Girl with Green

By Ashley Wilson Fellers

When she was a girl, she lived in a place where the green seemed to grow between the floorboards.  You couldn’t keep it out. 

            Green light, green shade, green shadow:  you breathed it in and out in clouds.  Stepped under the shower head and felt the green mist drench you.  Watched it run down your skin in rivulets.

            At thirteen, she’d stepped out of the forest into a place where the water was a solid sheet of green.  She was trusting then –innocent of what the color meant.  So she’d knelt at swamp’s edge and pushed the green skin off the surface of the water.  Cupped it in her hands.  And drank.

            She is 27 now.  She lives in a city slick with metal and black glass, and in the mornings, she stalks gray sidewalks, in stiletto heels.  She walks like a person being followed, flicking fearful glances behind her.

            Green.  Always, that green.

She finds the first mysterious spot while standing in a restaurant bathroom, leaning into a mirror.  She is fixing her hair, coiling the long black strands into a knot at the top of her head, when she sees it:  a splotch of bright green resting just behind her ear. 

            She drops her hair.  Sets the brush on the countertop.  When she lifts one hand, she moves slowly, like one afraid of startling a bird.  Her fingernail catches the base of the mossy spot and lifts the edge from her skin, and she rips it off like a Band-Aid.  The flesh beneath is pink and shiny.  New.

            Her breath doesn’t come for a moment.  Instead she leans against the sink, looking at the little patch resting lightly on her fingertip:  a tiny, coiled frond of what looks like plant-flesh, like a baby fern.

            She stands there for a long time, remembering. When she looks up at her reflection, her skin is suddenly pale against her dark hair. She flicks the spot away from her, to the trashcan, and lifts a lipstick to her mouth.  Then she flashes a smile at herself:  a hard, vivid smile she has practiced many times. 

            Her eyes catch the light like mirrors.

            Green.  Always, that green.

She is on a date.  The boy who waits at a table outside the restroom door looks up when she appears.  He’s a Midwesterner, ruddy, everything about him the color of wheat and sun and sky, and he has that happy, expectant look people wear when they have always had enough.

            “Had time to look at the menu,” he says.  “Hundred-dollar burger, you see that?” He grins.  “Kobe beef, I read about that.  Cows stand around all day listening to classical music, Japanese masseuses just kneading and kneading them, makes the meat soft.  Hey, let’s get it, whaddayou say?  Life is short, isn’t it?”

            “Life is short.”

            “Tell you what, I’m from Harkrader, Indiana – not exactly a Kobe beef kind of place.  Nicest thing I ever ate there was prime rib, before my high-school prom.  Thought I was a real high-roller, that night—”

            She picks up his hand, presses her lips to his fingers, and he stops talking.  His eyebrows lift in surprise.  “Harkrader, Indiana?” she says.  “Two small-towners, you and me.  I’m from Paris, New Jersey.”

            “Paris!  Sounds beautiful.”

            “Not really,” she says.  “Industrial town – leather tanneries.  But I’ll tell you, there were some great little pubs on Main, played the blues, jazz – great stuff.”  She smiles.

            The boy she’d gone out with the night before had been from Paris.  At least, she thinks that was what he’d said—

            “Something I’m dying to know,” she says suddenly, still holding his hand.  This is her strategy, with dates:  ask them many questions, make them spill information -- stories she’ll steal for other nights, other men. “I want you to tell me the craziest thing you’ve ever done.  And I don’t mean just a little crazy.  I mean, really, really crazy.”

            “Mmmm.”  He looks happily suspicious.  “Craziest thing – huh.”

Always, the best ones spit out something shocking and wonderful right away.  Something she can tell over and over to herself, later —

“Well,” he says slowly, “one time me and some buddies from the high-school basketball team jumped a train on a Friday night.  Took us all the way from Indiana to Chicago.  We got off, walked by the lake… back by Sunday morning.”

            She laughs.  His answer is not one of the better ones.  But in her mind she hugs it to herself anyway, folding it into the waistband of her skirt, for later.

            “What about you?” he says.  “You ever done anything crazy?”

             “I moved to New York.  Not that Pittsburgh is a hard place to leave—”

            “I thought it was Paris.”

            “Oh.  Well, Paris, yes. Paris was my hometown—“

            The words seem to slow.  Paris was the other boy’s hometown, she realizes, the boy from last night, with the jazz and the leather tanneries.  She hasn’t said the actual name of her own hometown in years—

            “So Pittsburgh was… ?  What, you went to college there?  Which school?”  The Midwestern boy looks at her expectantly.

            “College.  Yes—”  She is trying to think of  Pittsburgh schools.

            The lying usually comes easy.  This is what she likes about all these momentary men:  not the sex, which sometimes happens, and sometimes doesn’t, and sometimes is as ordinary as married people’s.  But no, the sex isn’t all that important:  it’s the anonymity.

            “You were saying?” he says.

            She cannot remember what she was saying.  She is looking at her hands in her lap. A patch of green slicks the skin between her index finger and thumb.

Later, when he kisses her, he grabs her by the back of the neck and swings her to him, and their teeth crack together.

            The streetlamp streaks yellow through his apartment windows, and he crushes her clothing in big fists, pushes her back against the banister to the loft, against the cool yellow floorboards.  He laughs, a happy, expectant laugh you hear in the mouths of people who have never suffered.

            She lets him bite her collarbone.  With her head turned, she stretches her hand against an oriental rug and imagines that it is hers.  Imagines they have done this many times. 

            “Look at you,” he says, kissing the hollow made by her breastbone. 

            She shifts with the light.  She is his wife, a blonde field-colored creature like himself.  They went to the same high school.  She wore his class ring. 

            “Where does a girl like you come from?” he says.

            And then in her head there is a shriek, like the tape in a videocassette ripped backwards.  And suddenly she sees herself, a little girl, scrubbing at moss growing from the floorboards.  The Brillo pad had foamed pink in her hands. 

            “Look at you.”

She puts her hands behind the Midwesterner’s neck and pulls his mouth against hers.  She wants to feel he is real.

            They have known each other always.  They went to prom, ate prime rib, made out in the back of a rented limousine they couldn’t afford.  Once they hopped a train to Chicago--

            “God, look at you,” he gasps out, laughing.  “Those green eyes—”

            Her mind shudders backward:  green sundapple.  Green branches.  She remembers a woman in a green-shaded bedroom, retching. 

            “Kiss me,” she murmurs to the Midwestern boy.  She has forgotten his name, but she remembers the way they stood at the door to the boxcar, watching yellow fields slip sideways.  She remembers the clacking of the train on the rails.  She has never suffered.  “Kiss me.”

            She knows that the poison, the newfangled fertilizer, bubbled up through the groundwater, collected in the wells.  She imagines that it shimmered through the pipes of the old farmland homes, before they knew what it was.  What it could do. 

            Ferns had sprouted in the rafters. 

            The vines that should have stayed in the forest leapt the irrigation ditches, crossed the fields.  They tangled in the innards of the combines, the tractors.

            And the poison -- it had whirred from the faucet, swished into the kettle.  The kettle sang on the stove and her grandmother had lifted a teacup to her lips.   

            So green.

             “Are you all right?” the blonde boy is saying to her.  “Honey, are you all right?”

             “I’m all right.”

             “But you’re crying.” 

            “It doesn’t matter.  Just kiss me.”

            They had been walking to church when it had happened:  her grandmother, bent in the green shade.  Pulling her hand from her mouth, opening the handkerchief.  That sudden, scarlet bloom.

            “Kiss me,” she says again.  And so they kiss, the green girl, the wheat-colored boy, and in their mouths they taste bile.  Mint, and basil, and fertilizer, and blood.

            Over the boy’s shoulder, the girl sees the crook of her own elbow.  A streak of moss. 

She has to leave.  Has to leave the city. 

            And so she leaves the Midwesterner standing in the doorway, in his boxers, and takes the subway to the garage where she keeps the little car.  She must get someplace grayer.  Somewhere more barren, and cold.

            In the parking garage, the car sputters when she turns the key.  It has been a long time, but the engine turns over.

            She flexes her foot against the pedal, listens to the mechanical roar.  In fifteen minutes the car is streaking down a black highway. 

            Radio, she says to herself, and when she flicks the old dial, Louis Armstrong crackles through the speakers.  She breathes easier. This will be okay.  She will find somebody else who can stop this:  somebody with happy talk, and sex.  She will tell him about a hometown in the Midwest, a train to Chicago.  She will steal his past from him in quick, sure motions.  

            She gets all the way out past the turnpike before her eyes begin to burn.  Her fingers tremble at her face, and she touches her eyelashes tentatively.  There is something clinging to them.  Green static speckles her vision.

            “Not now,” she says to herself, aloud.

            But there is a sudden rustle of leaves in the car, branches creaking. And she remembers kneeling at the water’s edge.  Remembers the way the water had tasted in her cupped hands – earthy and dank. 

She grabs for her cell phone, cannot remember any numbers.  So she dials the last call, and when the line picks up it’s the boy again, the Midwesterner.  His bright, expectant voice chirps out at her.

            “Who is this—?” he says happily.  “Is this … Kayla?”

            She does not know anyone named Kayla. 

            “Hello?” he says.  “Anyone there?”

            She wants him to talk to her, about the lake, clear cold air – but she cannot speak.  Her tongue is fuzzed over, choked with moss. 

            She drops the phone, presses her foot to the pedal.  Through a tunnel of green haze she can see the gray metal hood, but by then everything inside her is shifting, vines tightening around her lungs.  Rain pounds the windshield and she jerks the wheel sideways, the car skidding in a spray of gravel toward the berm.

            She kicks the door open, wrenches herself loose.  Stumbles away from the highway toward the trees.

For years she has carried it in her chest - a tangle of roots, the rhizome of the place she left – and now, at last, it unfurls. 

            It blooms. 

            Breathes.

            Rearranges her. 

            She tips her head back to drink the rain – becoming.

About Author

Ashley Wilson Fellers is a multi-disciplinary creative based in Roanoke, Virginia. Her features writing, photo essays, poetry, fiction and paintings have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals, regional publications and arts galleries. She is currently at work on a series of visual-art portraits that incorporate hidden poetry and found materials – from castoff paper and photographs to antique maps and old plaster. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Virginia Tech. You can find Ashley on Instagram and at her website ashleywilsonfellers.com