Adam dragged the body of the dead man though the forest. Its naked skin scraped against the fallen branches of trees and low plants, seeds embedding themselves in the flesh. It was heavy work, but necessary. Soon the body would stiffen up and it would be harder to move, so he had to haul it fast.

He ran back through the trees and toward the clearing and the armory. He climbed up the rocky cliffs, following the path to the top that only he knew, grabbing familiar branches and taking hold of the sturdiest stones to hoist himself up. He had done this climb so many times that he could follow it blind-- he had done so in the middle of the night when the moon was new and the shadows were their darkest.

Behind layers of leaves from a long weeping willow tree, he found his cabin door. With a push, it opened easily. He never locked it when he left.

There was generally no need to do so. It was unlikely that visitors would find it, and even if they did, they wouldn’t discover much, except a desk, a stool, a mirror, and a bed. A lamp on a bedside table might give them pause-- it was the only artificial light in the entire forest, connected by a cord to the electrical grid that was fed by the armory’s giant solar panels. Most of Adam’s possessions were in the armory.

Underneath the bed was his trusty metal shovel. He had tried using others, but none of them were more perfectly efficient than this one. It had a spade shape and was heavy enough to give him leverage while digging in the sandy, rocky soil.

He grabbed it and raced back to the body. The sun had finally ducked under the horizon, and Adam wanted to plant the thing in the ground before dark.

He set to work quickly, punching the spade deep into the dry earth, and tossing shovel fulls of dark sand into a pile beside the body. It was better if the grave was shallow, because then the plants could breathe.

As he dug, the scent of another corpse wafted through. It was buried a few yards away, between two growing saplings. That body had produced several bushels of light lavender flowers, which took root directly on the skin.

Originally, there were no animals in the forest or in the desert. One of the visitors had brought a bunch of small blue eggs with him, and after that visitor died, the eggs hatched into a number of small brown birds.

The birds multiplied over the years until they had become a little flock. Some visitors told Adam that he should kill and eat them so that they wouldn’t multiply too much, but that sounded barbaric. He couldn’t bear the idea of eating a dead body. Plants ate dead bodies. Molds ate dead bodies.

Eating the eggs seemed equally unappetizing, although visitors insisted that it was their purpose. He let visitors eat whatever they wanted.

Guests only came once every three or four months, and they came in both very large and very small groups, travelling across the desert from one far away land to another. Some claimed that the war was over, and some claimed that it would never end.

It seemed to Adam that the visits were becoming more frequent as time went on.

When he was first alone, the desert was his only company. Survival was easy because there was already food growing in the greenhouse and the farm, even after his family was buried and gone.

He pulled water from the well and tried to mimic what he had seen his parents and brother doing, dousing the plants each day and making sure that each green leaf was flourishing and each fruit and vegetable was becoming plump and ripe to eat. It only took a week or so for a crop to mature from seed to harvest.

As time went on, Adam couldn’t keep up with the maintenance all by himself, and the plentiful plants crept away from their beds and until bushels of strawberries, sweet peas, figs, potatoes, carrots, avocados, and all the other crops covered the land.

Trees had grown up where the old cabins were burned. Where the bodies were buried. The first ones were long and thin, racing each other toward the sky in perfect verticals. As they matured and more sprung up, they developed twisting branches that formed the forest canopy and offered Adam some much needed shelter from the hot desert sun.

Most of the trees were tall and fleshy with small, green, diamond shaped leaves. The leaves were a bit rubbery and had a slight shine to them in the sunlight. Their stems were sturdy and connected securely to the branches in little clusters of four or five. The branches were all green at their ends, and rose up in crooked curves that intertwined like laced fingers.

Once the trunk or branch of a tree had reached maturity, its skin would go from smooth and yellow-green to dry and grey-white or grey-brown. 

Where the trees were attacked, split, or cracked, their wounds would heal with a rough patch of black or dark grey-brown bark. Each tree would only produce a few thick branches before old age set in and the tree’s life cycle came to an end in rot, letting new saplings spring up from underneath it. Each time a tree fell, the soil became richer and more fruits and flowers grew.

Once the last of the body’s flesh disappeared underneath the sand, Adam rested on the handle of his shovel and looked out onto the vast horizon. Perhaps one day, his forest would grow so large that there would be no desert left. Maybe one day, the trees and grass would build a path for him to reach civilization and escape his lonely life in paradise. But until then, he would plant the bodies, and embrace their flowers.