Earth- Giants, Golems, & Gargoyles, page 21
Unable to pale any further, Father mutters, “Which side?” The ambulance shakes again, more violently. “Oh,” he whispers, then his gaze settles on you again. “I wish . . .”
A knock on the back doors cuts him off and Morag jerks to face them. “Shit,” she breathes.
The knocking becomes louder and faster. A woman’s yell follows: “Let me in! I’ve got kids! Let me in, please!”
The ambulance rocks from side to side again and the lights flicker. Morag’s jaw tenses.
“She’s not lying,” Al calls back. “I can see her and the kids.”
“We sit tight.” Morag’s voice is stone, but it trembles at the edges as though struck with a hammer. “Let the protest pa—” Father’s eyes have closed again and the monitor is agitated. “Shit! Al, he’s crashing!”
“Where the hell did that come from?” Al leaps from his seat into the back, and all you can do is watch as the two of them try to resuscitate Father, with the ambulance still being shoved and the lights still flickering and the crack in your chest deepening. Your lungs become useless—you can’t draw air into them anymore—instead, it swirls uselessly in the space like wind through a wrecked house. No more voice.
You sit silent, your strap rubbing at your bad shoulder and your broken chest, as Morag and Al continue their work, shouting commands at each other. The ambulance rocks again, the monitor’s beeps become one long low note and Morag and Al’s grim faces sway.
Outside, the noise of the crowd swells. It’s like the roar of the bees Father keeps at the bottom of the garden, when he approaches to take their honey. You want to cover your ears with your hands, but you don’t dare in case they crumble under the weight.
Morag stares at you. “Rowan, I’m afraid Harris is dead. His heart must have been weaker than we thought. I’m so sorry.”
Opening your mouth would be useless, and you can’t reach over to him. Now that he’s dead, you will be too, soon, and your arm could easily crumble as you raise it, or it may already have fused to your body, because you’re earth and you’ll be reclaimed. You can’t feel whether this will happen now or later, because you’re numb inside.
Morag comes around the gurney and places her hand on yours. “Do you understand?” she asks.
Nodding, you turn your eyes towards your chest.
“You can’t talk anymore?” Her thumb rubs yours lightly and she starts—a chunk has fallen away under the pressure. “I’m sorry. We can’t help you.”
You are earth. You are of earth and one day you’ll return to earth. The first words you ever heard, echo in your head. Your fingers are dust and flakes of hardened mud, and now your vision is going: your view of Morag has crazed and fuzzed. The last thing to go, you know, will be the inside of your head, the vast network Father and Mother crafted inside it. It weighs heavy on your shoulders.
“Morag,” Al calls, “you can’t help it. You know this always happens; we just have to wait for the crowd to pass and we’ll get this poor guy to the mortuary.”
“I know,” Morag sighs. The shape of her moves back towards Father. As she reaches him, your left ear canal collapses and your right auricle slides down your neck. The one benefit is that you now can’t hear the crowd outside.
So this is it. Your life ends this way. If you’d known this, you’d have stayed in the park with the speaker and his dumb ghost of a golem. Maybe you did make the wrong choice. But if you’d stayed, you wouldn’t have been here for Father. There was no way to win. It wouldn’t have mattered how many times you got to choose.
Time passes. You’re not sure how much, but you can no longer see or hear, and your body, you’re sure, is no more than a heap of dirt in the seat. In your head, the pathways Father built are slowly collapsing. All that’s left now is the last song you heard, looping, holding the last of you together and memories of a tree, and a cat, and hide and seek. You were supposed to protect and you didn’t.
Dimly, you’re aware of a pressure on what’s left of you, then your body’s falling into darkness. Later, there’ll be air and sunlight—earth must be returned to earth. You have to believe that, with what’s left of the honeycomb of your head, which someone is now lifting, cradling and carrying somewhere.
SOMETIMES, YOU LIKE to find a shady spot under a tree and just sit, reconnect. The government encourage it, for your physical and mental health. And who are you to argue with our elected officials? Their electors. And what is a protector, after all, without their health? Your creator encourages it, so you resist the guilt you feel whenever you leave the home to visit the centenary park and sit beneath the planes to which you’ve been so strongly drawn since your creation.
A little way off, surrounded by blue railings bearing a plaque, is the stump of a large tree that one of your creators told you was once important. It signifies what we’ve done to the earth, she said. We were all angry for lots of reasons, and the earth took the brunt of it. It’s cleaner now and that’s why you exist, made of earth from the garden of an ageing paramedic. You’re her eleventh golem, and the first to be able to choose to wander free of the house or to pass the understanding tests and be eligible to vote.
“Off you go then, Rowan,” she said, smiling.
She chose your name in memory of someone she knew a long time ago. A bad time, she’ll say, shaking her head. It’s not all passed, but we’re on the right path.
The sky is blue, the air is clear, and the planes are heavy with fresh leaves. Soon, it’ll be too hot for you to come out during the daytime—there’s nothing that can be done about that at the moment—but for now, you’re going to enjoy the feel of the tree’s roots against your legs, and the warmth in the spring soil, and the peaceful hum of the park.
Maggie of the Moss
Sarah Van Goethem
THE CHILD COMES out of the forest fifty-two years after she disappeared. Hannah sees her first, as she always knew she would; she never stopped looking. She knew the Moss Folk would give her child back eventually.
Through the frosted panes in the winter she watched the frozen woodland until the blanket of snow melted into the spring rain pools, the weeds tightening themselves around the perimeter in the heat of summer. It’s always been now though, in the rusted throes of Autumn, before the farm is set to a cold slumber once again, that Hannah expected Maggie to return.
A bell is ringing somewhere, but Hannah ignores it. She’s waited so long for this moment, so very, very long.
ON THE NIGHT before Maggie’s third birthday, as Hannah rocked her daughter in the bentwood wicker rocker, a single quick crack sounded from the forest. Hannah knew the shot had found its mark; spirits flew up and out of the forest in splashes of jade and emerald lights that bathed Maggie’s skin in an eerie green glow. Hannah crossed herself before hauling her daughter off the porch and into the house. She dunked the child in the tub, scrubbed her from head to toe, washed her thick brown hair in mounds of lavender-scented shampoo and tucked her safely into bed.
Afterward, Hannah lay beside her daughter, her pointer finger tapping three times, light as a feather, on her daughter’s arm. “That means I love you,” Hannah explained.
“I.”
Tap.
“Love.”
Tap.
“You.”
Tap.
Maggie giggled and tapped on Hannah, too.
Then, when Maggie fell asleep, Hannah went to the kitchen and baked a pink champagne cake. She drank two glasses of Dom Perignon while she iced the cake with rosy buttercream frosting. She kept an eye on the window, but the spirits had settled. Only the stars shone in the dark sky, and she thought maybe it would be okay.
It was almost midnight when Hannah stood by the open window and rang the small hand bell.
Several minutes later, the door swung open. “You rang?” Howard called, amusement in his voice.
He stopped at the laundry tub and Hannah floated into the entryway barefoot, weightless, the way she imagined the spirits in the forest. She watched the blood trickle off his knife, swirling crimson where she sometimes soaked her panties if her period surprised her. She wouldn’t need to do that for awhile.
“Got a buck,” Howard said, and Hannah had a flash of him making an incision in the belly, all the way from the neck to the anus. Next, through the belly muscle, sliding two thick fingers inside to lift the muscle away from the stomach organs. “Tons of meat for the winter.”
“I asked you not to.” Hannah’s voice was level, but she felt the crack that threatened. It was inside her, between them, left in the night sky in a trail of faint green dust. “Not in our forest.”
Howard scrubbed at his hands, his flannel shirt rolled up to the elbows, all logic. “We gotta eat, Hannah.”
“The Wood Wives . . .” Hannah slugged back the rest of her warm champagne. She’d tried to explain this to Howard, but he didn’t understand. He was born here, not across the salty ocean, not in Germany, where the Moosleute, the Moss Folk, were well-known. Before she’d been forced to board the ship that brought her here, Hannah had run wild in the depths of the Black Forest, where she’d stumbled on one of the moss maidens, with limbs of knotty bark and lichen for hair. It was blurry in Hannah’s mind, but she knew this: a hunter had come and the unearthly woman, of an age Hannah couldn’t place, had whisked her away and tucked them both into a tree marked with a cross, a safe haven. “Did you at least mark a cross?” Hannah asked, her throat tight.
Howard was near her now, his still-damp hands caressing her face. His eyes were bright blue, the same colour he’d bestowed upon their first daughter. “Yes, Hannah-banana, I carved a cross on a particularly large one, with a wide trunk and a great cave of a hole for all your wee folk to hide.” He was making fun of her, but she didn’t care, so long as he’d done it. Then, his lips were on hers, and he smelled of wood smoke and earth and the bar of soap at the laundry tub. He had a way of making her forget everything she was about, of making her notions seem far-away and silly, something she was supposed to leave behind, like childhood.
“Maybe I’ll start ringing the bell when I want you,” he joked with a wink. He led her upstairs and took off her dress in the moonlight, making her remember she was a woman, a wife, not a spirit from the forest. But when he bent to pull off his own pants, her eyes travelled out the window. She saw the pile of guts near the woodshed and wondered if the cross was enough.
HANNAH STARES AT the child through her fingers which are pressed to the glass, skin like crepe paper now, nails hardened and jagged. Her breath comes in a jolt, like something she’s forgotten to do. She struggles to see Maggie; her eyesight has dimmed to shades of muted greys and browns, blurring into circles like Maggie’s pinwheel in the wind.
Maggie is standing like a tree in the yard, still and rooted, staring at the house as if for the first time. Hannah thinks Maggie can see her gawking and she pulls back abruptly, as if she’s been caught at something. She cowers behind the faded gingham curtains, the ones she hung the year they moved in. She never changed them. Or anything else.
And then, in a shock of adrenaline, Hannah shuffles out through the entryway, her house shoes clomping on the porch steps, the ripped screen door slapping behind her. She grows lighter as she walks across the grass, shedding a weight she barely remembers acquiring, it’s been with her so long.
The child doesn’t move, only stares at Hannah with widened watery eyes rimmed in white. Hannah slows her pace, afraid to startle her. She longs to wrap her arms around the girl and crush her to her chest, to inhale her and consume her and take back all the years of suffering. But it’s been too long, all the years snatched away, and she restrains herself.
Hannah is surprised to find she’s kneeled; she didn’t know her knees could bend anymore. The usual shooting pain hasn’t come, only a warmth that cloaks her from her feet to her scalp. Hannah sees her own wrinkled hand extend, reaching, but Maggie jerks back, and Hannah’s hand finds its way to her own face, pushing back strands of loose grey hair.
Of course, Hannah thinks, feeling her coarse hank of hair. While Maggie has been trapped with the eternal Moss Folk, time has stroked Hannah’s face and hair and body into something unrecognizable to her. Hannah is no longer the young mother with the skin as smooth as flower petals and hair the colour of harvested wheat, though in this moment, she almost feels as if she is again.
“It’s me,” she whispers. “Mama.”
Maggie blinks, her eyebrows furled into a frown that squeezes Hannah’s heart. Hannah has imagined this day a thousand times, but always, Maggie remembers her. She isn’t prepared for this, for the forgetting. She wasn’t prepared for it with Howard, either.
“Please,” Hannah says, and she tries again, her hand outstretched, palm up. “Please come in the house with me.” Then, you’ll remember, Hannah thinks. I’ve kept it the same.
“Mama.” The child turns, pointing at the forest. She grabs Hannah’s hand, tugs at her. The word, Mama, slices into Hannah’s heart.
“I’m so sorry,” Hannah says. She’s been wanting to say that forever, it’s been a bitter taste in her mouth for years no matter how much water she drank.
The child clings, her hand cold and clammy, and Hannah holds tight; she isn’t letting go this time. Hannah’s other hand finds Maggie’s fragile shoulders and strokes her wet back. Hannah didn’t notice it was raining; it’s been the driest year she can remember. She tries to think if Howard has been obsessing over the drought-stressed crops and the cracked soil, but it doesn’t come to her.
Hannah also doesn’t remember the dress Maggie’s wearing, something long and linen, earthy, plastered to her now-lean body. Hannah knows she disappeared in the birthday dress she made her, a bright concoction of flounces and ribbons and a velvet sash.
Gaudy, Howard said.
Gorgeous, Maggie squealed.
Maggie had so many words, where are they now? Perhaps she’s just in shock, Hannah thinks. To spend half a century in the forest, only to be spit back out . . . Hannah doesn’t want to think about it. Even the one night she spent had left a mark, a strange blister in her memory, a tug-of-war of sorts. Had she wanted to come back? Had Maggie?
“Let’s get some dry clothes, shall we?” Hannah asks softly. The child is still stretching toward the forest as if she can’t let go, and Hannah takes a tentative step toward the house. She’ll have to do this slowly, methodically, with patience.
“Mama.” The child’s lip trembles and Hannah can’t bear it. Her resolve cracks.
She pulls Maggie close, into the soft flesh of her middle, and strokes her wet hair. It, too, seems leeched of colour, paler, like her skin and eyes. She smells moist, like wet wood, like the inside of a hollowed-out trunk. Hannah squeezes her eyes shut and thinks of the rain pools in the woodland, with their carpets of dead leaves and florescent green moss, their reflections of the branches and sunlight above, masking the world beneath.
Maggie has come back from that world, and Hannah will never get enough of her now. When she squirms in her arms, Hannah finally releases her and opens her eyes. She staggers back, the world is so bright; a raging crimson and orange fire lit over her forest, the cloudy sky an intense white.
Hannah hears the offending bell over the rustling of the leaves in the trees. It’s coming from upstairs—a call from Howard. He’ll be wanting something, tea, or a carrot muffin, or the newspaper. Tea, Hannah thinks. He’ll likely forget he wanted it by the time Hannah gets there; she remembers the doctor saying something about short-term memory failing. Long-term though—Hannah’s fake teeth clench in anticipation—is still fine. He won’t have forgotten Maggie.
THEY HAD MAGGIE’S favourite lunch—grilled cheese sandwiches with piles of ketchup. Afterward, Hannah poked three pink candles into the cake and Howard lit them. Maggie blew them out with a spit-filled breath and they all laughed.
Howard gave Maggie a handmade doll cradle, pieces of pine that he’d expertly crafted after Maggie was in bed at night. Hannah had painted it, a folk-art display of multicoloured leaves, a tree bent sideways, branches lunging everywhere. Hannah had also made a tiny patchwork quilt and a matching pillow.
Maggie laid her one store-bought toy inside—her Baby Dear doll, with the crinkled lips and the puffy cheeks—and covered it up, all gentle and protective, the same way Hannah did with Maggie.
After Howard left to harvest the beans in the back field, Hannah and Maggie sat on the porch and drank lemonade. Hannah mixed leftover champagne with hers. The air was still warm, but leaves fluttered down like confetti when the wind breathed and Maggie danced her way to the big maple tree, where she set about making a pile. Leaves clung to the lace of her birthday dress and she giggled.
“I’m a tree, Mama. I’m part of the forest.”
“But you can’t be,” Hannah protested, playfully, “because you’re my little girl.”
At that, Maggie ran back up the steps and plied Hannah with kisses, tapping three times on her arm, before returning to her play.
Content, Hannah rocked herself into a sleepy trance, still tired from her lack of sleep the night before.
When she finally awoke, the light was all wrong. It came in from a crooked angle, kinked like her neck. Maggie was no longer under the tree, the pile of leaves forgotten.
Hannah searched the house and found Baby Dear missing from her cradle. She searched the barn next and slithered past the pile of guts, rotting by the woodshed. Then, she knew. She’d let down her guard and she would pay. She turned her eyes on the vibrant forest, radiant in death, bathed in a green aura.
Hannah went to the maple tree in the yard and with furious fingers dug apart the pile of leaves to expose the clawing roots of the maple. Sure enough, a mantle of moss clung, a velvety-green strip so vile Hannah retched into the leaves.
INSIDE, HANNAH PULLS on Maggie, her grip soft, yet persistent, a tether to keep Maggie from vanishing again. She stops in the kitchen, where steam seethes from the kettle. She shuts off the orange burner and pours Maggie a glass of apple juice, her favourite, and takes out the package of windmill biscuits she always has on hand. She used to make gingersnap cookies, but this is the best she can do now.
