by Ellen Datlow
“Don’t you ever both love each other at the same time?”
Blank stare from Janelle.
It was worse than not speaking the same language. At least with languages there’s a chance you’ll have a word for the concept.
I told her I was tired. Actually I was kind of sick to my stomach. She suddenly remembered to talk as if I was dying. And brain damaged. “You take care of yourself, hon. Okay?” Then she left.
That was when I had my big revelation. I didn’t want to be just like Janelle anymore. I couldn’t be. I wasn’t built with the right parts or something. I guess I’d hoped that, if I stuck with her, she’d want to be more like me. But what was there about me that screamed “role model?”
Being like Janelle wouldn’t save me from my life. And being like me wouldn’t save Janelle. The people from the Titanic might have found some floating debris to hang onto, but they were still in the middle of the North Atlantic.
I said it was a revelation. I didn’t say it made me insanely happy.
After dinner (frozen pizza—I’m the cook, after all), Mom came to my bedroom door and said, “There’s a girl who says she’s in your English class and has your homework assignment.” She was half-frowning—not angry, just trying to figure out how she felt about this. “Alice somebody?”
Oh, god. Alice New Girl, witness to my shame, calling to find out if I had committed seppuku like a smart person. Well, I had to face the world eventually. Make like a rock, I told myself. “Sure. Where’s the phone?”
“She’s not on the phone,” said Mom. “She’s here.”
I had only seconds to get my ducks in a row. All I could do was tug the sheet up straight and make my face blank. In that last moment I saw my bedroom as others see it: the matching furniture bought during my ten-minute girlie phase in fifth grade, now with the white laminate chipped off the corners. The dark blue mini-blinds with the puffy valance (Wal-Mart!) that grotesquely needed dusting. Clothes tossed everywhere. Invalid crap on the nightstand.
Alice came in. She wore black capri pants and a red bowling shirt with “Stan” embroidered over the pocket, and had the giant purse over her shoulder. Her face was world-class blank. “Hi,” she said.
My mom took that as some kind of signal, because she left. Alice instantly closed the door and plopped down on the floor beside the bed. “Oh, jeez, Tab, you look awful! I’m so sorry. I tried to follow you at the rave, but I lost you in the dancers. Then I went back and tried to get that idiot guy to help me find you, but he was so full of Happy-Shiny he couldn’t find his own head. How do you feel?”
Like I’m in the path of Hurricane Alice, I wanted to say. “Okay, considering.”
“Considering that you could still be out there, bleaching like a cow skull?”
“With the ravens picking out my eyes,” I said, just to see if she’d be grossed out.
“And the kangaroo rats stealing away your hair to make their nests,” she said gleefully.
I tried not to grin. “The search party would never find me, but I’d be all around them.”
“Part of the desert forever!” Alice finished. “It sounds like a song.”
“Or an Outer Limits episode. You brought my English homework?”
She made a spitting noise. “That was just an excuse. I’m grounded. Nothing else would have got me past the parental units, short of climbing out a window.” She looked at the wall over my head. “Where’s that?”
When I did my frantic life-flashes-before-my-eyes view of the bedroom, I’d forgotten the tree picture over the bed. It’s a blown-up color photo I got at a church rummage sale, nothing fine art about it. In the picture, a path climbs a hill in the foreground, around these big oak trees and a couple of good-sized rocks, then curves out of sight.
When I first saw it, I had this hunger to get into the picture, to follow that path. I can still stare into it and imagine walking around those rocks, into the shade of the trees, and seeing what’s on the other side of the hill.
“I don’t know where it is.” Then I amazed myself, because my mouth opened again, and out came, “It’s a picture about possibilities. About wanting. The path always goes out of sight.” I didn’t just figure that out, but I hadn’t planned to tell anyone. Now to see what Alice would do to my exposed throat.…
Alice looked very serious and intense. “What do you want when you look at it?” she asked.
I didn’t feel like I could lie. I’d started this, after all. And the tree picture is one of the few things I’d grab if the house caught fire. I shrugged (which reminded me about the sunburn). “I don’t know. I just want.”
A big grin spread across her face. “Yes! Just like ‘Malibu’!”
“What?”
“Hole! Courtney Love! On Celebrity Skin…. You haven’t heard it?”
She grabbed up the giant purse and pulled out a portable CD player. At first I thought there were morning glories glued all over it. Then I saw some of them were scuffed, and I realized they were painted on. Amazing.
Alice handed me the headphones. “‘Malibu’ makes me feel the same way. Like there’s a road in front of me, and I have to find a way to get on it and see where it goes, or I’ll go nuts.” She looked up to make sure I had the phones on and pushed PLAY.
Wistful, jangly, beautiful guitars in my ears, and a girl singing, talking right to me. I mean, spooky to me—the voice wanted to know how I’d gotten so screwed up, and how I’d held it together in spite of it. And then it said, Hey, meet me halfway, chica, and the two of us can maybe save your stupid life, okay?
Even with the sunburn, I got goosebumps.
When the chorus started, Alice sang along, as if she knew without listening exactly how long the first verse was. Then she grabbed the phones off my ears.
“Hey!” I said.
“I can’t not listen to it. We need a boom box.”
I pointed to my desk. She jumped up, found mine (under a pair of jeans), and put the disk in. The song started over, and Alice bumped the volume up.
“Play it again,” I said when it stopped.
After a couple more plays, we were singing along with Courtney as loud as we could. About a place where the ocean would wash away all the bullshit. A place to live, not just survive.
“Have you ever been?” Alice asked.
“What, to Malibu?” I laughed. “No chance.”
“But it’s only three hours away! Well, L.A. is. When my dad told me we were coming to California, I went nuts. But it seems like nobody here has ever been to L.A….” Alice grabbed her spiky hair and pulled it. “Three hours away there are great bands and dance clubs and juice bars and history and art and the ocean, and we’re missing it! There are surfers and pelicans and movie stars!”
“All in the same place?” I asked, trying not to laugh.
“Yes! And you and I have got to go.”
It wasn’t like with Janelle, when I knew I was trying to fit my sticking-out pieces into the empty spot in the puzzle. It was as if I’d had a dream every night that I couldn’t remember, and Alice had remembered it for me.
I know where that path in the picture comes out. On the other side of that hill is Malibu.
Mom must have heard us singing and shrieking, because she came in and said I had to rest.
“I’ll bring your homework tomorrow.” Alice winked.
“Don’t forget your CD.” I really didn’t want to remind her.
“You can borrow it,” she said.
Mom came back after she shooed Alice out. I asked, “Have you ever been to the ocean?”
She stared at me for a second. “No.”
“Alice and I are going.”
“Oh? When’s that happening?”
“I don’t know yet. But we will.”
She gave me such a funny look, as if I’d surprised her, as if she felt sorry for me. Or for her. But she just said, “Drink your Gatorade.”
I’ve listened to the whole album about a dozen times already.
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br /> Today I told Alice what happened when I was in the desert. She’s the only person I’ve told. It was like having to be honest about how I felt about the tree picture: either I wasn’t going to say anything about what happened after I ran off, or I had to tell her the whole thing.
I was afraid she would be different when I came back to school. I had visions of her being tight with Piper, pretending I’d become See-Through Girl. I know all about survival tactics, after all.
And, okay, I was afraid of the way I’d be—that I’d go back to sticking with Janelle and our posse. Because I do know about survival. I didn’t know if I could resist that yummy, cozy, supposed-to-be hiding place.
But it was as if Alice and I were wired up like Secret Service guys. We could watch the crowd for snipers while we had each other’s backs. I’ve started raising my hand in class. I just laughed and walked away when Amber called me “Gross Peeling Thing.” I’m not alone, like the tree behind Little Mike’s garage. I’m a forest, like the trees in the park.
The park is why I had to tell Alice. “Let’s go out there this Saturday,” she said today after sixth period.
“Why?” The bottom fell out of my stomach.
“Joshua Tree is a big deal. I read about it. It’s this amazing ecosystem that doesn’t exist anywhere else. And so far I’ve only seen it in the dark.”
“It’s the desert. There, I saved you so much time.”
“Tab!” Then she looked at me with her eyes squinched up. “Is this anything I should know about?”
Even when I was behaving like a psych case, she didn’t insist I tell her my deepest, darkest secrets. So of course I had to.
I told her about the creature in the desert, about waking up on the other side of the park, and the doctor saying I was lying.
Alice didn’t say anything right away. I got scared. “It was probably heatstroke,” I added, and heard the flatness in my voice.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
That scared me even more. “Why not? It was heatstroke, LSD, or I’m insane! What do you mean, ‘I don’t think so?’”
“Remember your lips?”
I was about to yell at her, but she looked so serious.
“Lips dry out worse than any other part of your face, because they don’t have any oil glands,” she went on. “When I came to see you right after it happened, you looked like you’d just come off a barbecue grill. But your lips didn’t. They weren’t even dry.”
I think every hair on my body stood straight up. “When I drank out of its palm—”
“You put your mouth in the water.”
This Saturday we’re spending the day in the park. We’re going to bike in, and pack a lunch and huge amounts of water. Alice has a guide to the birds and animals and plants, and the plan is to see how many we can check off.
It’s funny, but I’m not worried about seeing the Joshua tree thing again. I think if something like that happens to you, you get one shot. You can do what you want with it, but that taste of live magic is one per customer.
Now that I’m not trying to be who I’m supposed to, I’ve started to wonder about the rest of the world. Is everybody wearing a disguise with the zipper stuck? Are all the supposed-to-bes big fat lies? If so, how about the desert? I know what it’s supposed to be: no water, no life, everything poisonous, pointy, or otherwise out to get you.
I was supposed to be a loser. Maybe the desert and I have something in common.
Can’t wait to talk this over with Alice.
Emma bull’s first novel, War for the Oaks, a contemporary fantasy about a rock musician who finds herself drafted into a civil war between the high courts of Faery, is a cult favorite among fans of urban fantasy. Her third novel, Bone Dance, was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and was the second place Philip K. Dick Award novel. Her Bordertown novel, Finder, was reprinted for young adults in the summer of 2003.
By the time you read this, she’ll have finished Territory, a historical fantasy set in Tombstone, Arizona, in which magic affects the events surrounding the O.K. Corral gunfight.
Her most recent band, the Flash Girls, released their third album, Play Each Morning, Wild Queen on Fabulous Records.
Her Web site is www.qwertyranch.com [URL inactive], where you’ll also find stuff about her husband, Will Shetterly, and maybe even a picture of their cat.
Author’s Note:
When Terri and Ellen invited me to write a Green Man story, I thought I’d do something with the desert. After all, everybody loves the rain forest, but the desert still doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Having decided that, my brain pretty much filed the subject in the “dealt with” folder. I forgot all about it.
A month or two later, I was in my favorite coffee house when a stranger complimented me on my T-shirt. It was my Green Man Press shirt, from the company Charles Vess runs, with a beautiful big Green Man face silk-screened on the back. The stranger and I started talking about Green Man myths, and this great book on the subject he’d just found, Green Man, by William Anderson and Clive Hicks. A couple of days later, back at the coffee house, he lent me the book, and XTC’s Apple Venus One CD, with their “Greenman” song on it.
When I got home, I found an e-mail from Terri and Ellen reminding me about the anthology. All right, all right, I said to the universe. I get the message. I’ll write a story.
Tab started dictating her autobiography to me pretty much right away. Well, it seemed like she was dictating it. Sometimes characters pop into my head so clearly that I feel guilty taking credit for making them up. I got so involved in Tab’s story that I found out more of it than I could use here. So eventually this may be the beginning of a novel.
The Green Man is a symbol of rebirth in nature, and, from carvings in the churches of Europe, the rebith of the soul. Through Tab’s story, I realized that he can also be part of the rebirth of the self. Like forests and grasslands, people can suffer fire and drought. They forget why they’re here, what they really love, what’s important to them. The Green Man says that everything regrows, that it’s never too late to figure out who you are and why, and do something about it.
Ali Anugne O Chash (The Boy Who Was)
Carolyn Dunn
Two boys were hunting. One was of the Deer Clan, who make songs of light and send them stars. The other was of the clan related to the Hawk, the messengers, the ones who stay silent and speak only when the world must be spoken to.
They had been hunting a long time, singing the charm songs they had been taught, the songs to hunt for or to woo a deer. They had seen the antlers hiding in shadow, hiding in sunlight, along the oily leaves and sweet-scented magnolia, along the light pathways in darkness of the fireflies and hidden in soft wood, water, damp bark. They heard the deer sing, and could have sworn it was the voice of a woman.
The darkness is kind; it does not say the words the light must always repeat. Stories told in darkness are always safer than ones told in light. Spirits cannot always see so good in the dark, but in the light everything is up for grabs. Inside of the house of The Boy Who Was they tell a story about a woman who went to the water, came home, and was never the same again. I will never be the same again. My words bleed their lies, and I will always be one with the water, kin to the darkness, calling the stone river home, deep within those recesses of memory that I can never shake.
His touch at first was cool, damp. I remember him before he went there to the water, before he had left Wolf Town and went in. He would look at me from the secret place behind his eyes when he thought I was not looking. A flash of darkness under a daylight sky, a look that would hold me well within him, and I would sigh, smile in that way that he knew he had won.
Ali Anugne O Chash, the one who would become The Boy Who Was, they say was the tallest of the tall, the bravest, the most handsome, and I thought so too. My sisters and cousins would speak his name in hushed tones, turn their faces to the ground when he would walk by, turn their
heads and pretend to not see him. Not I. I was bold, they said, because my mother had strong charms and sang protection over me. Because she had dreamed I would be taken by the Long Hairs but she had kept me from their claws. This made me bold. Made me look people in the eye. Made me laugh and smile when the Peace Chief spoke, her eyes arrows my way. Gave me the backbone to look into the eyes of the tallest, most handsome, strongest warrior of the Deer Clan, with my club foot and bent leg.
And he had chosen me, Iyi Tanakbi, a girl of modest means, not the wealthiest of the clans or the most beautiful, but my hair did shine and my eyes were dark, ringed with silver, like the moon’s shadow, in spite of my club foot, my slow walk, my small leg. Hidden in the small shadows and dappled light among the shade trees, I would watch the young men in the circle of men smoking their pipes, fathers standing over them as they stripped the oak of its bark to smooth, damp and clawed surfaces, make the sticks that would bring them fortune, call in the deer, gamble for love, for money, for women. And I, Iyi Tanakbi, would be his downfall.
The two men, barely out of their youth, turned to one another, and began to sing their hunting songs louder. Surely, this was no male deer, but with antlers? They had become separated from the rest of the hunting party and knew they would be lost at once if they did not perform the ceremony for hunting the deer. One reached for the dark earth and put it to his face, singing a charm song all the way. Brother deer, he sang, sister fawn, blood of my blood, there is nothing to fear from me. Let my arrows be strong, may they find your heart. Do not fear.
The other, with steady hands, made fire.
What becomes of his man-name does not matter, the memory of who he was, the nights dreaming of the warmth of his touch cannot say what he was to me, and I can no longer see that part of him. The name he had then is dead to me, and in its place, in his place, is the touch of the cool, damp clawed bark, smooth laden skin and touch of ice that he has become. I no longer speak this name, and it is not the name with which I speak to him now. Ali Anugne O Chash, they whisper behind their hands. The Boy Who Was.
