Sylas and the Dead Forest

     “This place is creepy weird,” Sylas said. Miles and miles of shriveled dead trees and a tangled mess of gnarly twigs. The blackened trees were covered in some kind of a mysterious, slimy goo that gave them a strange glow that was almost pretty in a curious shiny way. Shorter dead trees stuck out from the ground like rotten fingers clawing out from the deep below, and those that lay on the ground looked like giant black slugs. 

     Sylas opened his car window expecting to smell rotten eggs or broccoli, but instead, he smelled…popcorn. A dead forest that smelled like popcorn. Really? He took another long sniff of the air, and now he smelled popcorn—and sugar roasted peanuts. What?

     “A-a-a-achoo! Close your window—quick—Achoo!” Uncle Dan yelled. He blew his nose into a tissue and made strange noises. “It’s making my hay fever worse!”

     Sylas closed his window and kept looking out. As the road got closer to the forest, the view became uglier and gooey-er as they drove along. This was not the green forest his uncle had promised. 

     “The forest looks dead,” Sylas said, “smells weird too.” 

Uncle Dan glanced through the rearview mirror. “Yeaaah, sorry—I only heard about it yesterday.”  

     “But you said you grew up here.”

     “I did, but that was thirty years ago. I haven’t been here since.” 

     “What happened to the forest? Did it get sick?”

     “Yeaaah— no one knows—one day it was all green and healthy—next day, black and dead.”

     “Why did it—”

     “You sure have a lot of questions tucked away in that round thing on your shoulders, huh?” Uncle Dan said. “Look, I haven’t driven a car in years, and the navigator doesn’t work around here, so will you keep quiet until we reach Grandpa’s house? I need to concentrate on driving, okay?”

     “Okay.” Sylas had never met his uncle until a month ago. He didn’t even know he had one.

     Apart from the occasional Ewwws, Sylas kept quiet for fifteen minutes and watched all the dead trees whiz by as the car drove along. Just when his eyelids were getting heavy, he saw something further ahead that looked like a blob..It must be a pile of dead trees he thought. He changed his mind as the blob came closer and closer, and it was getting larger and larger. 

     Sylas’s eyes widen and his voice cracked. “U-u-uncle?”