The Green Man is watching me again.
He comes in through the gate; the rusted hinges give him away. I track his progress by his footsteps, gravel shifting under scuffed Skechers.
I recognize his wrinkled face, half-buried in the rumpled collar of the green coat he always wears, the coat that gives me his name. I wonder what he looks like when he leaves me, retreating to a home that hasn’t been ripped away.
When he comes around to stand in front of me, a balled-up tissue in his fist, I try to show him I’m not the person he wants me to be.
Around me—around us—lives hang in suspension. Eons arrested, mutilated and shoved into uneven ground to watch the people who shuffle in and out through the gate. The Purple Woman wears a wool hat, the Yellow Boy a ripped sweatshirt. They belong to my neighbors, imprisoned on either side of me.
We cannot speak. We have no words, our voices carved out along with our roots.
Cut and isolated as we are, we wait to be visited. Not all of us have people to weep for the memories we conjure. I am lucky; I am not entirely alone. The Green Man is my warden.
He talks to me. I wish I could reply, crack open my false mouth and scream and scream and scream.
He calls me “Martha.” That’s not my name.
My name is quartz and feldspar. My name is hornblende and mica. My name is buried in the mountains’ roots, where I lay sleeping before the Green Man ever wet his cheeks, before there was a gate with hinges to rust. I do not belong here and he doesn’t either, standing there asking me questions I can’t answer.
Go home, I tell him, wind biting my still-tender edges, forced into an unnatural shape. I am not her. I am nothing anymore.
He stands before me, water running from his eyes. He’s stopped talking, shaking silently while the wind tosses his thinning hair into his face. He doesn’t try to push it away. I watch him—I can only watch him—as he shoves the tissue into one pocket of his green coat and pulls the flowers from under his arm. He whispers into their frostbitten petals before laying them at my feet.
“I miss you,” he says to me. To her.
This time, I don’t try to respond. He can’t hear me, and I let him have his silence. We face each other, aching bodies and futures without words.
He leaves me after a few minutes, unsteady footsteps retreating along the gravel path.
The gate creaks closed and I am alone again in a field of hidden bones. Pain is on every side, unfamiliar words incising my skin.
I don’t know how far I am now from where I belong. From where I stand, feet buried in mourning earth, I see no hills. Only the gate, and a bare horizon stretching out of sight.
Unlike the Green Man, I cannot leave.
I sit with Martha as night falls, imagining her last face.
listen to this story on Ghostlore (Alternative Stories and Fake Realities Podcast, 2022)
Marisca Pichette is a queer author based in Massachusetts, on Pocumtuck and Abenaki land. She is the flash winner of the 2022 F(r)iction Spring Literary Contest and has been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Pushcart, Best of the Net, Utopia, Rhysling, and Dwarf Stars awards. Her Bram Stoker Award-nominated poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is out now from Android Press. Find them on Twitter as @MariscaPichette, Instagram as @marisca_write, and Bluesky as @marisca.bsky.social.
photo by Jill Dimond (via unsplash)
Crow & Cross Keys 