Preview of "Wild Green"

Her hair was the lush dark-green color of forest moss. Not the kind that hangs like an old man's beard and catches twigs and bugs and all sorts of wild things, but the shade of green that you know your feet will sink into, a wet, earthy feeling. She grounded me, completely and totally in reality, though my mind told me I must be dreaming.

It was late in the afternoon, the day I first saw her. I was dripping with sweat, swimming in the humidity. It was that time of day when you imagine there won't be an end to the heat. When she walked into my field of vision, I thought I was seeing a mirage, like you see in the wavy lines of heat radiating from a freshly-ploughed field at this time of year. But, no, she was very real.

"Could I have a drink of water?" she asked me with a smile.

Her smile made me think of twilight, her eyes of moonstones. Of course, when she got closer, I could see that they were ordinary eyes, but they had an ethereal luster which made me imagine gemstones. And when she spoke, my heart stopped and when it started again, it seemed the world was going in slow motion. Perhaps it was just the heat.

When I made sense of her request and stopped staring, I hurried to grab a dipper from the water-pail which sat just inside the barn-door. When I stepped back into the sunshine with the water, I realized how dirty my muslin dress was from working all morning in the vegetable garden and I suddenly wished that I had known she was coming so that I could have changed. But of course, that was silly.

She accepted the water with a secretive look which made me tremble. And I couldn't help but watch her soft lips, not cracked and faded like my own, but plum-colored, touching the iron dipper. I could almost feel her lips, like two halves of a ripe fruit, wet with water, on my own skin.

I had to shake myself a little when she pressed the dipper back into my hands. Her eyes were fixed on mine, and it seemed that there was nothing in the world beyond her. When she laughed, perhaps sensing my confusion, it was like a heavy weight lifted from my shoulders which had knotted and twisted beneath my dress from my morning's work and I smiled in return.

"More?" she gestured to the bench next to the door to the barn.

I blinked and she sat down, arranging her dark red dress about the rough-planked bench like a princess from some faraway land. Everything about her was unusual: from the length of her silky, green hair to the odd proportions of her body. Her arms and legs were small in width and elongated, like a child's. When I brought her another dipper of water, she took it and patted the wood next to her. I sat, barely daring to breath, for fear that she would disappear. But instead, she stared off into the distance, surveying Jacob's fields and the distant green line of trees, where the forest kept watch on our land.

Selfishly, I was very glad the plough had broken and that Jacob was away in town buying a new blade and some additional seed for the garden. He wouldn't call attention to my visitor's strange looks.

"You can touch it, it's real," she said. She turned half-sideways and shook her hair out in a wave of green across her shoulders and down her back.

I reached out and at the first touch, I was lost in a vision.

I saw her standing on the edge of a very still lake, small as lakes go, but completely ringed by enormous weeping willows which climbed so high that they twisted together at the tops and swept over the water, blocking the sun from reaching the surface. Long leafy limbs from the trees dropped into the mirror-like water. She was weeping and I wondered what could make someone so beautiful so sad. And then I blinked awake.

She was touching my sun-burned face and I was irrationally frightened at the gentle motion.

"Who are you?" I was hallucinating, I knew I was. She wasn't real and I thought this even as I breathed her in. She smelled just like the warm pastries, filled with custard that my mother had made when I was little.

I choked back tears as she touched me. My mother had died years before, when I was still a girl. She had touched me with the same tenderness. And later, when I had first married Jacob. He too had possessed the kind of emotion and physical expressiveness as this creature next to me.

I pulled her hands away from my face and looked down at them. Her fingers were long and cool to my touch. They were almost like ten tiny serpents: smooth, but slightly scaly.

"I was just about to put on dinner," I found myself saying as she stared at me. "Would you like to stay?"

She nodded, eager as a young girl, and the afternoon seemed even brighter for her smile. In every way, she amazed me. And when she rose to follow me into my cottage, I looked at my home through new eyes as she wandered about and examined things as ordinary as the quilt my sister had made me for my wedding day, the flowerpot I had painted one spring morning after I had discovered I was pregnant, Jacob's beard clippers, and the pile of kindling he had left near the fireplace to last until he returned.

While I set about cutting carrots and cabbage, shelling the peas, and slicing the smoked beef, she looked and looked until I finally grew uneasy and motioned her over to the table and handed her yesterday's bread to slice up for the meal. She brought it to her nose, closed her eyes, and breathed it in. Suddenly, the entire room was filled with the yeasty smell that could only be bread fresh from the oven. I was astonished.

As I continued preparing the stew, I noticed she was humming just under her breath. It was a familiar song, a lullaby perhaps. I moved back to the little stove which always burned me no matter how careful I was when I was removing pots or leaning over to adjust the flue. My dinner kettle sat on the front of the stovetop and I added the vegetables and beef to the water as it boiled. I filled the pot to the brim with fresh water and then turned as I felt her eyes on me.

She had finished slicing the bread and I will swear forever after that it steamed from her touch.

"What's your name?" I asked.

She looked at me with a little bit of confusion wrinkling her forehead and cocked her head slightly to one side. Her hair looked almost brown silhouetted against the open door which was the only light in the room since I had left the windows shuttered, lacking the will to open them to the searching heat.

"What can I call you?" I reiterated.

"Kaia," she murmured and then she looked away with a pensive expression.

"That's pretty. I'm Claudette." I moved to the icebox and brought out some butter and a carafe of fresh milk. "Jacob, that's my husband, he's gone to town. But he'll be back in a few days." I wasn't sure why I felt I had to tell her we would be alone. But I knew Jacob wouldn't appreciate having someone else around. He was used to his long days and silent evenings, sometimes I wondered what we'd be like when we were old if we were this set in our ways after only thirteen years of marriage.

"Claudette?" My name on her tongue was like curry spices and I smiled in spite of myself. "May I drink?" She was pointing to the milk.

"Yes!" I hurried over and poured her a mug of the white milk that frothed as it reached the brim.

She took it in both hands and began to drink. I couldn't help but laugh as she drank down the entire mug and then held it out for more. I poured it full again and then turned back to stir my pot.

"We have plenty of milk. With Jacob gone, it's just me to drink what Mary generously gives. Drink all you want, Kaia."

There was a pleasant silence as she consumed the carafe of milk and I moved about the room, pulling the chairs to the heavy oak table, throwing another log on the fire, putting out gruel for the cat, and watching the stew. But when I found myself humming along to her lullaby, I decided the silence had to be broken.

"Where are you headed?" I asked. "Or do you live near-by?"

"I found you." She said.

"What do you mean, dear?" I was curious. "Did someone send you to me?"

When I looked at her out of the corner of my eye, she was staring out the doorway, hands clasped about her mug.

"Well, you must be going somewhere!" I murmured. The stew was giving the room a wonderful beefy aroma and I stirred though it wasn't necessary and I found myself watching the patterns my spoon made around the chunks of vegetables and dark meat. "You can stay for the night, of course, but I'm sure you will be missed soon by your family. Don't you have family?"

"No." She said it without emotion but I was sure she understood me. "I am traveling."

"Oh, seeing the world?" I dropped some salt into the mix and turned to glance at her. "I remember when I was your age, I wanted to see everything. But, it wasn't meant to be, for me, at least. Jacob asked me to be his wife and I didn't have a reason to say no."

My visitor was very mysterious indeed. I kept thinking of the vision I had seen of her standing at the edge of that lake. What had that been? Just the heat? Now I wondered.

"I was all alone."

"What?" I moved over to her and when she looked up at me, my heart broke into pieces. I saw her as a little girl, I saw her as a young woman, I saw her lost in the forest, and when I finally found myself clutching the side of the table, I saw her looking at me with eyes full of hope.

"I was tired of talking to myself," she murmured, stroking the rim of her empty mug.

"I think I need to sit down," I said matter-of-factly and so I did.

She smiled and patted my white-knuckled hand.

For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to ask her any more questions that night and she fell asleep, green hair spread across my table like fresh grass cut from the fields. I folded her up in my arms, for she weighed no more than one of my young cousins whom I visited from time to time, and put her to bed. I sat near her, perched on the side of the large bed I shared when Jacob was at home. I couldn't stop the memories which flooded to my mind. Perhaps I had gotten too much sun, perhaps it was the strangeness of my visitor, but I sat there until the cock crowed in the early hours of dawn, my mind working at a pace I hadn't known since before my marriage.

Kaia had triggered a wave of nostalgia and when I let my eyes go un-focused, I could see my mother lying in the bed next to me, not the strange green- haired girl. Then I saw Jacob there in the bed and I remembered..