by Ellen Datlow
I jumped down and ran into the trees. I hid behind one whose trunk was ten feet thick. My hands shook.
I leaned against the tree until I stopped shaking, then peeked around it. Vernon sat on the trunk. It looked like he had never left. The weird branch was gone.
I hid behind the tree, trying to make sense happen in my head. All I could come up with was: I was alone in the forest with Something Else, and I didn’t know what it wanted.
I glanced around. I couldn’t remember what direction we had come from. Soft needle-padded trails wound away between ferns and sorrel and rhododendron bushes in lots of directions. If I hid here, would Mom ever find me? Would anyone?
Eventually, I walked back to the fallen tree. I stared into Vernon’s face. “What do you want?” I wailed.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. I will never, ever hurt you, Fiona.”
“I don’t understand any of this.”
He held out his hands to me.
I thought about his kids, how they touched me and it changed me inside somehow. They touched my hand and my mouth knew something strange had happened. Nobody back in my real life could do a thing like that.
I licked my upper lip, and put my hands in his.
No tingling. No strange tastes. His hands were warm, nothing more.
“Are you going to hurt my mother?”
“No. I love your mother.”
We stared into each other’s eyes. In the shadows under the trees, his eyes were honey-brown with green flecks.
“I’d like to show you my work,” he said. “Is that okay?”
“I don’t know. What is it? I thought you talked to people.”
“There’s more to it than that.” He slid off the tree trunk and held out his hand again. I hesitated, then took it. He led me over to a tree. He pressed my palm to the bark of the tree and said, “Feel.”
I felt rough wood against my hand, almost shaggy. I could see spiderwebs in the fissures of the bark, and ants crept over it. I smelled aftenoon-sun-on-forest.
Vernon laid his hand on mine. “Feel,” he whispered. And then—
It was like music. I dropped down into a different place, and I could feel that inside the tree, things flowed, ran, changed, water and sap, light fizzing into green, roots plunging down, flavors of the soil, sense of sun and shadow, breeze and stillness, and the years—years and years and years, one wrapped around the next, weather graven into them, rains and droughts and the fresh embrace of fog, nights and days, summers, winters, under it all Earth, above it all Sky, and the eternal giving of Sun.
Vernon lifted his hand from mine, and I collapsed down from a hard stretchy tree-self into a small, soft-outside human.
I leaned against the tree, pressed my cheek to it. Still, faintly, I could sense life flowing through it. The bark felt warm.
After a little while I straightened and studied the forest. The trees seemed different, individual and alive, ancient, somehow friends. There was this undertone. When I held my breath, I could hear threads of music all around me.
“What?” I murmured.
“People lose touch.”
I sat on the ground and dug my fingers down through the pine needles into the soft dirt. I could almost taste it with my fingertips.
Vernon dropped beside me. He dug his fingers into the soil too. His hands looked gnarled and hard and brown.
I lifted one hand and reached out to touch the back of one of his.
Bark.
He smiled at me. “People lose touch,” he said. “Especially in Silicon Valley, where they spend so much time in little windowless rooms staring at computer screens. Some people are searching for a way to get back in touch, and others can be called back. That’s my work. Give them roots, get them grounded.”
I sighed and put my hands on my knees. “What does that have to do with Mom?”
“Sometimes I touch something special. Meg is special.” He scooped up a handful of earth, held it cupped in his palm. He glanced around, picked up a little round pinecone, shook a seed out and poked it down into the earth, covered it. Then something baby and green speared up out of the dirt. Gently he joined the earth in his hand with the earth under us, without disturbing the new shoot. He frowned at it. “I can call them here,” he whispered. “Meg is my other half. She can let them go.”
He smiled, his eyes soft and distant. “I had forgotten that part of the cycle until I found her. Together, we…” He smiled again and shook his head. “Together.”
I twisted my hands inside each other. I stared at the little plant, trying to put everything together. Mom spent so much time with the dying, and Vernon spent his time bringing things to life. I touched the tip of the new green shoot. It was so soft I could barely feel it.
I couldn’t get the ends to match up. Vernon was some kind of plant person. And yet—“You found Mom on a computer.”
Vernon laughed. “I know. I help people who lose themselves inside machines, and I lost myself inside a machine and found life.” He shook his head, smiling. “Life reaches out in new ways. There are always surprises.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and gripped my ankles.
Vernon sat back, his hands shifting from bark to skin. “Meg and I can wait to live together until you’re ready. Do you want to go home?”
“Home,” I said. My room back home had one little window, and it looked out on the parking lot in back of the Safeway.
Dad was there, and Ginny, and Catrina, and my very own square piano, and my friends from school. Everything I knew was there.
I touched the tree again, sensed the life rustling under its skin.
There were trees along the streets at home, though the town I came from sat in the middle of rolling pea and lentil hills, land furred with crops and not wilderness. If I went home, would I be able to touch the street trees, sense what moved through them?
If I stayed here, and Vernon helped me touch things, what else would I learn? What different kinds of music would I hear?
But—“Tam and Holly did things to me.”
Vernons face sharpened. “What?”
I thought it through. It sounded stupid, but I said it out loud anyway. “They wrote things on my hand and made me taste strange things. Then Tam gave me a piece of candy, and it made me stupid.”
He frowned. “They shouldn’t have. I’ll talk to them, tell them to stop that. They did it because they don’t want you to leave.”
I thought of the second time Holly touched me, how she led me to the kitchen table and sat me down like I was a doll. If she kept touching me, would I do what she wanted? Would I forget what I wanted?
I leaned forward against my knees, rocked, chewed my lip. “Vernon? I don’t know what I want. Nobody at home can do that kind of stuff to me, and I didn’t like it when Tam and Holly did it. I know I want them to stop. If they don’t stop, I want to go home. But you and Mom—”
“It’s no problem for us to wait, Fee. I’ve waited a long time already, and I don’t mind waiting longer.” He rose, held out a hand, and helped me to my feet. “That’s not the issue. You have to feel safe. No one should touch you without your consent. They know that. I’ll remind them. You don’t have to decide anything until you’re sure.”
We walked back to the house amid murmuring trees. I took Vernon’s hand. He smiled at me.
The forest was full of music. I knew the direction to the house; I knew things about the forest, which trees were healthy, which felt sick; I knew how the land lay even in places I hadn’t walked.
As we approached the house, I sensed something else, a chorus of different voices. The house plants, lively and wild. I stopped.
Vernon stopped.
“I hear them.”
He cocked his head. “You opened your ears in the forest. Do you want them closed again?”
I went to the nearest window and stared at the jade plant on the other side of the glass. It sang a song of water-fat sun-bright contentment. Beyond it, a potted palm mourned
and asked for water.
The house was alive with plant conversations.
“Not yet,” I told Vernon.
We rounded the house and went in the front door. I kicked off my shoes and raced to the piano, then played the music of the trees until my fingers had it memorized. Something… something.…
With my right hand, I added a phrase about Vernon startling a seed to life. With my left hand, I played Mom’s face as she sat at Peggy’s bedside, listening to a story about Peggy’s granddaughter. The two phrases were so different from each other. At first they crashed into each other. I staggered them, a beat, two beats, three beats apart, and then something happened; they clicked together like puzzle pieces.
I played the forest. I played pea and lentil fields. I played Mom and Vernon and mysteries until I was used to the sound of them together.
I played Mom wondering how she could keep doing her job when she was sunk too deep into death. I played Vernon giving her the green, fresh energy to take back to her work. I played Mom giving Vernon shadows to go with his light.
I played a theme for me, and one for Holly, motherlorn and sister-seeking, and one for Tam, more of a question mark because I had so little sense of who he was. That part of the music clashed and didn’t work out so well, so I went back to the Vernon and Mom themes, with forest and water, treesong and sunlight, late night and the fresh silence after breathing stopped woven in.
It sounded right. I could work on the other stuff later.
I stopped. I turned. Everyone was there: Mom, Holly, Tam, and Vernon. Holly’s hands were clenched into fists, and she was breathing through her mouth. “Please,” she whispered.
“That’s it,” Tam said. “That’s—huh? What was that, Fee? It was like my heart beating. Can you teach me that?”
Mom smiled, bewildered.
Vernon stood just behind me. His eyes glowed. I turned and swung one leg over the piano bench. He leaned over and hugged me, and I hugged him back.
Nina Kiriki Hoffman has written and sold more than two hundred stories and several novels. Her works have been finalists for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Theodore Sturgeon, and Endeavour awards. The Thread that Binds the Bones won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Her fantasy novels include The Silent Strength of Stones, A Red Heart of Memories, Past the Size of Dreaming, and A Fistful of Sky. Her third short story collection, Time Travelers, Ghosts, and Other Visitors, came out in 2003, as well as her most recent novel, A Stir of Bones (Viking).
In addition to writing, Nina works at a bookstore, does production work for a national magazine, and teaches short story writing through a local community college. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with several cats, a mannequin, and many strange toys.
Author’s Note:
I have always been drawn to forests, but I must admit that they also scare me, especially after dark. My few camping experiences have been exercises in passing the night without sleeping. I also dream of a forest spirit whose motives and goals are deeper than understanding, but whose general leaning is toward the light.
While I was working on “Grounded,” my mother and I watched On Our Own Terms: Bill Moyers on Dying, a four-episode PBS series about people who are facing their deaths with courage and curiosity, strength, fear, open eyes, and acceptance; and also about the doctors, nurses, and social workers who help the dying face death. Their stories were inspiring.
There is so much mystery in the darkness, under the leaves, inside the bark, and down in the dirt.
It doesn’t always have to be scary.
Overlooking
Carol Emshwiller
If you want to hug a tree, here’s the perfect place for it. They all belong to us, and we wouldn’t bother, but we don’t mind if you do it. There’s no better ones than these to hug, stunted, weathered, half dead. They’re more used to hardships than any of us, so, good to hug them.
We’re crepuscular. And grayish, which makes us hard to see. We’re wide awake when you’re tired.
You bring dogs to sniff us out, but we outwit them. If caught, which is rare, we lie about ourselves. We pretend we’re you.
When it’s cool we wear squirrel hats and jackets. From a distance, you think we’re those wild furry people you keep talking about, but those wild people are of another sort entirely. But if you think we’re them, all the better.
In certain spots, way up here, there are more of us than of you. You come in small groups or alone. It’s us you’re looking for. Sightings? If we want you to have them, then you’ll have them.
But we watch you—follow you, here and there; set up blinds you think are piles of brush. We use your own field glasses. (You often lose them. When we come out to clean up after you, there they are. Sometimes cameras, too. We don’t use those. How would we get film developed way out here? Though sometimes we play a joke on you and take pictures of each other and then leave the camera back where one of your kind will find it, develop it, and wonder: Who are these odd people making funny faces?)
We giggle when we see you, crunch, crunching around, your big feet on dry leaves, or slipping on wet moss. We giggle when you think you’ve caught a glimpse of us. That’s not us.
Lately the woods are full of you—and tin cans and plastic water bottles, sunglasses.… There’s hardly a place to sit alone and contemplate anymore. And God forbid (your God) that we should stand, anymore, at the top of anything, silhouetted against the sky!
Don’t think we don’t have weapons. Silent ones, unlike yours. You don’t know you’re hit till you’re hit, and you never know which direction it came from. Crossbow with darts. So silent, we can shoot and miss more times than several and you don’t know you’re being shot at until you’re shot.
As to your weapons, we make sure our babies’ first words are, “DON’T SHOOT.”
I’m the mother. I don’t mean really. I mean I’m the oldest and wisest. I lead my group around at an arthritic limp and everybody calls me Maaaaaaaah. I haven’t had any other name since… I can’t remember when. If I approve of something, then that’s what happens.
When one of us gets hurt it’s me they call. They know, by now, that I know about all there is to know around here.
In order to avoid you, we have nothing to do with the highest and therefore most popular mountains. What difference does it make, high or a little bit less high?
But we’ve captured one of you.
I was sitting here reading from your manuals about us. Most of the books insist we do exist. A few say maybe. Some say we don’t. There are many of you who swear you’ve seen us and have pictures to prove it. They’re lying and the pictures are fakes. Others write about how those people are crazy. We’re like flying saucers, maybe yes, maybe no. Except it’s not exactly us they write about. It’s those others who live farther back. It’s said those others are so cold they sleep with rattlesnakes to keep them warm. We don’t believe that any more than we believe we don’t exist.
You say we’re seven feet tall and fuzzy. That’s not us.
So I was sitting here in my favorite shady spot reading when they brought one of you in. An old man almost as old as my own old man got to be. I wondered why they’d bring a grown man up home this time of year. Our women are running around as if it was mating time. All because of this poor old man. It’s the gang caught him. They’ll do anything just to be different or to shake their elders up.
I like the old man’s looks. Gray haired like us and nice and bony. Younger men are too baby-faced for my taste. I never liked that look even when I had a baby face myself. Such faces are all right for the young but softness of that sort is scary in a man when one must trust one’s life to him. Mostly it’s our men who keep you from us. They will sacrifice themselves if need be.
You can see on his face that this man can’t figure out if we’re us or his kind. I suppose we look odd. (You never look odd to us. We’ve seen you much too often.)
This man has the usual paraphernalia: camera, backpack, field glass
es, big notebook full of notes and maps. He must be here on purpose. In his backpack, food, including three little easy-open cans of apricots. I sample one right away. Since I’m the maaaaaah, I have the right.
I ask the gang, “Why have you brought this one up here among us? If you don’t know that’s got to be the end of him, you should go down with the fathers and stay there.”
“He knew.”
“He didn’t, but now he does.”
“He did, too.”
“There’s nothing to know.”
But then I see he’s hurt. His arm hangs in an odd way and he’s holding on to it.
“We didn’t do that. He had that already.”
I don’t trust those young ones. They’re at a bad age. Well, but they usually tell the truth.
“Bring him here and hold him down.”
(Up this close those young ones smell bad. It’s a sign of maturing.)
I put my foot in the man’s armpit, grab his wrist and pull and twist and pop his shoulder back in place. I bandage him so it won’t move.
If he didn’t look good to me, I wouldn’t have.… Well, yes, good looking or not I would have. Would I do less for a wounded turkey vulture than for this man? I nursed a vulture all spring. Everybody knows that.
I give this man broth. I don’t tell him what’s in it. We know you better than you know us. Best he not know. To him it’ll taste as buttery as snails.
“I’m Maaaaah,” I say.
Right after, when he says his name, I don’t listen. Why know a thing like that when… well.…
I’ve been inside your cabins lots of times—even when you were there. Sometimes, as I walked right past you, I could hardly keep from laughing out loud at how you didn’t even know I was in your shadows. I made myself peanut butter sandwiches. I drank your milk. There was one particular cabin—large for a summer house. It was all woody inside. Smelled of cedar and pine. Big woodpile outside.… (You never miss what wood we take.) Usually your cabins have chandeliers made from wagon wheels and horseshoes, but here there was a cut glass chandelier, small though; in the cabinet were teacups with gold on them, on the table, silver candlestick holders. I really did want one of those. Each held three candles and had silver leaves all up and down it. I went up to our home and thought about it for a couple of days, and then I came back down and took one. After all, there were four. After all, I’m the maaaah.
