A WOMAN, SLEEPING in a tree.
Not like a lemur, nothing like that. She’s not suspended in the branches by her toes. This tree, this red cedar, once awe-inspiring in a forest of awe-inspiring trees, is now dead. All that remains is a hollowed trunk with a triangular opening just big enough for a person to crouch through. The trunk rises about three and a half metres from the ground. Its open top is jaggy and covered with a blue tarp, which is secured around the wide circumference of the trunk with bright yellow nylon rope. Picture waxed paper secured with string over the lid of a jam jar.
This young woman is asleep under the tarp. She’s warm and dry in a sleeping bag, on a bed of blankets and more tarps, and she’s wandering through one of those dreams where you just cannot get to the place you’re trying to get to. On her feet is a pair of cumbersome, flapping shoes that get caught on all the edges (there are edges underfoot) and she’s taking wrong turn after wrong turn, destination blurring more and more. The dream hands her a peach. She takes a bite. It’s rotten.
It starts to rain. Not in the dream, it is actually raining. The forest canopy is thick so at first the drops landing on the tarp are sporadic, but soon the rain comes down harder and the water begins to collect in little pools on the tarp and eventually finds its way to small tears in the blue, synthetic fabric. It drips on the sleeping woman. First on her forehead so she turns in sleep, then on her ear, and down her neck, and stipples through her thick hair.
She wakes up. The dark is so absolute that for a second she’s not sure if her eyes are even open. She sits up and feels for something solid in the black, something she can touch. She pats the space beside her and feels the warmth and give of her sleeping friend.
The sound of the rain on the tarp is like the clop of a spooked pony and the woman is concerned that the collected water will get too heavy and the tarp will come down on them—it’s happened before, while they were asleep. It was quite a shock, it was dreadful to be woken up that way, but they laughed about it in the morning and told the story over and over again.
The woman shifts her bedding away from the drip and lies back down but now she can’t fall asleep. It’s hard to trust the integrity of this shabby structure. She frowns because, well, come on, how did she end up here anyway? Having moved out of the path of the drip, she’s now cramped in close to the inner wall of the cedar trunk. It smells dusty and musky and old. There are probably ants.
It is 11:28 p.m.