Green

The light fell through translucent leaf after leaf on the mossy branches of the tree, fading before it hit the ground speckled with young fruits and grass. It caught the scaled back of a lizard, neon stripes on a snail’s shell, and a hundred different bright gnats and flies as it filtered down through the rainforest canopy. The buds of river-flowers lay tightly curled over shaded lilypads, long stems falling through pooled water to pockets filled with algae. The world of the forest was one color. It seeped through the underbrush, all the trailing ivy vines, every head of a tropical bird; it colored the smell of the mist, the taste of dew on viper’s tongues, the softness of mushroom caps under toes. It was the hue of growth and life.