The Green Man

by Ellen Datlow

  “In the morning I’ll go. But I want one last night to sleep here in the Greenwood.”

  “Sleep then, Charlie. And know that the Greenwood is always home to you.”

  Charlie closed his eyes and inhaled the sweet fragrance of the trees, the musty loam of damp soil and new mushrooms springing up in the gathered dew. Laying his head on the long stretch of a branch, he heard the soft murmur of the Greenwood’s heartbeat pulsing slowly through the veins of the tree. The wind gusted, swayed the branches and rocked him into a deep sleep.

  In the morning Charlie woke, feeling the heat of the sun through leaves, the gold light flaming the insides of his closed eyelids. A thrush trilled an alarm, the wings beating through the leaves.

  “Charlie, wake up!” a girl’s voice called from below.

  He rubbed the daze of sleep from his eyes and looked down. He saw the flicker of pale blonde hair.

  “Charlie, it’s me, Nina. I know you’re there, you goof. Your mom told me the whole story when I got really pissed off because she wouldn’t let me talk to you. Everyone at school thinks you’ve got mono. I’ve been playing along, bringing home your homework and even doing some of it for you. But it’s time now. Come home.”

  “Did you get your scholarship to Florida State?” Charlie asked, slowly lowering himself down through the tree branches.

  “Yes. And I accepted.”

  He could see her now, standing in the green light of the wood, murky as a pond, her arms akimbo, her head looking up at him like a mermaid at last returned to her watery element.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said, crouching in the crook of the tree.

  She smiled at him, and tossed back her blonde hair. Leaves cast a stippled shadow over her white T-shirt, cupped her breasts, and shivered over her bare thighs. She tugged the legs of her shorts down.

  “You look good for somebody living off leaves for a month,” she said. “Kinda got that nature boy thing going on. Very sexy.”

  “I said I’ll miss you,” he repeated.

  “And I’ll miss you, you goof,” she repeated. “But look, Charlie, this is our last summer together before we go away, before we become someone else, meet someone else, and grow up into something else. But right now, this summer, we can still have fun, still be free, still be who we are, not what we will be. Let’s enjoy ourselves, Charlie. We’ll hang out, lie around in the sun, and neck a lot. You’ll be my first, Charlie, and even though we go away to college and meet other people, you will be always my best and sweetest memory and you won’t be able to go to a pool without remembering me and getting turned on. These last few months, Charlie, they’re all ours, a bridge between one place and another, between our old lives and the new one we have to reach for. Come on, Charlie, come down.” A blush pinked her smooth cheeks, her eyes earnest and hopeful.

  Charlie climbed down the branches, hesitated for a moment on the blasted branch lying outstretched on the ground. Nina was waiting for him, grinning, her smooth skin slick in the soft green shadows. He glanced up into the dappled branches above and saw the slow spiral of maple seeds twirling down through the slanting light, a few at first and then a shower of seeds.

  He laughed, recognizing his sister’s silent prodding. He nimbly leapt off the branch, his feet finding the solid earth once more. He stepped with a rolling gait like a sailor back from a long sea voyage into Nina’s open arms. He felt the heat of her breasts as he embraced her tightly, breathing in the scent of chlorine and the musk of her summer sweat. She tilted back her head, her hands stroking the back of his neck and he kissed her, grateful for the taste of cinnamon. They parted, breathless, their faces moist and soft.

  Charlie took Nina’s hand and they walked together out of the Greenwood, the spinning maple seeds twirling green and gold in the falling shafts of sunlight.

  Midori Snyder has published numerous fantasy novels, including The Innamorati, winner of the 2001 Mythopoeic Award; The Flight of Michael McBride, which combined Irish folklore with the legends of the American West; and a high fantasy trilogy, New Moon, Sadar’s Keep, and Beldan’s Fire, set in the imaginary world of Oran. Her most recent novel, Hannah’s Garden (Viking), is about a young violinist and her trickster relatives, and was shortlisted for the American Library Association’s Teens’ Top Ten Award.

  Snyder lives with her husband in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; they have two children in college. When she isn’t writing or teaching English, she plays second mandolin with the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra, the oldest such orchestra in the nation.

  Author’s Note:

  The source of inspiration for my Green Man story comes from a wonderful Irish epic called “Sweeney in the Trees.” Sweeney, a soldier of great renown, is cursed with madness when he kills an unarmed priest in battle. The mad Sweeney drops his weapons and scampers like a terrified bird into the trees, where he survives, traveling over the leafy tops of Ireland’s ancient forests. Every once in a while he descends, meeting with other madmen and hermits to eat watercress and drink cold spring water, and to share their mutual tales. Though Sweeney is cursed, removed from the comforts of human society, the trees and bushes magically sustain him until slowly, he becomes a part of the forest, half wild bird and half mad poet. Sweeney’s tale, sadly, is tragic compared to Charlie’s, but I liked the idea that the Greenwood was a fertile, imaginative place where one could temporarily escape life’s burdens and be changed. I wanted Charlie to have such a moment, free from grief, to skim the tops of the trees like Sweeney, and to experience in that newfound “lightness” the possibilities for his future that he had denied.

  A World Painted By Birds

  Katherine Vaz

  One morning A man danced in a public fountain. He was happy. He and his wife were about to have their first child. The man splashed water on some soldiers, even though they ordered him to stop.

  That night, he vanished from Rio Seco and was never seen again.

  His wife knew that if she screamed, she might also join the Disappeared People. She swallowed her shrieks, and they knifed their way into the baby she carried inside her.

  At his birth, her son gave off the loudest cries of anyone ever born.

  His name was Hugo Costa. When his mother hugged him, she felt the sorrow rippling below his skin. His red hair made her think, His brain is on fire. She painted a portrait of her missing husband, curled up next to it, and died of heartbreak.

  Hugo was taken in by a Musician who taught him to play the violin. People always sighed at its music and said, “That is so sad but so beautiful!” When he turned eighteen, he stood outside the mansion of the General and played “Ode to Joy,” which was against the law.

  He played for the people who painted their houses purple and yellow—they disappeared in the night.

  The Musician who raised Hugo came out to stop him—but then he stepped back to admire Hugo’s courage.

  His notes soared in honor of those who wrote poems of protest against the General—they, too, joined the Disappeared People.

  His tears flowed for the Gardener of Rio Seco, who had disobeyed the law by planting flowers. (Plants like to climb walls, and they stick out their tongues and hold up their scarlet skirts.) The rumor was that he had escaped to the forest before they could drag him to the detention camp on the other side. It was a prison where people were put if the General did not like them.

  Lucia del Mar went to her balcony. She had never heard music so explosive. Bright colors were not allowed, but the hair of the violinist was the shade of a blood-red rose, and the sunset brushed him in gold. She wept. Long ago her parents had disappeared for kissing in public, and she had been put in the General’s house, thanks to her talent for creating lace. (A forbidden activity, since lace is very lovely, but the General’s Wife had a weakness for it.) Her green eyes wept out a green river that cascaded from the balcony.

  The green river of her eyes ran to him, to pool around his feet.

  His blue eyes were pouring out a blue stream. It ran into the green
river from her eyes. That was how Hugo and Lucia first touched each other across the distance, and they smiled to see that they had painted the blue and the green of themselves in great, wet strips across the dull landscape.

  Hugo gazed at her. Now he would be banished or killed, instead of having the chance to love her. But he knew this: While the ants danced on his skeleton, they would be like tiny black notes playing a xylophone of bones, and the music he would sound out from the dead would be: Joy! Joy! Joy!

  Word reached Lucia that the General had decided to forgive Hugo if he became his personal musician and learned military marches (which are terribly wrong for a violin). Hugo was locked into a house on the General’s estate. When the Musician who raised Hugo came to protest, he was driven away.

  Hugo’s music echoed inside Lucia, who had nerves like a violin’s strings—thin and trembling. The shine on her long, black hair was like the shimmer that stays on a pearl, even when it is snatched from its home in the sea. Her feet were large, and she had a habit of whistling badly, but these things made her worthy of being loved. A goddess might be adored for a moment, but only a real person can speak forever to the rest of us.

  “I am in love,” Lucia said aloud. Her words were carried to him—a Valentine stitched into the air. When she awakened, she said, “Hugo.” Already just saying his name was the same as proclaiming her love.

  She strained to hear his music entertaining the General. How brave Hugo was—and she would be brave, too. She started making lace pieces, big as curtains, that told stories, dangerous ones. Her mother, who had been a fine lace-maker in the days before beauty was outlawed, said to her once, “Listen, Lucia. The delicacy of what we do is what makes us strong.”

  Lucia got out the lace-making bobbin that had belonged to her mother. It was a stick with a hollow carved in it, like a cut-out window. Inside was a toy-sized bobbin, painted to look like a slender girl. This type of lace bobbin with a treasure tucked inside a hollow is called a “mother and babe.” Thread was wound around the stick so that it could be easily used. Lucia’s mother had said, “Remember that I am always with you: We are mother and babe.”

  Lucia let her green tears splash onto a lace picture of two people kissing.

  She stitched a scene of the Gardener who had escaped to the forest.

  She showed Hugo’s father splashing in a fountain.

  Spinning out lace goods as fast as a spider, Lucia wove herself into her work. The love inside her leaked into the thread. Suddenly Rio Seco got inflamed. Anyone who touched Lucia’s lace touched the wild heart of her and caught her fever.

  A woman wearing a lace collar made by Lucia del Mar began dancing in public! She narrowly escaped arrest.

  The man who raised Hugo coughed into a lace handkerchief and burst into song.

  A child who received some lace angels asked, “Mama, can’t we plant sunflowers?” until his frightened mother hushed him.

  Now we all know that when a girl falls in love, everyone rushes in to tell her that she’s wrong, wrong, wrong, she doesn’t know anything about love. These people come out of the woodwork! Their big faces are so eager!

  The Cook in the General’s house said to Lucia, “Love means that the other person does things for you. Does he bring you soup?”

  “He sends his music to me,” said Lucia.

  Hugo’s music was filled with sorrow for the people in the detention camp, and the notes he played every night were carried to anyone who would listen. He created a picture of the suffering people. Lucia sat very still so that she could hear the music filled with all that sadness, and it made her want to take it out of the air and show it to everyone. When she finished a lace picture of people screaming in the camp, she threw it onto the back of a horse galloping toward the public square.

  The General’s Wife burst into Lucia’s room and shouted, “You’ve gone too far!”

  Lucia controlled her trembling. She looked calmly at the General’s Wife, who was sharp-featured, the way most liars are. It is impossible to tell a lie and not have it take a slice from the skin, sharpening the nose, tightening the mouth. Each time the General’s Wife drank whiskey in secret, she added a brush of varnish, death-colored, to the backs of her eyes.

  Whenever the General’s Wife stole kisses with the Colonel, it put faint lines on her skin. Instead of telling the General to stop sending people to the other side of the forest, she was content to live in his nice house. Instead of telling the General that she loved the Colonel, she waited to see what one or the other of them could give her.

  “I’ll miss you after they drag you away,” said the General’s Wife, unable to look Lucia in the eye. “I’m sorry but—what are you doing?”

  Lucia was spinning a lace daisy, soaked with her frantic love for Hugo.

  Seeing the lace flower, the General’s Wife felt her love blossom for the Colonel, for Lucia, for love that tires of hiding.

  “They plan to come for you at ten o’clock,” said the General’s Wife abruptly. “Every night at nine, the soldiers lock the door to Hugo’s house. When they leave, I’ll go myself and unlock it.”

  “I won’t forget your kindness,” said Lucia. She tried to peer into the eyes of the General’s Wife, but they were flat, whiskey-colored.

  Lucia ran under cover of night to Hugo’s house, bringing only her mother’s bobbin and a supply of thread. Her hand dripped with sweat as she tried the latch. She threw open the door, and Hugo put down the plate he was washing. His red hair and blue eyes made him seem like all of fire and all of sky. He put his violin into its case, and he took her hand. The moon shut out its light to let them escape to the forest at the border of Rio Seco.

  Entering the world of the thick firs was like being in a sound chamber made of plants. There were two silences, stacked one on top of the other. The dome overhead was green-black. Fireflies arrived like fairy-sized lanterns to flicker over Hugo and Lucia. Hidden animals hummed a serenade. She rested her head against his chest, the music of his heartbeat spooling around her mind. He whispered, “Think of me at six-thirty every morning. That’s when the two hands on the clock are joined as one.”

  “Think of me at six-thirty every morning,” she replied. “That’s when night and day are joined as one.” They fell into an embrace until morning, six-thirty, when they leaned their heads together to think of everything joined as one. The bodies of the fireflies, going off and on, seemed to go light, then lighter—until they were merged with the light of dawn.

  Lucia found a stream and exclaimed, “Hugo! Look!”

  Fish scales were sewn to leaves, to make mirrors in the trees.

  Moss was sewn onto bees to make buzzing, floating islands.

  “It’s true, then, what I heard,” said Hugo. Vultures had reported to the General that the Gardener was trying to create a new world. He was grafting strange forces together, and he was threading vines under the forest. When he figured out how to make a parachute, he would harness it to the vines, and his own small country would sail away from the earth. Lucia whispered, “I’ll make a lace parachute. Let’s find this Grafter, this Gardener.”

  Lucia walked quickly; Hugo walked slowly. Lucia with her worries; Hugo with his calmness. Lucia with her bad whistling; Hugo correcting her tunes until she shouted, “Stop!” They were getting to know each other.

  Why are habits endearing when first glimpsed, but irritating in such a short while? What if you make each moment with someone feel like your first? (They are always first moments, since no moment is ever the same as the next.)

  Hugo and Lucia sat down and laughed. Their pounding hearts gave them their reminder to love each other: Doesn’t the heart perform the same task over and over, stubbornly repeating itself, washing blood in its chambers minute by minute, without end? Isn’t it wonderful?

  Mushrooms were sprouting. When Hugo pulled one from the earth, the stem grew longer, and what looked like a gray stone emerged and turned into—an elephant!

  “Thanks,” said the elephan
t, sitting elegantly on a rock, brushing dirt off the wrinkles in her hide. “The Grafter attached us to mushrooms to hold us up. Our trunks water down the fire at the center of the earth. It’s quite hot.”

  Lucia pulled a mushroom—and pulled—and out burst another elephant, its trunk gushing. “Whew,” he said. “It’s hell down there.”

  Hugo played “The Baby Elephant Walk” on his violin, and the animals danced, trampling grass and orchids. They trumpeted and shot water out of their trunks. Lucia grabbed the paws of a fox to waltz under the spray.

  “Such a lovely red coat you have!” said Lucia.

  “You should see the birds near the Grafter,” said the fox.

  “Hang on!” bellowed an elephant, lifting them onto his back. He grasped a vine to use as a tow-rope, and they flew as if they were skiing.

  When they reached a glen, they stopped and blinked hard.

  Birds that they had seen in forbidden books—parrots, parakeets, toucans, macaws—drifted and left ribbons of blazing colors in the sky. The Grafter had figured out a way to turn birds into paintbrushes! Wherever they flew, their feathers stroked crimson, cobalt, primavera green, violet, and mandarin orange in great washes that hung a bit, then melted into the sky, leaving it tinted before the colors faded—and then came other birds sweeping across, leaving new banners in the air, perhaps of lemon and saffron and topaz and every grade of yellow, to hang for a moment like colored smoke. Hugo pointed with excitement: The trees caught bits of the colored banners that floated off the flight of the birds, and they hung like bright rags from the branches. Filling the streams were fish with lavender heads and spotted tails. Lucia gasped to see them leap from the water and pop their scales off their bodies, and squirrels, wolves, and deer fit the scales over their eyes to use as goggles so that they could swim. The Grafter had planted the wolves’ howl into the fish, so that a salmon swiped a pink rainbow band over the water while it jumped out to bay at the moon. A parakeet’s song was married to a tree, which trilled, “Oh, how high can I go?”