I couldn’t pronounce

  Edrev, so it turned into Edver.

  Now, as if he knows the real me—a nerdy kid

  named for the color of forest trees—Abuelo hugs me

  fiercely, then grabs my backpack, chattering

  rapidly, Cuban-style, as he leads me out to a blaze

  of melting asphalt, where colorfully painted

  antique cars are lined up all over the parking lot

  in gleaming rows, like life-sized toys

  for grown-ups.

  Tu hermana, Abuelo says,

  shoving me into the arms of a girl

  so close to my age

  that we could be twins.

  ¿Hermana?

  Sister?

  As far as I know,

  I’ve always been

  an only child!

  Trying to pretend that I know

  what’s going on, I sort of hug her,

  then bob my head like a bouncing ball,

  barely listening

  to her questions.

  All I can do is think—really, Mom?

  So this was your big surprise?

  So many lectures about how to behave

  on this island, but my mother never even bothered

  to mention that I have una hermana, a sister,

  my sibling, a mystery, puzzle, riddle. . . .

  ¿Por qué? Why? Don’t I deserve simple truth

  instead of complicated, loca-crazy

  genius-Mom

  selfishness?

  There’s only one way to survive

  this sudden sister shock—pretend

  I don’t

  care.

  Rediscovered

  LUZA

  I can’t believe she never told him.

  I’ve known about Edver all my life!

  The ride to our tía’s house

  in a rattling old taxi

  now feels like a journey

  across warped time

  and empty space,

  light-years of confusion

  condensed into just a few

  harsh minutes.

  This whole city of La Habana is crumbling,