Wound

It was me who found the infection, but I didn’t know it at the time.

I only knew the forest had suddenly stilled. I saw trees skeletal in the height of July, bark flaking away from the trunks. The ground completely bare, as if the leaves had dissolved, not fell.

I walked away, back to where the forest still lived.

Maybe, then, we could have done something. But I put it down as a quirk of nature, and let it be.

It followed me.

Now plants die as it creeps outwards. Metal corrodes. And we have fewer places to run.

—–

This one’s from the prompt ‘necrosis’.