Tiger Heron

Understory

34 Understory for Eloise Klein Healy and Colleen Rooney I woke to howler monkeys screaming at dawn. The false-eyed iguana changed from orange to green. In the raftered lobby, a teal-winged macaw screeched hello baby and the Jesus lizard ran across the infinity pool that met the sky. The deceptive cadence of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor rang in my headphones in the forest that made its own clouds and thus continually wept. Del Monte pineapples flanked the road to Tortuguero where the forbidden Caribbean sparkled with sharks. In the mangrove, a fallen tree opened its mouth, turned caiman, and leaves doubled in size every day above a chevroned tiger heron wading in the slough. I beached the kayak below tiered and pedestaled trees festooned in droplets, trees studded with pink epiphytes, their holdfasts strong as barbed wire. After a brief fracas with bullet ants and poison frogs, I revived at the thatched tiki bar and added a gray-headed kite to my life 35 list beneath boa constrictor and sloth. Seven years together, now we no longer speak. The rainforest absorbs decay in a lyric. Like a bird in a mist net, the half-life of betrayal. ...