VERDANT
JOHN'S VIVIDEST MEMORY of his grandfather was decidedly odd. Among other things.
Maxwell Carly was an old man when his first and last grandchild was born, but he was not... elderly. No; he only acquired that intangible air of great age when John was turning eight and he caught tuberculosis. So most of his memories involving his granddad were vague impressions of a great deal of energy compressed into a thin, bony shape trying to get him to do something that was active and probably highly uncomfortable, as well. That was part of what made the recollection odd; it was, without doubt, his vividest memory of the man, even though it had occurred in the After period, the fairly short stretch of time during which Max acted his eight-something years as well as looking them (but wasn't dead yet).
John was sitting on the windowsill of the living room, picking at the grass stains on his knees, which he had discovered some time after he had in fact finished playing in the grass from which they came. No chance, he reflected, of getting a matching set for his elbows today; it had just started to rain, and his mom would never let him out now.
"Boy," he heard, behind him. Granddad must have woken up from his afternoon nap on the sofa while John was busy contemplating his newly-acquired badges of honor. He turned himself half-around till he was facing him.
The old man's watery hazel eyes, however, did not meet his. Max was staring at the greenish blotches his grandson had so recently been admiring, and he did not look happy about them. John started to worry.
"Where did you get those greenies, boy?" he demanded.
"Er... the lawn," said John.
"Ah." His skinny frame relaxed slightly, only then drawing attention to the fact that he had been tense a moment earlier. "Just... grass stains."
"Yeah."
"Good."
Max was quiet so long that John decided he must have fallen asleep again, but just as he was returning to his stains he spoke again.
"Listen to me, boy," said his granddad, quietly. "Just this once. Listen to me, and listen good and hard."
"Yes?"
"Listen!" he snapped. "Did I tell you to politely sit still and stare at me like a goat? No! Listen."
"Sorry," said John, totally bewildered but also aware of a prickling sense of shame in his gut, for no reason he could discern at the time.
"Never mind, never mind." He coughed, hacked up something John was glad he didn't catch a glimpse of. "Come closer."
Suddenly excited at the prospect of hearing something that was clearly important, the boy hurried up to Max's bedside.
"Beware of green girls," said Maxwell Carly into John's ear, dry thin lips brushing against the warm cartilage. After that he lapsed into silence, and there was nothing left for John to do but shrug and walk away.
*
TEN YEARS LATER, John was drunk.
He spun the fluted glass awkwardly about in his clumsy hand. It didn't seem like it should've been possible to get drunk out of something so delicately graceful, but he was. Drunk, that was. Yes.
The wine was pretty too, he thought. What was left of it, haha, the tiny pool of red liquid at the bottom of the glass. He tried to put the glass to his eye and look through the dregs of the stuff. (It seemed like a good idea at the time). Through it, the bonfire burned an odd dark purplish-crimson color, not much like its normal, untinted orangyness.
Very drunk, he thought, as the wine slid down the side of the glass and trickled over his cheek. Very, very, very, very drunk. Drunk.
"Here, stop that," said Matthew, his roommate, slapping at John's hand. Reluctantly he lowered the glass. Matthew stared at him for a moment and snorted. "And you should probably wash your face."
"What? What?"
Matthew tapped the skin just below his right eye. John mimicked him and discovered sticky wetness. "Oh."
"Yes, oh. What the hell were you doing?"
"Dunno," said John, with total honesty.
"Surprise, surprise."
They lapsed into silence for a time, contemplating their respective glasses. After a while John got up and got another glassful.
He frowned at it for a while, absently, then took a swig. A lot of it missed his mouth, somehow, and splashed against his chin and throat and shirt.
"Hey," Matthew objected, "that's a good vintage you're drinking, don't just waste it, man."
"Uh-huh," he replied, unconcerned and generally more interested in the taste on his lips. It was what a forest would taste like if a forest had a taste, he decided, and told his friend so.
"That's the nutty flavor. Nuttier than you, even. Fermented forests in our cups, what next?"
"Global warming," John said, in an attempt at dry humor that fell face-first onto the ground, or rather, would have had they been sober. As it was both found this astonishingly funny.
"He's right, you know," said someone John couldn't see to Matthew's left. "It does taste like a forest. It's a very good wine."
"How would you know what forests taste like?" said Matthew, without rancor - he was as drunk as John by this point.
"How do you think?" the person replied. "I've savored oakwine many times in my day."
"Your day? Your day? How long's your day?" said Matthew. He and John both found this tremendously funny.
"Three thousand years, almost to the dot," said the person.
That silenced them for a moment. Then:
"You're three thousand years old?"
"Yes," said the person, and stood up so they could see him - no, her - properly.
She didn't look three thousand years old, John thought. She didn't look thirty, for that matter. She looked about thirteen, too young for this party, really.
The light of the bonfire left most of her face in shadow, so he could only make out bits of it, like the too-big nose and the high cheekbones. Her eyes were too deep-sunken to get a glimpse of. Probably not very pretty, he decided, just another face.
"You're drunker than I am," he declared.
"In ways you will never understand," she retorted. "But yes. Do you know who I am?"
"No," said John, and "Knew it. What're you, honestly, fifteen, sixteen?"
"Three thousand," she said stubbornly.
"Right," he said, "and I'm a small raspberry cupcake."
She smiled and touched his cheek. "Would you like to be a small raspberry cupcake?"
She had turned until she was looking straight at him. It was hard to make out anything of her face now, but he could tell that she was smiling even so.
A chill ran down his spine.
"No-o," he said, slowly. "I don't think I want to be a small raspberry cupcake."
"I dunno, I wouldn't mind having a cupcake for a roommate," said Matthew, beside him.
"A pity," said the girl, "I am bored."
"Damn, no cupcake for me?"
"Did I ask you in the first place?"
"Burn," John whispered into Matthew's ear, and this time Matthew snorted up more wine, he laughed so hard. When they'd recovered sufficiently to look up the girl had left. Probably off to find her older brother or something, thought John, but with just a touch of slight unease.
*
HE WAS MORE uneasy the next day, although the hangover might have had something to do with that.
"I'm telling you, she had old eyes," said Matthew, from his position in the bathroom, forehead pressed against the rim of the toilet while John leaned over the sink and panted.
"Whatever the hell that means," said John. "You can't have old eyes, mate. It's like, against the laws of nature, or something."
"Okay, okay," Matthew conceded, "not old eyes, per se, but, like, there were wrinkles around them or something."
"There weren't," said John, with absolute certainty, despite the fact he hadn't seen them. He was fairly sure that no wrinkle had even thought about marring the girl's face yet. She had practically radiated youth.
"Maybe not. But you know what I mean."
"I think you're just gullible when you're drunk."
"Hey, I didn't say she was really three thousand years old, or whatever it was," Matthew protested. "I'm just saying..."
"I don't think you even saw the eyes. I know I didn't."
"I did!"
"Yeah? What color were they, then?"
"Grey," said Matthew without hesitation. "Grey as clear water over stone."
John snorted at that particular piece of poetry. "You're such a -" he flailed a bit, "- such an English major."
"And what does that mean, I'd like to know," Matthew protested.
"It means you're inclined towards stupid metaphors."
"Similes, actually."
"Exactly my point."
"Wait, what?"
"Aaaaah. Never mind. I think I'm going to heave again."
"Right," said Matthew, and moved still farther the sink, despite the fact that there was no feasible way for John's vomit to reach him next to the toilet, unless John'd been practicing projectile-hurling, or something. Which needless to say he hadn't.
"Ugh," he said when he'd finished not-projectile-hurling and rinsing his mouth out. "Maybe we went a little heavy on the booze last night, huh?"
"No s**t, Sherlock," said Matthew. "We must have had at least a six-pack last night."
John frowned. "No, we were drinking wine, I thought."
"Wine? Psh. Alan Carson is not the sort of guy who serves wine at his graduation party."
"I thought his rich girlfriend brought some, though?" He tried to remember; unsurprisingly, the evening was something of a blur, all strange observations about the nature of the dancing shadows from the bonfire flames and stupid jokes and, if he recalled correctly, the wine.
The girl too, he thought.
"Oh, Sienna?" Matthew said, interrupting his thoughts. "Yeah, she brought a couple bottles... Why would she give any to you, though? Nah, we were drinking beer."
Sienna, Sienna - another girl, not the girl, red hair, he knew, red hair and brown eyes, Matthew knew her, didn't he? Oh yes. "'Cos you asked her nicely," he said confidently. "She looked a little weirded out but she gave us a bottle."
"Oh yeah," Matthew admitted. "Right. That was later in the evening."
"Yes," John agreed.
"Well, I know I didn't drink much of it," said Matthew, "I like my beer."
"Yeah, yeah, manly Matthew, give it up, we all know you dressed up as a Fairy Princess when you got stoned last year," said John. He was thinking about something else.
"Oh, shut up," said Matthew, not observing this.
"Okay," said John.
There was an awkward silence. At least, it was awkward from Matthew's point of view.
"Er," he started, "when I told you to shut up, I didn't actually mean for you to shut up. I just meant for you to shut up about the Incident."
"Matthew," John said, "I have just passed into that stage where the formaldehyde coursing through my body is causing every. Word. You. Utter to feel like a great big hammer is being, well, hammered against the inside of my skull. Silence is golden, my friend. And," he added threateningly, "duct tape is silver."
"That was surprisingly eloquent," said Matthew after a moment, "but I think I am justified in saying that biology majors are every bit as annoying as English - ******** last would be because John had just sprung into action, in this case by hitting Matthew over the head with his own hairbrush.
"Argh," said Matthew, but wisely did so in a very, very quiet voice.
"Just so," said John.
He was really starting to feel a bit better when Matthew spoke again.
"But really, formaldehyde?"
"And you were doing so well," he said sadly, before he was interrupted in the midst of his Special Kung-Fu Hairbrush Attack Of Doom by the doorbell.
"I'll get it," Matthew said, eager to escape the reach of the hairbrush, and dashed out the door before John could reply.
He slid down from his awkward position draped over the corner of the sink and ended up sprawled against the cupboard beneath.
He heard the door open.
"Hello," said Matthew's voice, "what can I - you?"
"Me," agreed a different but also vaguely familiar voice, female, probably, but lower than normal for your average twenty-something collegiate woman.
"Er... what are you doing here?" Matthew sounded panicked.
"Following up on my offer," she replied.
Definitely familiar.
"Offer? What offer? Did you offer something to me?"
"No. I offered something to your friend."
"My - John? How did you know he lived here? How did you know I lived here?"
Definitely panicked, haha. John sat up slightly, hangover (briefly) forgotten.
"Sienna gave me your address."
"...Oh."
"Yes."
"You're a friend of Sienna?"
"We're so close," said the voice, "that we're practically sisters." Something about her tone made her sound amused. It was subtle, but there.
"Oh. Well, that's all right then, I suppose."
"Can I come in?"
"Sure. Wait, so you wanted to talk with John about something?"
"Yes."
"I'll just go get him, then."
John was on his feet when Matthew opened the door to the bathroom and hissed "It's that girl from last night!"
"Ah," said John, and then, "I might have guessed. Er."
"She wants to speak to you."
"I heard."
"Well, go on."
"I'm going, I'm going." He made his unsteady way out into the room they liked to call a living room but had more in common with a wide hallway.
She had stepped inside and closed their front door behind her. He stared at her.
His inference last night, he decided, had been wrong: she was pretty. Just... not in a twenty-first century kind of way. Whatever that meant. Not that it mattered. Pretty, yes, and with long brown curls down her back and features too large for her face, big eyes and big nose and big mouth despite the small jaw and skull. Which sounded almost clinical, he thought, ridiculously, but it was true.
"Hi," he said. The big eyes were grey, he saw, and they were old, whatever was possible; Matthew'd been right.
"Hello, John," she said. "Do you know who I am?"
"Um. No. Um. Did you have something, um, to give me?"
"How much do you remember of last night?" she said.
He was filled with sudden worry. Had he had a not-very-good ol' anonymous shag last night under the Influence? Was this why Matthew had seemed so intensely panicked?
"Er, not much?" he tried.
The smile he had seen even in darkness curved upwards again. It changed her face in ways he didn't understand, ways that had to do with wildness and the fact that the smile showed her white teeth and the fact that between the teeth was a crusting of brown and on the white teeth were stains of purple. Her breath reeked of alcohol.
"Good, good," she said. She didn't sound drunk, but surely she had to be drunk? "That is well."
"Okay," he said. "So. Um. What was the offer?"
She didn't answer for a while, staring instead at a point a little below his right eye. He touched it himself, he was so nervous, and felt something sticky. Again. "Oh. Uh. Shoot. I must have not washed my face last night..."
"You did not," she said, and then, suddenly, "Would you like a mirror?
"Er... sure?"
She held out a cupped palm, and that was when John knew things were getting really weird, because cupped in her hand she was holding a small pool of red wine, so dark it was almost black, gleaming, the surface perfectly still. His face stared back at him, and damned if he knew why but it was more perfectly reflected than it had ever been in the dorm room mirror.
He looked like s**t, of course, mussed hair and shadows under his eyes and a generally saggy appearance. Of more importance, however, was the smudge beneath his left eye - no, his right eye, of course, stupid mirror. There was a purple stain from the wine he'd dripped onto his cheek, of course, but there was also the smudge, which was green and fingerprint-shaped.
"Where did that come from?" he managed.
She spread her fingers wide. Wine poured through them in red streams and ran in rivulets across the floor. Before he could object to that particular maltreatment of college property, however, she pressed her thumb to his cheekbone a second time and whispered, "Guess."
Then she had disappeared again, leaving only the open door, hanging off its hinges (damn, thought the insistently prosaic part of John's mind, not again), and... grass sprouting out from underneath the floorboards.
He stared at that for a while, then said "Matthew?"
"Yes?" said Matthew, entering with unseemly speed for someone who was theoretically not a sneaky, eavesdropping person. To be fair, their shared dorm was very, very small. But even so.
"Um, she's gone."
"What did she want?"
"I don't know. But... look."
"What the -" He knelt down next to the persistently existent grass. "Er, hello there..."
John laughed. "Talking to plants, Matthew? That's a new low."
"Hey, you're the biology major."
"That does not entail talking to plants."
"Yeah, sure it doesn't. But but but how did they get here?"
"Well -" John tried to think logically "- were they here before she arrived?"
"I don't remember."
John stopped trying to think logically. Obviously it was hopeless. "Okay," he said, "then let's just uproot 'em."
"But where did they come from?"
"Look, I dunno, plants come up through concrete all the time, right?"
"I guess -"
"Right. So, of course, the same thing can happen with floorboards."
"We're on the second story."
"Who the ******** cares?" said John. "Just pull them out and we can forget about... this. Or leave them, I suppose," he gave them a cursory glance, "they're kinda pretty."
And he ignored the rest of Matthew's protests in favor of yet another short trip to the loo - but not before noting the second green mark on his cheek in the more ordinary mirror just over the tap.
*
JOHN WAS AWAKE, eyes on the half moon floating huge and pale outside his window when it was suddenly blocked by a dark silhouette.
"Do you know who I am, John?" she said, as she clambered in and shut his window, which always squeaked, behind her. There was no noise. He shivered.
"I-" He was about to say no again, but something stopped him, so he changed it to "Look, you have to give me a hint first!"
She laughed too hard, like someone drunk (which she was, he could smell the alcohol on her breath again). "A hint. A hint. Yes. You shall have a hint. Wine, John. I worship wine."
"You..." he stopped. He thought. Worships... wine. Worshipper of wine. God, what did he know about worship -
Wait.
"Wasn't there some... some god of wine in Greek mythology? Are you the god of wine?" Not that he believed it, of course (except he did). He was just humoring her (except he wasn't).
This time she laughed so hard that she started to moan in pain. "Aaaah," she said, "ah, Dionysus, me Dionysus..."
"I'll take that as a no, then," he said, a bit annoyed.
"No," she agreed, "I am not Dionysus. Guess again."
John looked at her. In the moonlight she was almost colorless except for the wine trickling down her chin from forth her dark laughing mouth.
What else, what else... "Are you a... a..." he tries to think. Greek mythology, young girls... "...are you a nymph?"
She - he would say that she sobered up, except she didn't, it was impossible for her to sober up, but at least she calmed somewhat. "No," she said, "not just any nymph. But you near the mark."
Nymphs, nymphs. What else were there but nymphs for young girls who made grass spring up where they walked and left green marks on people's faces when they touched them?
He tried to sort through his baffled mind. Fragments of everything he had ever learned about Greece were upturned and dismissed.
Then a memory came up that had nothing to do with it at all (except it did).
"Are you," he said, trembling with a strange suspense, because three was the number, three was always the number, "are you a green girl?"
She laughed so long he wondered if she was dying, and she did so silently. Sometimes people die of laughter, John thought. People die of that sort of laughter - bubbling up, unstoppable, mad.
She did not.
"Yes," she said, and pressed her thumb to his cheek. "Yes. Though that is not the name most of you give me. I remember you, John. I remember when you were just a possibility, not even a possibility that had occurred to anyone yet, just... there. A child. Your grandfather... he told me about me - us - did he?"
John could only nod.
"What did he say?"
He could not have lied for his world. Or perhaps he could have, but he would not have.
"He said to beware of green girls."
"Beware..." She rolled the word around in her mouth. "Yes. Your grandfather was wise, wise even in his naming of us. And yet a fool, especially in his naming of us. He said no; he did not follow; and so he was left only fear and longing, and in his turn left you a warning, is it not so?"
"Er... maybe?"
"Yes."
"When did he say no?" John asked, with an urgency that surprised him even as it slipped from his throat.
"He was an old man already, though young to my three thousand years and more. But that does not answer your question, does it?"
"No."
"No. Your answer... he said no when I asked that he come to dance."
"To dance?"
"To dance," she said. "And on that note I would ask you now, John son of Terry son of Maxwell, will you dance?"
"I..."
She kissed him. Her mouth tasted like wine and blood every bit as much as it looked like wine and blood. John reveled in it.
"Yes," he said.
The room washed away. The world left behind was a profusion of black and green and silver, shadow and forest leaves under the fleeting radiance of the half moon. The green girl was green at last, green and black and silver as the world she stood in, and John could feel under his skin the green marks she left him with spreading. Soon he would be green too, he thought, and hesitance took him.
"There is still one last choice," she told him, before he could surrender to reason and to fear. "One last choice. The dance is only a dance. Come."
Her footsteps here were more real than those she left in his world, for all that they had left deep-rooted grass wherever they trod. His own were the insubstantial ones, and yet hers were lighter than his, and she was faster as she danced onwards, laughing like a woman, howling like a beast.
The worst of it, thought the last remains of his conscious mind, was that he did not fear that howl.
If it were Earth, the shadows would have been falling in the wrong places. It was not Earth, and the shadows were as they should be.
"Where are we?" he shouted, his voice lost among the threatening trees.
Yet she heard him. "The heart of Gaia," she called, merry and ringing as befit her dancing steps. "The forest."
Not Earth. Not the Earth he knew. At that he almost stopped, and then did not, but followed still.
At one point he saw that she had stopped, and was bending over something. He hurried, hoping to catch up, until he saw that she was bending over some forest creature, still alive and struggling, and tearing it into pieces with her teeth, with her hands, with her laughter, a green girl smeared with red.
He stopped, and she was gone again. All that was left was the chase, and he no longer spared thought for the death and the blood and the laughter.
And then the clearing was spread out before him, and she was beside him once more, looking out over the tangled mass of living flesh. The noise was almost deafening, and also too quiet, her strange joy a thousandfold. And the people - how they writhed...
"Satyrs and nymphs and we," she told him, quietly.
"We?" he said, and the word was heavy on his tongue, unnatural.
"Green girls," she said. "Maenads. Whatsoever you would name us, for here the names are meaningless. Madwomen, if you will. And," she added slyly, "madmen. Dance, boy."
He did not protest that his name is John. As she said, it did not matter there.
They danced, danced until they met with the great crowd, and danced as one and apart, and killed as one and apart, and were as one and apart, while the wine ran over all and at the center of the grand chaos Dionysus sang.
