The Cuckoo Colloquium

22 - Moonch

"What kind of colloquium are you, anyway?" she asked the forest.

They told her she would be learning strategies-strategies to build study skills, ease school stress, embrace leadership, increase SAT and ACT scores. Those were the strategies Moonch expected, not how to survive a flashflood, or a boat explosion; not how to stay alive with no food, no medicine, no mosquito netting.

Maybe the files got switched. Were they confusing the colloquium with some Navy Seal's program? It seemed possible.

As she walked, the forest made a sudden change from small, moss-covered trees to towering hardwoods, and the canopy above her became as thick as she had even seen. But she'd found a path; it was wide, for jungle conditions, and it didn't fork. It almost seemed like a road.

Then Moonch saw a large, ivory colored nut on the ground, and she picked it up and looked up into the canopy. Were the nuts coming from the monkeys? She saw another nut, and then another. Three little treasures for her!

It was work cracking the knuckle-sized nuts open, but she was thankful to have the project. They were delectable, and she savored the nutrition the nuts gave her, trying not to chew too quickly. And only after the contents of the nuts had settled in her stomach did Moonch turn to watch a falling palm leaf settle on the ground.

"Oh, bibble-babble..."

The exclamation, something her Aunt Lorraine liked to say, seemed appropriate-She had wandered off the trail.

Moonch tried to backtrack, but the monotonous blanket around her refused to help. Then she started thinking there had never been a trail, anyway- that some presumed safe corridor of passage had just been in her head.

She passed a small banana grove, but the bananas were small and green, impossible to eat.

She reached a small, muddy-bottomed stream, and decided she would go no farther that afternoon. She plopped down on the bank of small stones and looked out across the water again, and down the meandering creek through the thick tangle of riparian growth that wooed the water's edge.

She examined herself for all the nasty jungle stuff that wanted to suck your blood. She seemed mostly hampered by ticks, not the leeches. And she pulled off her orange pants and looked at her bare thighs; black on white, like blackheads on her alabaster flesh, and her legs were showing the puffy, septic signs of all the previous bites.

POP! - That was the sound of her fingernails crushing the bloated torso of a tick. And Moonch giggled, relishing the execution.

Then she did what she had been anxious about-She took off her boots and had a look at her feet.

"Ahh, pizza."

Her socks were stiff with the decaying blood from all the bites. And she winced and pulled off the socks and examined the damage on the underside of her feet. The sores had graduated from pizza.

"Anybody for mushroom picking?" - She had the ulcers that accompany life in the tropics, often striking at the feet of the unaccustomed. The pain was raw and throbbing, and she pried apart her toes and examined the peeling and the cherry-colored blistering of the sores.

Looking at her feet made her hungry-and was that sick, or what?" Eating herself to stay alive seemed, overall, a stupid thing to do.

The condition of her feet was not good. "Mental note-keep feet dry."

Then, immediately, she stepped off the hard, furrowed ground and into the cool water of the little river that traveled over her feet. It felt so good, like ice cream on a burning summer's day.