TE23 Double Feature

Sandrine Collette

The Forests

blackened, bent, or gashed open. Their rivers were gray and muddy, full of dead fish in a sluggish current. No birds sang. It was cold andclammy.

world, they crumbled when Corentin stepped on them. Nothing announced its presence, neither squirrel nor blackbird, not even a fly, which, before, would have buzzed around him, driving him mad. A dozen times he thought he saw a blade of grass or a patch of tree that had been spared, that had preserved its colors, its green-brown bronze.

Like elsewhere. Like everywhere.

Something sank inside Corentin, shrinking him, when all he had hoped for was to be able to expand, to spread out at last after days of distress—he felt the flesh tightening around his bones. He’d been searching for a sign, but all he found was indifference. Deep in his gut, the feeling he’d been betrayed.

For something to gleam like bronze, it needed sunshine.

Corentin had slowed his pace, without realizing.

A part of him didn’t want to get there. As long as he was still on the way, he had a goal. Hope, too, a hope which he tried to quell, not to be disappointed, but which slipped into his head like leaking water, through the tiniest gap, the slightest breach. He frequently blocked his ears, as if it were coming from outside. But it clung on, inside 67

* * *

He went through the Forests without making a sound. The leaves did not crunch beneath his feet, they had fallen as ash. Pebbles did not roll. Incinerated by the fire of the 66