WE BEASTS — WILL McMILLAN
/“Everything in nature’s out to get you,” said our father, flapping a hand toward the explosion of wilderness. “Everything. Hold still long enough, and the birds will drop from the sky to devour you. Insects will lay eggs in your skin. Every beast that crawls on the ground will tear into you.”
He spat on the dirt road where he stood with his boys. The road that split through the woods like a dagger. The road where our camper, our home now that we were without one, was dumped. We watched his spit sink into the soil. “The earth, too. It’ll swallow you up. The trees, the flowers, they’ll break you down into nothing. You’re not little boys to the wilderness. You’re just raw material.”
Every day he repeated this discourse, aware of our habit to forget and to wander. Ten steps, maybe twenty from the road, that’s as far as my brother and I’d wager we’d get. We’d glare at the trees, imagining their dripping branches as arms, their grimy roots as tentacles ripping our puny bodies in two. To the road, we’d return.
Until the day twenty steps became thirty, then a thousand. Our tendency to wander magnified by a rooftop of perfect blue sky, by winds bleeding the scent of wildflowers. Two thousand, three thousand steps. Until the road disappeared. We turned, but there was nothing but trees and earth, nothing but the unrecognizable wilderness. Four thousand steps, five…? Realization shook us like thunder. We were lost.
The forest was warm-washed in crashing sunlight, trunks and needles glowing chocolate and lime. Suddenly, our father’s words came to us and we would not consider ourselves as prey. “If everything in the wild’s out to get us,” we’d said, “then let’s become wild.”
Quickly, we cast off our shoes, our socks, strapping them around our necks. We ran, kicking our toes through the earth, flinging dirt and leaves through the air, screaming up at the sky. We feasted on clover, ripped it raw from the ground, gnashing our teeth like beasts because beasts we’d become. Shouting and whooping to the birds, to the trees, running harder and deeper, getting more and more lost, jagged earth gouging wounds through our feet. But so what? The wounds of living inside a dumped camper gouged even deeper.
But the road that stabbed its way through the woods also cut them up into fragments. Abruptly, the wilderness ended, spitting us back onto the dead, dusty street. “Everything in nature’s out to get you,” our father had warned us. Except it was the road, not the wilderness, that seemed to be stalking us, refusing to let us stay lost, to let us stay beasts.
We slowly pulled on our socks and shoes while the trees cast deep, frigid shadows over us. Our feet stung walking back to the road. Ten steps, then twenty. Back toward a camper, toward a life waiting to slowly break us down into nothing.
Will McMillan is a queer writer born and raised in the untamed wild of the Pacific Northwest, where he still lives today. His essays have been featured in The Sun, Hobart, Hippocampus, JMWW, and Pidgeonholes, among many others. His first essay collection, When You're a Boy, is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press.
