I’d say I opened my eyes, but I’m not sure. I wouldn’t say I awoke. Looking back on it, the dream felt like climbing into a kettle. Awaiting the boil, swirling, faint, in bubbles that struggled toward the noise. It was all of us together. I opened my eyes and saw, of course, but nothing looked the same. Lord knows if there are other verbs for such matters.

A clearing in the woods. The perspective was as if shot from below. Like if someone had buried a pair of eyes, watering them carefully, in steady sun, until the eyelids papering the seed had let themselves split open to reveal the baby creature, always seeking the sky through the curtain of a playhouse. If that’s what looking is—you know? I’m not sure what I saw, but I saw so much. Way up high and all the way along, I saw the meadow being the meadow, the woods, the woods, but the moss inside told me things, and I knew I couldn’t repeat any part of what I’d heard. I only listened and that was what it was. Suddenly all things sprouted all together like the water rising, turning to steam.

Leaves, lichen, shoots, stone, water, lots of water, a little semen, yes, dead slithering things, residues of beast, gasoline, almost snowy with fungus; a bit of fire was also there, but it went out. A strong wind blew, the wind always bearing things far away, doing things. It wasn’t the fire, you know; the part at the beginning was only the wind that returned and spoke to itself.

Like I said, lots of water, but lots of plants, I also saw. They weren’t green: The plants beneath weren’t the same plants, they said things in a better language, they spoke among themselves out of nervousness, they knew what each wanted to ask before doing so, it didn’t take much thought. The wind soothed everything, brought rain, allowed for wetness, and that was a pleasure. I remember we bathed in it, yes, as I remember other ancient things. The fragrance of flowers someone left on the kitchen table in my childhood home. But that wasn’t a house, I don’t think—it’s more of a well we’re talking about. Yes, that I do remember, the water above. Not beneath. In the earth we were all of us and not a word, not a blink to anyone of what I saw. If I speak now, it’s not because they’ve asked me to. It’s because of my son. He and I were mute. Dry plants for a long time. But not anymore.

• • •

When Pedro started working in the tree plantation, he was still so scrawny and inept that the ax blade snagged in the trunk on his first day. The other members of his crew cackled, applauded, and thumped him on the back. Nice job, look at the skinny kid go, they hooted. Now try hauling that log on your shoulders. The foreman, seeing that he wasn’t cut out for it, led him to the whip-sawyers. Then came an afternoon of shared effort, coordinating his pulls on the saw’s rough handle with those of Astorga—a flabby asshole who called him kiddo, runt, fragile, puppy, soft palms, broken nail, splinter in delicate flesh—on the other side of the fallen tree. At the end of the day, his shoulders were stiff and his arms shuddered.

The boss doubled back on him at the exit.

¨Hey, you know how to fill out a table?”

He’d spent weeks watching these men work. Barely acknowledged by the others, Pedro counted the logs they piled onto the truck bed, corroborating the number of trunks, ensuring they had no fewer rings than the mandatory minimum. There were laws. Only the old eucalyptuses could come down. The youngsters were to be left alone. In general, fifty, sometimes even eighty logs were loaded up and transported out, readied for cutting and cleaning. One afternoon, Pedro amused himself by imagining that the rings formed a language, that every ring spelled years of tree history and tree memories, like in photographs: classmates all lined up, sitting beside each other in class, swapping notes, whispering among themselves, chasing a ball at recess. That’s what he was thinking about when a heavy log clipped him on the back of the head. The choker setters’ laughter sank into his skin like a tattoo. Even the squad leader cackled. Pedro rubbed himself slowly and laughed too. Adjusted his helmet. Don’t pay Astorga no mind, man, his coworkers said. He’s a smart-ass, that’s all, you get used to it. He listened to them, in his way: He lifted a rock and lobbed it at the porker’s head.

After a month and a half of work, he was wrecked. The first few days were the worst. Following the men uphill through sun and shade, hands caked with dirt, nails blackened, fingertips adorned with so many splinters that there was no point in taking them out. The omnipresent pesticidal dust prompting coughs and sinus infections. A shared life. The fatso’s jokes. His own languid persistence beneath them. His coworkers said he didn’t have a sense of humor. Come on, Pedrito, it ain’t nothing. He’d lower his arms, clutching his clipboard, eyes cast down behind the group. That’s when he started gathering eucalyptus pods. He’d look for them on his lunch hour, select husks that were similar in shape and pierce each one in the same spot. He’d say to himself: Better a craftsman than a grunt.

Making matters worse, his wages were stolen at the end of the first month. He’d carefully tucked the bills into the bottom of his backpack, standing in the little alcove where Astorga shamelessly masturbated, threatening to spatter you if you watched or said anything. Come on, relax. No one else gives a shit, the axman Juan Carlos said to him. Why whine about it. On the evening he couldn’t find the roll of blue bills inside his clean socks, he walked up into the brush until he was out of sight. He sat on a pine stump and tried not to cry, but he couldn’t help it.

It was as if the world had stopped. Life was scarce in those plots of land, but so was silence. Expanses of sticks and twigs, dust, metal cables, sweaty glances, scribbles, simple fauna, withered flora, hole saws, the swift and rhythmic groan of wood growing into coffins, sawdust, men half asleep, cut fingers waving, hands bleeding onto the lichen, lush moss that doesn’t grow much but peeks, sometimes, from the corners of mirrors and showers. It was as if the forest itself had hurled a rock at his head.

Pedro always limped a little after that episode. But the next week, he was trudging uphill with his clipboard again, ax over his shoulder, sweating, whistling. He’d joke back and chuckle.

Over time, he became one with his labor. His body adapted to the rigor of the days, arms and back gained muscle mass with every blow. His humor conformed to that of his fellows. He no longer made a fuss when someone cleaved his boots into a log at lunch. He’d hear them laughing and let the wind brush it off him, shoo away the forest heat, shifting the boughs of the pines and eucalyptuses, offering their sweet shade.

From the novel Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo. Copyright © 2026 by Simón López Trujillo. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. New York, NY. All rights reserved.