The Cuckoo Colloquium

1 - Windy

He was lost—good and lost. And that meant one thing: Dead. Fini. The big bite. Adios Park.

Windy was lost, all right, in a gauntlet of steamy muck and creepy-crawly, itchy things. A harsh and sweaty gauntlet—that's what it was. Slippery, too. Not friendly, not one little bit.

Lost, then dead—a one-two punch that went hand-in-hand in the rain forest. And it wanted you dead pronto; it wanted you for a light snack before you became some rotting stump in the soil.

The fourteen-year-old turned a slow three-sixty and whispered to the greenery all around him, "You're the real deal ... Oh, yeah, I'll be worm food, I'll be in the fertilizer business, I'll be..."

He ran out of cool lingo for dying, but continued to spin, seeing nothing but pressing foliage. Everything looked the same—the ground, the canopy above. He could be upside-down and not know it—except, then, all the blood would go to his head, and that wasn't good for the health.

"This isn't a jungle, it's a labyrinth ... for loons! Death Trap Borneo, the prequel, the psycho version."

Bugs all around him. He swatted at something sucking at his eyelid. Now blood dripped into his eye, and it stung. He took out his handkerchief again and rubbed at the bite, already swelling up like a pea.

"What kind of colloquium is this?" He waited, but the forest didn't answer. "Why are we here? —To study leadership strategies? Meet Tarzan? Fight the crocs? What's going on? I don't understand!"

On a shelf in the open-walled veranda of the visitor's lodge, a discolored leaflet said: 'Cuckoo Camp—Personal Growthing Adventure to the End.'

'Growthing'? That had to be the lamest slogan in the whole world. And to what 'end'? Who's 'end'?

His welcome drink in the lodge was a warm glass of mango juice, but his thirst forced him to down the sweet drink quickly...

Problem was, then he had to see a man about a horse, and quick — So he had left the visitor's lodge for the outhouse. But one smell of the stench from the outhouse shack was enough to send him deeper into the trees. No big deal, he peed all the time in the woods back home.

But that was Connecticut.

He dropped his voice to a whisper, "You're Asia, you're Borneo, you're the home of cannibals, headhunters, wicked, flesh-eating bacteria that eats American boys in a single, clammy afternoon."

He hunched there, wary, waiting for the jungle to respond to his words. When it didn't, confidence returned. He wiped the sweat off his brow. Then he smelled his armpit, sneered and swaggered forward.

And tripped.

A vine, or root, or some devious growth snaked across the ground. Windy fell in slow motion, as if gravity didn't apply in a rain forest.

He sighed, flat on the jungle floor. He wasn't Tarzan, he was just a teen—albeit a gifted one with potential, potential for great things—that's what the organizers had told his parents; that's why he was here.

So why wasn't the colloquium in some Manhattan high-rise? One with soft drinks and tortilla chips, maybe pizza? Why did they fly him 10,000 miles to some jungle he's never heard of?

Perhaps he would just stay on the ground like that, no hurry to get up. He could catch a few z's. His energy had evaporated like steam. He was a bone-less chicken, one without the strength to rise.