Green Heart

by Alice Hoffman

  I wish I could find the answer to my own question. One small bit of truth. I want to know what love is worth. If you can weigh and measure it as my mother once weighed out tomatoes and measured out green beans. I want to know if Diamond is measuring the days since we were last together, or if they mean nothing to him and I alone am counting each hour we’re apart.

  At night, when I hear my garden growing, I sometimes think I hear something more. I think it’s the boy I love, coming back to me. I hear him say my name, even though he was made mute in the fire and I have never heard his voice. In my dreams I hear him say I’m here with you. He tells me not to doubt him, or myself, or what we had. But in the mornings, when I wake, I’m alone. The windows of my cottage are covered with vines. I have to pick away the roses one by one.

  I have to bleed once more.

  There are things in our world that are forever changed, and that is true of me as well. I am still Green, but soon I will turn seventeen, and eighteen is not far off after that. I can’t go back to being the girl I once was, any more than the city I loved can rise whole from the ashes. The world is a different, sadder place. The star magnolia trees have blooms again, but the flowers have come back as sharp as glass; they’ll prick your fingers if you dare to pick them. The moths that were once white are now black as coal; white moths only exist as a memory. The deer have turned the color of ashes. The doves that were blinded by the flames have fledglings that are sightless from the day they are born, as if their parents’ trauma has been bred into their bones.

  In town there are rumors that some of us have also been altered in deep, strange ways. The Enchanted — those said to be witches — are those who stood outside for too long while the cinders rained down, or looked at the sun as it gleamed, or drank from the river when it was thick with toxins. People believe in black magic even when there is none. They assume that whatever is different is dangerous — a snake on the road, a toad in the well. They think that my dear neighbor is one of the Enchanted because she lives alone and seeks no one’s counsel or love. Aurora and I used to call her a witch and throw apples at her door, but she’s just very old, and wiser than most.

  There are those who swear that the stones in my neighbor’s field can speak and tell the future. They say she is one of the Enchanted, along with a woman who can fly when the moon is full, another who can change her looks the way a chameleon might — beautiful one day, terrifying the next — and yet another who can swim beneath the water, with gills on her neck like a fish.

  Of the fifth, they say only that she is a true believer, although in what or in whom, no one seems sure.

  There is truth in the notion that we need magic these days.

  Certainly we need protection. The people who destroyed the city travel along the river under cover of night, trying to undermine whatever any village may try to repair. We hear explosions while we are asleep in our beds. Our enemies like the way our world is now, without the things they call the inventions of doom. On the darkest nights, their soldiers kidnap women who wander off to look for night-flowering quince. They drag away any man who dares to disagree with their way of life, depositing him in a prison from which, it is whispered, no one ever escapes.

  These soldiers do not look evil when you come upon them, riding their beautiful black horses. They have open, handsome faces. They will offer you food, advice, their side of the story. Some of our own people have joined with them, including my schoolmates who had formed the Forgetting Society at a shack in the woods, all of them orphans, all of them lost. My old schoolmates tried to erase their pain with drugs and drink. When they discovered that wasn’t possible, despair overcame them. Some ran away or drowned themselves. Some vanished, as my friend Heather had, though I had tried to convince her that even if she was an orphan, she still belonged. A few young people from our village joined the Horde in exchange for a meal, yearning for something to believe in, desperate enough to accept the Horde’s philosophy of destruction. They were willing to adhere to one of the Horde’s strictest rules.

  Should they ever happen upon a book, they were to tear up the pages, soak them with precious kerosene, and let them burn.

  In town, our people lock their doors when dusk falls. They board up their windows, blow out the candles. After they say their prayers, they go to sleep with knives beneath their pillows. They never step outside to see the white sliver of the moon in the sky. They haven’t noticed that the ash, which obscured the night skies for so long, has drifted away and that we can once again see the stars.

  I still work in my garden at night. My mother taught me the best time to harvest is when the moon is in the center of the sky. The best time to plant is when it wanes. I have Onion to protect me. He would bark to alert me if anyone tried to climb the fence that surrounds my garden. The wooden pickets are adorned with glass bottles that sing when the wind blows through. The glass would shatter if anyone dared to sneak in. Not that anyone would. I am far away in the woods. I’m just Green, who can make any garden grow. Green, who writes stories. Green, who has managed to go on alone.

  I’ve never minded the dark. I can disappear into it, with my green-tattooed skin, my long black hair. I disappear into my stories the very same way. I lose myself inside the ink. I have written about the way the light fell across my mother’s face as she told me good-bye, the song my father whistled, the last time Aurora waved to me on that bright morning.

  I’m afraid that soon enough there won’t be anything more to tell.

  There is only one story I want to get to the end of now.

  Will he come back to me?

  Will I want him if he does?

  Today I have my ink and the pen I fashioned from a sharpened hawk feather. I set off with Onion. I have decided to go looking for the Enchanted — if they exist. I want more than just the stories that come to my kitchen, or the ones that follow me down the streets of my town. I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren’t easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all.

  I wear my long green dress for the journey. My feet are bare. I have paper that I specially invented for my neighbor, the one they call a witch. It’s made of nettles and shards of rocks. Her paper is heavy. It shimmers like starlight.

  Onion runs ahead through the woods. We come upon the three stacks of stones I made to remember and honor my family. A memorial to those I loved and love still. White and silver and black. Moonstones and sunstones and midnight-black stones.

  I stop and say what I think is a prayer. I ask for a blessing. I ask to always remember. Then I try to catch up to Onion.

  We reach the field of rocks between the woods and my neighbor’s house. These are the stones people say can tell a person’s future. Although I am no longer caught in the past, the future seems like a ridiculous thing to me. Try to catch it, hold it in your hand. It disappears every time.

  I go to knock on my neighbor’s door. We have watched over each other in every way we can ever since the city burned down. I deliver food from my garden, and she’s brought me closer to understanding the person that I’ve become. If that’s the trick of a witch, then perhaps she is one after all. She was the only person who could help me to see that despite all my loss, I was still myself, still Green at the core.

  Are you sure you want to come in? she says, as if there might be something dangerous inside. It’s funny, really. I’ve been here to visit a hundred times. I have spent many Sundays in her parlor. I’ve washed her windows, brought baskets of yellow and red tomatoes, eaten a birthday cake she baked just for me.

  Of course. I laugh. I want to write down your story.

  Once you write it, you’ll know it, she warns me.

  I come inside and sit at her table. I write down everything she tells me. How she had been a beautiful young girl whose true love went to war, how she closed down her heart when he never returned. She had watched the world from her window, going no farther than her own stony field. Then one day she woke up
and she was old. She had thrown her life away with her mourning. She hadn’t known how to go on. She confided that on the burning day, she’d stood unprotected in the firestorm and let the cinders rain down on her. She thought the world was ending and she was ready to have her life be over as well. But it didn’t end, and now she can see the future in the rocks in her field. I laugh because I don’t believe her.

  My neighbor laughs right back. You think a stone can’t save you?

  A year ago, stones had fallen when marauders from the Forgetting Shack tried to take everything in my garden. Someone had come to my rescue, scaring the thieves away. I knew it was my neighbor who had saved me then. But I’d never known why. Now she tells me that she saw herself in me.

  She saw past my tattoos to the grief I was trying to cover with ink. She didn’t want me to waste my life the way she had wasted so much of hers.

  Perhaps she’ll help me once more.

  I follow her into the field. My sister and I often came here to gather apples. Now there is only brown grass and rocks. After a time, I lean down and pick up a stone. It’s green. It seems like mine.

  Tell me my future, I say, not thinking she can.

  What you are able to dream you are able to grow, she says to me. If you don’t believe in it, it can never happen.

  She tells me to look, insisting my future is within the stone. When I look carefully, I see a leaf inside the rock.

  Nothing grows in stone, I say to my neighbor. It’s impossible.

  Just watch, she insists.

  We sit there for a long time, until at last the moon rises. Every stone in the field becomes a tree. Every tree is growing taller. I fall asleep because I’m certain I must already be dreaming. But in the morning, when I open my eyes, I’m surrounded by a forest.

  In one hand I hold the stone with a leaf inside. In the other there is a leaf with a stone weighing it down.

  I take them with me when I go.

  Ever since that visit I walk along the river. I think about the way things change, about leaves and stones, about the future. I can’t stop myself from wondering about these matters even though I know it’s a foolish thing to do. I had taught myself to live in the moment, go day by day, forget about wanting more for myself. But my neighbor had made me wonder what might happen next.

  Perhaps that is a kind of witchery, a spell she has cast.

  One day as I walk along, I hear something in the distance. I kneel and listen to the earth. Something is brewing. It sounds like a windstorm underground, a change that is to come.

  Onion darts off into the woods. I follow, calling. He stops by a cliff of craggy rock. I kneel and listen to the ground again. What I hear now is an echo, like my garden growing, but noisier. It’s the sound of machines, something I haven’t heard all this past year.

  I tie Onion to a tree, tell him to hush, then creep toward the cliff. There is a cave right in front of me. If a bear is inside, so be it. If a monster is there, there’s nothing I can do. I’ll never know if I don’t go to see.

  I keep on. It should be dark inside, but it’s bright, as if a thousand candles are burning. There are pieces of metal scattered around: cogs, wheels, nails, wires. Generators and lanterns glow. I realize only one person could have managed all this. I have entered the workshop of the Finder. I feel awed that someone has gathered together so much of our past. His back is to me as he works, but when he hears me he turns, an arrow in a bow aimed at my heart.

  Despite the threat, I laugh when I see him. He’s only a boy. Thirteen at most. He looks familiar. He’s probably someone who was several grades behind me in school. A boy to whom I never paid much attention. Someone my sister might have known.

  No one is allowed here, he tells me.

  For someone so young, he’s very sure of himself. The king of the junkyard, of all that was lost.

  I recognize him then. He’d been a nervous boy, a prize student, too shy to speak in front of anyone. His sister had done all his talking for him, as mine had once done for me.

  His sister was Heather Jones. The girl I’d tried and failed to save.

  I know you, I say. You’re Troy Jones.

  He still has the arrow pointed at me. But he seems hesitant once I call him by name. Still, a boy playing with a dangerous toy can be dangerous himself.

  I knew your sister, I say. Heather was my friend.

  Now that he realizes who I am, he puts down the bow. I’ve heard about you. You’re the one who writes stories. I made something for you. I thought you might come by someday. You look for stories the way I look for machine parts.

  He’s rebuilt a typewriter for me. It’s made of mismatched pieces, with clackety old keys and leather straps I can use to carry it like a backpack. It is the best gift anyone has ever given me.

  Why would you do this? I want to know.

  There’s something I can’t find, Troy Jones admits. Something I need from you.

  Impossible. I’ve heard you can find anything.

  He shakes his head sadly. I can’t find Heather.

  He had only one sister, as had I. He’s an orphan now, too.

  I sit him down and tell him his sister has disappeared. When I’d gone to look for her, all that had remained were a few scraps of a blue dress near a fire pit. I’d given her the dress; it had belonged to my mother and it had been beautiful. I tell Troy that Heather is gone and there is no sense in searching for her.

  Troy insists I’m wrong. He has a camera, the only one in our village. He found packets of film that raise images as if by magic. He has taken some snapshots he wants me to see. They’re grainy and dark but I manage to make out the images. There is my friend Heather — just a fleeting glimpse, but Heather all the same. She is caught in the stoptime of the camera as one of the Horde lifts her onto his black horse. The dress Heather wears is a ragged blue. It’s the dress my mother had worn to dances when the world was different. Now, like a miracle, it appears once more.

  I ran after them, but I couldn’t catch up, Troy tells me. People say one of the Enchanted can tell you how to find your heart’s desire. I know you’ve set out to collect their stories. All I want is to know where my sister is now. I want you to collect that for me.

  I’ve heard the same idle gossip. One of the Enchanted is said to see the future, one can see disaster, one can see true love, one can save you, one was a believer. People guess which among them could grant you your heart’s desire. It has become a game children chant when they jump rope.

  Stone, Sky, Rose, River, Earth.

  Let me know just what I’m worth.

  Tell me where my true love can be found.

  In the sky, the flowers, the river, or deep in the ground.

  I’ve tried every other way to find Heather. Troy’s voice is insistent. Now I need you.

  Why me? I want to know.

  Because the Enchanted will talk to you. They’ll tell you their stories.

  I thought that what you lost you could never get back. I thought I knew the end of most stories. But I was wrong.

  I spy a magnifying glass on the worktable. I grab it, then take a closer look at the photograph. My hands are shaking. The half of my tattooed heart feels the way it had when the first needle went in. Like ice. Like heat. As though it had begun beating.

  I thought I recognized the denim jacket worn by one of the Horde riders.

  Now, upon a closer look, I do.

  It’s the person whose story I want most of all, the boy who appeared in my garden, the one who’d gone in search of his family, only to disappear.

  Diamond.

  The boy I loved.

  I don’t turn on the lantern that night. I sit alone in my house, in the darkness, my sister’s dog beneath the table. I can hear crickets in the garden. I hear moths at the windowpanes. Troy Jones asked for my help because he believes I can hear what no one else can. A cry in the distance. A heart that beats when all else is still. He is convinced that people will tell me their stories, and in those stories w
e’ll find what we’re looking for. Lies, after all, can be unearthed in many places. But the truth is much harder to decipher, on this we agree.

  There’s only one way to know if he’s right.

  I must find out for myself.

  Sky Witch

  This is what I learned

  What you see, you can understand.

  Someone once told me this, but I laughed out loud.

  I said I had seen smoke and ashes and death and I didn’t understand any of it. I had seen love as well, and that had turned out to be the biggest mystery of all.

  But I had looked at the outside of things, not at the true, ever-changing heart. Look at a cloud and see how it becomes a swan, a rose, a lantern, a lion. That is the only way to understand that all clouds change.

  Not a single one can ever stay the same.

  That doesn’t mean it’s not still a cloud.

  The Enchanted never allow themselves to be known. They don’t wish to be made into goddesses or demons. They are merely women who have suffered. They want to be left alone. They know what happens to witches in this world. Every little girl does.

  Because they won’t reveal themselves or deny their existence, people tell lies. But a lie is not a story, it’s simply a lie. Lies become bigger, and fatter, and meaner every time they’re told. They eat air and inflate with each piece of gossip. They feel real, but when you touch them, they pop like a bubble. There’s nothing inside.

  People have begun to say that the Enchanted steal children and keep them in cages. They cast spells in which dogs become men and men become dogs. They turn women into birds, fish, stones, thorns, hedges, monsters.