The Once-Green Forest of My Lungs
by Lynne Sargent
I have already met disaster. Now I stand before three deaths, hoping to make it to my desired one, and therefore make all my tribulations worthwhile.
First is the Cobreigen, the wolf of the dunes, made of swirling dervishes, who stalks the night air of the desert and hunts the water entrapped within flesh. Second, is the slow desiccation of the desert itself, the exposure of sun and heat. Third, and most coveted is the inevitable end of the Samia, the flower of the profound and the sublime, whose ingestion ends with perfect clarity, and death.
It is what I have sought ever since I became as I am now, a creature of wooden limbs and mossy organs, the fruits of my adventures that were too much for either of my peoples to stomach. An outcast, a cautionary tale if not quite a monster in my own right. I have failed in discovering the mysteries of my father’s forest, instead becoming a part of it, so now I would like to find the secrets of my mother’s people and die by the desert’s highest honor: the Samia’s poison alone.
My mother’s people say that slain Cobreigens become oases. That in death they return the water they have stolen back to the world. Those oases are where the Samia bloom. To slay a Cobreigen you tempt one close, time and time again, ensuring there is too much water in your body for it to gorge itself on and be able to leave you dry, until it shows you its soft belly and can be killed. It is a grueling process, done only by their strongest leaders.
I am not strong, but I am prepared. I have spent days salting bushmeat and stockpiling water from distant wells, hauling it bucket by bucket to my small camp at the edge of the desert.
I have a waterskin at hand, and strip down naked, feeling the uncomfortable pulse of my bladder. I bear my skin to the moonlight, hoping it will be tempting enough, dreading it will be too tempting.
I need not have worried. The Cobreigen finds me beneath the moon. It is a whirlwind of licks scraping at my skin, sucking all the moisture out. The residue of its swirling sand is like days of unbrushed grit on my teeth– somehow grating and sticky at the same time
It finishes just before sunrise. I am dehydrated; my throat is hoarse despite my silence, my skin achingly parched. I drink two full waterskins immediately, and another over the course of the dawn as I retreat to my tent.
I wait two nights, recovering, restocking, before I platter myself as feast once more. The cycle repeats from there. It feels like a little death each time. A moon passes, but the Cobreigen still does not seem to trust me– always eager to drink; always quick to leave.
Tonight it is late. Past midnight. The nights of feeding and days of hauling water have worn on me, and sometime in the cryptic hours, I fall asleep. When I wake, it is to the morning sun, and the Cobreigen is there.
He is swirling, but not feasting, caressing, but not licking the last of my life from my cursed bones. My tender flesh is blistered and burned in the morning sun. I run back to my tent, and the beast permits this. I bathe myself in water, lather myself in protective sap, and sleep uneasy once more. That night, I hear it stave off bandits, and the next morning, when I am more recovered, I find their dusty corpses, not a drop of water left within them.
From then on, the Cobreigen’s feeding is strange. It becomes more willing to brave my tent and the edges of the desert. It seems to play at times, darting and weaving before collapsing into a pile. It grows smaller, the molecules of sand tighter together each time it feeds. It lingers afterwards, staying close, its breathing relaxed. It seems nearly domesticated.
I still want the Samia, just as the Cobreigen still wants water, but perhaps it would do no harm to wait a little longer before I slay it, to linger in this intrigue. I know all my peoples would caution against this, but if I had ever listened to them before, I would not be here.
Days pass, then weeks. The Cobreigen changes me and I change it. I become a creature of the desert, denser, and better at keeping the water of my flesh inside my body, although the Cobreigen’s magic still allows it to extract it at need. The Cobreigen slowly loses the air between the particles of its sandstorm, until eventually it is like a wet sandcastle of a dog, rolling over for belly rubs and flopping its head against my thigh in contentment. No story I have ever heard tells of the relationship going this far. I begin to wonder, as we pass the time together, if community is not our true desire, even if it cannot be the only one. The meaning of our lives, our quests, has become so tangled with the everyday of being by the other’s side.
One day, it refuses to drink from me entirely. It will only look up at me mournfully, holding my gaze before staring out into the expanse of the desert. If it could, I’m sure it would whine. In all these years I have still never gone further than half a day’s walk into the dunes, still too afraid to meet my second possible death. In truth, I am also unsure of my readiness for the third death which lies within the dunes, now I have made a companion of my first. A part of me simply wants to love it, to exist with it for the rest of my natural days, fulfilling its hungers. But now it desires to go into the desert, and so I shall.
By night we walk. The Cobreigen leads the way, fending off others of its kind, fetching me snakes and lizards to feast upon in the twilight before dawn. By day, it keeps me company in my tent, finding its way to snuggle under my hands and into the caverns of my armpits.
After ten days we reach the oasis– except it is not merely one oasis as I expected. Instead it’s dozens and dozens of lush little circles, all of them surrounded by green, fruit trees unlike any I’ve seen before, not even in the most secret reaches of my father’s rainforest. Each pool is large enough for two to bathe in, but no more. Altogether though there is more water than a person might need in a lifetime.
The Cobreigen frolics, weaving its way through the pools. Eventually it stops at one where a queer flower blooms– the Samia. No description of it that I have ever heard does it justice. It is an eye-searing yellow and green colour, almost too bright to look at, and each petal is feathered like the wings of birds.
I look at it, awed. It is more beautiful than I expected. “But I’m not ready yet,” I whisper to the Cobreigen, only in that moment coming to know my own truth.
The Cobreigen whirls back and forth, zooming in circles before finally resting flopped on its back, displaying the smooth clay of its belly before allowing itself the smallest slurp of the water of my flesh, taking it from my hands like gel from an aloe.
One day melts into another, fuses one month to the next, until the years are gone and dried like preserved flowers– beautiful still, if of a different character than when they were freshly plucked. I draw the Samia in my notebook. I write too of all I see in the depths of the desert here, painstakingly careful with the space I have. I speak of the miracle of the Cobreigen, the way we have sheltered each other and given the other something to live for besides each of our respective, desired ends.
And yet endings must come, and we are ready now.
I wish I could share this knowledge. I hope someday another soul will find their way here and see what I have written. I hope they will have reason enough to return from whence they came and bring my story with them.
I spend my final day bathing in one of the pools, readying myself as the Cobreigen takes its last drink from me, passing to its next state of being. As the Samia’s feathery petals bless my lips, I feel my breath catch on desert thorns where once there was simply the green forest of my lungs. The Cobreigen is there, and the love between us divine. From above, I watch my body desiccate as the Cobreigens now-clay one become a new pool in the oasis, until in time my arboreal remains become fertile soil for more of the Samia to bloom from. We are together, a biome of two, both of us monsters showing the world new ways to grow.
Lynne Sargent is a Hamilton-based queer writer, aerialist, and holds a Ph.D in Applied Philosophy. They are the poetry editor at Utopia Science Fiction magazine. Their work has been nominated for Rhysling, Elgin, Best-of-the-Net and Aurora Awards, and has appeared in venues such as Augur Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Analog. Watch out for their non-fiction book Not Just Playing Make Believe, forthcoming from ECW Press. To find out more visit them at: