The Dryad’s Orchard
In Fall 1972, I was a disillusioned twenty-four-year-old with long blond hair and red beard backpacking along the Appalachian Trail in the Smokey Mountains. The world was not the fantastical place I had imagined as a kid, so I thrust myself into nature to find solace. I never dreamed I would meet a creature like Eulina and end up having to choose between two worlds.
After a good day’s hike, I reached a saddle between two peaks where the forest opened on a vista. An ancient oak stood alone in the clearing, back-dropped by the distant mountains, which rolled off in successive ridges of hazy blues and purples. The scene sent me into one of my reveries. I imagined, not for the first time on this trip, being the first Native American to witness this view.
When I came back to myself, I leaned my pack and walking stick against the oak tree and retrieved the topo map from a side pocket. There was a campsite nearby, down off the saddle. With ominous clouds gathering as the Sun dropped in the West, I decided this was my stopping place for the night.
I set up camp in a protected copse of trees below the saddle, while a field mouse with one gnarled ear watched from the undergrowth. I felt an instant kinship. Both of us were trying to get by in lives full of foxes, owls, women, careers, and other mortal perils. If only we could live somewhere protected and safe, maybe somewhere with a touch of the magical about it.
When I reconstituted a package of freeze-dried beef stroganoff, the aroma was surprisingly rich. “I must be really hungry,” I thought. Either that or the air of these ancient mountains contained an extra whiff of sensuality.
After I finished eating, a ferocious wind howled over the saddle. I was relieved that it stayed in the treetops, barely ruffling my tent. Not much later, I settled into my sleeping bag and hashed over arguments with my old girlfriend. She was the “practical and committed” one. I was the “idle dreamer”.
“You think you’re so superior, Nate, but you’ve just got your head in the clouds… or up your ass, more like it,” Brenda had said.
“But the lives people lead are stupefyingly dull.”
“Making a living and raising kids are real. Stop looking down on people.”
“There has to be more.”
“There can be, but you’ve got to earn it.” She ran her hand through her long stringy hair. “Look, you have a great imagination. It’s part of what I love about you. But, unless you use it for something other than daydreams, you’re as full of shit as the rest of us.”
Soon after that conversation I quit grad school, moved out of Brenda’s apartment, and started drifting. I spent a year or so on a commune, but tending goats and raising kale while high as a kite didn’t suit me. It seemed as meaningless as everything else.
A nearby lightning strike and crackling thunder brought me back to the moment. The storm had tumbled up on me with the fury of an angry Roman god. Rain rattled on the nylon of my tent and ran in rivulets around the campsite. Despite the din and excitement, weariness submerged me into a sound sleep.
#
Tiny squeaks in the post-storm calm dragged me out of Dali-esque images of melting clocks and girlfriends. When I pushed up the tent flap, the mouse stared at me from the near the fire pit. I could tell it was the same one because one of his ears was partly missing. His eyes reflected tiny images of the gibbous Moon, while the trees in the open area behind him glowed a pearly blue.
“Hey, my Little Man, you smell the chocolate in my pack? Come closer, Nate will toss you some.”
The mouse ran off a few steps, then stopped and turned towards me again.
“What?”
The mouse repeated its previous dance, running a few feet before turning back.
Because the sky had turned clear and beautiful, I decided to get up and look around. I scuffled out of my tight sleeping bag, loosing a torrent of water from the tent fly, pulled on my jeans, and slid my feet into unlaced boots. I thought for sure the mouse had disappeared, but, despite the commotion, he had just scampered a few more feet up toward the saddle. I stepped toward him. He waited until I took another step before moving ahead. After that, he made frequent looks over his shoulder to be sure I followed.
Up at the saddle, the Moon shone on thick fog clinging in the valleys. Wisps of it, like spirits on galloping horses, rose into a sky glittering with stars.
“Wow, Little Man. Thanks for bringing me here.”
The mouse ran onto the roots of the large oak and sat on his haunches, looking at me.
“OK, the tree then.”
As I approached, the mouse dove around to the other side.
Up close, the moonlight outlined bumps in the trunk. It took some puzzled attention for me to realize, with a start, that the shapes blended into a most splendid feminine form. My heart melted. Although textured with bark, the face was remarkably detailed – nose, lips, indentations for the eyes.
As I watched enthralled, creases formed through the middle of the eye bulges and deepened. When those eyes popped opened with a spray of splinters, I leapt backward several feet and shouted, “Oh my God!”
Another crease, like the deft cut of a master woodcarver, appeared between her lips. More splinters as the mouth opened. “No, not a god, just Eulina. Come, set me free.”
I stepped up, brave with astonishment, and gently peeled the rest of the bark away from her face. Her skin was the pale yellow-green color of wood too moist for a fire. Some bark came off easily, like old sunburn; some made a sticky sound as I pulled it away. She did not seem to mind. Her hair was a matted patch of leaves.
She peered hypnotically into my eyes and smiled with mischief. “The rest is as beautiful as my face.”
Entranced, I acted without thought. I freed her shoulders, which gleamed like fresh amber. Then her right arm and breast. She pulled my head down, and I did not resist. When I sucked, the nipple oozed a sap that tasted like honey, and she moaned softly. We enjoyed her left breast the same way. When both her arms were free, she pulled me toward her and kissed me. Together we removed more bark. A thicket of moss covered her pelvis.
With Eulina’s legs still bound in the trunk, I slid both my hands down her back and past the small of it. She wrapped her arms around my neck and murmured, “Pull.” I cupped her buttocks and tugged. The bark around her legs broke free, and her body lurched up tight against mine. We kissed deeply. She tasted like cinnamon. Before I knew what was happening, even though I was fully clothed, I had the most sustained and intense orgasm of my life. After it was over, she leaned her head back and said, “Thank you, Nate.”
Before I could react, Eulina dissolved around me as if she were a drop of dye billowing into water. The pressure of her body where I had held her faded like she was sand sifting through my hands.
“Sleep. Tomorrow, come find me,” she whispered as she swirled away in ever diminishing eddies. “He will show the way.”
I could see the mouse watching from under a bush.
#
I do not remember going back to my tent, but I woke up there at dawn. My underwear was damp and musky. The memory seemed intensely real, but I chalked it up to a vivid wet dream and considered, over breakfast, whether it might not be wise to stop dropping acid. There was no sign of a mouse. I struck camp slowly, sipping several cups of instant coffee to chase away the chill and to sooth my growing uneasiness that something even more bizarre was about to happen.
When I made it back up to the saddle, I walked to the big solitary oak and studied its trunk. There were some bumps and hollows, but nothing strongly suggestive of a human form. The bark on the trunk was intact, but I was unnerved to see an extensive scattering of bark pieces on the ground. I noticed the mouse staring at me from the edge of the clearing, his chewed-up ear confirming he was the same one.
“You again, Little Man?”
The mouse sat in the middle of an unmistakable trail into the forest. My topo map showed no sign of it, and the crowding of contours suggested a steep drop off beyond the trees. The mouse started his routine from last night, moving along the trail in short spurts and looking over his shoulder. I thought it would not hurt to follow a few steps, but I wasn’t planning to walk off a cliff because of a mouse. To my surprise, the trail was straight and level. I couldn’t argue with what I saw, so I followed my small guide.
As I hiked, I lost track of time. Although it was Fall, the woods showed the paler greens of Spring, and unfamiliar wildflowers appeared in vast abundance. Yet, I neither heard nor saw birds or insects. When I thought to check my watch, it had stopped. Although alarmed by all this strangeness, fascination and wonder drew me on.
Eventually, we entered a clearing lush with a rainbow of blossoms.
Ahead was a cottage of preternatural design. At first, I thought it was surrounded by stout trees but soon realized that the trunks were its very walls. The canopies interlocked with a massive moss-covered vine to form the roof. Windows of irregular design were held in place by the living wood. The trail led to the door, then on to the right, where it bordered a large orchard of fruit-laden trees. Little Man ran up to the cottage and leaped into the massive twining of roots at its base.
In the logic of fairy tales, although afraid, I knew I had to knock.
After a minute or two, I heard scuffling on the other side. A wheezy hesitant voice said, “Soon, soon. Patience… Have to pull meself together, I do. Squibble. Oh, that hurts. How do you folk stand it? Scritch, scratch.”
Irregular steps approached the door. It opened to reveal a hoary gnome with tattered leather clothes and a dirt-stained, pointy hat. His face was all scrunched up, except for the oversized dark eyes and long nose. He had a terrible overbite that made some of his words whistle. His voice was erratic, as if forced, and broke into a high register, especially around the peculiar nervous noises he made.
“Squibble. Want in? Your problem, not mine. Scritch, scratch. Oh, twigs and poop, that’s right, me own problem, too. Squibble. She’s not here. I’m supposed to let ya in. Scritch, scratch. But, by the fox’s teeth, better if ya just turn and go for that hike o’ yours.”
“She?” My heart hammered against my ribs.
“Yeah, ya know. Eulina. Squibble. The one hidin’ in the tree. Scritch, scratch. May’s well come in. Squibble. She’ll be here presently, or pastly, far’s I can tell.”
If my experience with the woman in the tree had been a dream, I was back in it. “My name’s Nathan. People call me Nate.” I offered to shake his hand, but he pulled back. His fingers were thin and delicate and ended with incredibly long fingernails.
“I know. I know. But shakin’s not me custom. Squibble. As for a name, people don’t call me anything ‘cept ‘Eek’ and ‘Get’m’. Scritch, scratch. Brownie will do for ya, if ya need names.” He turned and shuffled into the cottage. I followed him.
The first thing I noticed was the book lying open on a stone pedestal of grey and black marble facing the threshold. The book itself was huge, like a Shakespearian folio, with gilded sepia pages. The cover was leather. A quill sat in an inkwell. The writing on the open pages was a gorgeous looping script. I walked towards the book but stopped when Brownie screeched, “No! By the hairs on me face, no reading yet, not yet. Squibble. Later, maybe, soon?”
I turned away from the book and saw an extensive collection of walking sticks, pouches, wool knapsacks, backpacks of various designs fashioned from wood and doeskin, coiled ropes with carabiners, skis, snowshoes, boots, moccasins, and hats – a museum’s worth of gear for trekking, exploration, mountain climbing, and the like from various cultures and ages piled against the wall or hanging from branch stumps.
“May’s well add yer own. Scritch, scratch.”
So I took off my red Kelty backpack and leaned it against the wall along with my carved redwood pole.
“Sit yerself.”
The rest of the interior contained a bed of pine needles covered by a worn woolen blanket and, under a window, a small table with two chairs. All the furniture was crude, and the finish of the wood was worn smooth and shiny. The dirt floor was packed hard. Roots and branches from the trees intruded only modestly, but the walls were basically unadorned bark. Light came in through the windows, but some other diffuse light came from above. I looked up to discover a ceiling covered with large glowworms. The first animal life, I found myself thinking. These things were larvae, yet I had not seen any insects. They were larger and brighter than they should be. Their churning and jostling was unnerving.
Brownie offered, “Ain’t fallin’ down. Squibble. Too bad, it is. Might be tasty. Sit yerself. Have a nibble.”
On the table, there was a bowl of various fruits – bulbous, aromatic, and brightly colored. It made me think of a welcome basket in a posh hotel. I realized that I was hungry, so I grabbed an orange. The juice squirted in my face as I peeled – the sweetest, tastiest orange I had ever eaten. I sank into a chair and consumed the orange slowly, section by section, savoring every bite.
Brownie was on the other side of the table but did not sit down. He leaned forward with his hands on the table and stared at me with his large dark eyes, twitching his nose. He pointed a finger at the orange peels and said, “Mind?”
I shrugged and offered, “Help yourself.”
Brownie reached out with both hands, stuffed his cheeks with the peels, and chomped.
I looked around at the book. “Brownie, do I know this place?”
“Squibble. By me breadcrumbs, that’s quite a thought. Yes, that’s thinking quite a thought. Scritch, scratch. Ya got some chocolate in your pack, haven’t ya?”
I ignored the implicit request. I suddenly felt like I had dropped a Quaalude, so I lay down on the bed and slipped into a vivid dream.
#
I am born on the Minnesota frontier and have a hardscrabble early life. The winters are deeply cold. I hunt and trap to support my mother and father and then my wife and kids. When we go to war over slavery, I join the 1st Minnesota Volunteers, just a few hundred strong. Our minister says it’s our righteous duty. We muster at Ft. Snelling and go east to fight in all the big ones – Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville – sometimes heavily engaged, sometimes only guarding this or that. At Gettysburg, on the second day of the battle, as part of Harrow’s Brigade, Second Division of the II Corps, I’m standing in formation on Cemetery Ridge as Wilcox’s Brigade of Alabamans races toward us across Emmitsburg Road. Sickle’s men are skedaddling all around. We’re all that stands between the Rebs and the exposed Union flank on the right. General Hancock orders us to charge. Outnumbered five-to-one, we rush the Rebs with bayonets fixed and fight for thirty terrible minutes. We’re almost all casualties, but we hold the line. I’m the last of five men to carry the colors. The next day, the few of us left standing seal a breach in the line during Pickett’s Charge. I live through all the later months and years of fighting. I run a message back to General Grant during the Siege of Petersburg, and I notice a female form in the trunk of tree...
#
When I opened my eyes, Eulina was running a hand through my hair. She was kneeling beside the bed beaming at me the way a mother adores a child. Her skin was a lush green in the phosphorescence of the glowworms. I was drenched with sweat, and my mouth tasted of fermenting orange. I felt like years had passed. It took a great effort to move my joints enough to run a hand over Eulina’s face and shoulders.
“Welcome back, Love,” she said.
“What’s happening to me? Such a realistic dream. It seemed to last a lifetime.”
“It’s because you ate an orange from his tree.” Eulina pointed to a spot along the wall of hiking gear. I raised my head enough to pick out a haversack and ammunition pouch leaning against a rifled musket. The kepi perched on the tip of the muzzle sported the trefoil emblem of II Corps.
“His tree? I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
“What are you? Where am I?”
“Ah, Curious One, you find it hard to let go.” She paused, then continued, “One question at a time. Me? In Hellenic Greece, I would be called a ‘dryad’ or a ‘wood nymph’. I am called different things in different cultures.”
“You’re a myth?”
Eulina crossed my right hand over her torso and placed it on her right breast. She whispered, “Does this feel like a myth?”
My palm tingled. Realizing I had awoken from the dream with an erection, I coughed and withdrew my hand. Laughing at my shyness, Eulina deliberately leaned on my groin with her arm. It distracted me for a while, but my head was buzzing with confusion.
“Oh God, where am I? What is all this?”
“This place has no common name. I sometimes call it ‘Between’.”
“Between what and what?”
“Between my world and yours.”
This wasn’t getting me very far, so I took a different tack.
“Why am I here?”
“I guess you need to be, Love. We may never understand how, but you summoned me. You need to rest your mind. You ask difficult questions. I’m only a dryad.”
Eulina straightened her upper body and placed her hands on my chest, over my heart. As my erection subsided, the rest of my body burned with unfamiliar warmth and comfort. I felt a tear run down the corner of my eye onto the pillow.
Eulina smiled, “I need to go, Love. Another is calling.”
“Who’s calling?”
“A person. Their lives call to me. Usually, they call when their fruit is ripe, but, once in a while, like you, they call when they are barely sapplings. I will be back.”
Eulina rose from her knees with the fluid muscularity of a ballerina. Her movement to the door was as much dance as walking.
I felt so exhausted I slipped into a deep dreamless sleep.
#
Upon awakening, I felt refreshed in a normal way and sat up in bed. Neither Eulina nor Brownie was in the cottage, but the door was open.
I walked over to the book on its pedestal. The opened pages described my intense dream about the Minnesota soldier in the Civil War. Then a childhood memory flashed in me. The Book of Lives! The imaginary book of possible lives I would browse through in my head whenever my own life disappointed me. I could recall elaborating this particular entry to the book after reading an account of Gettysburg in Junior High. I had made hundreds of other mental entries, always with a feather pen.
My epiphany was short lived. I heard loud rhythmic gasping and rushed to the window overlooking the orchard. At the far edge of it, Eulina straddled the naked body of a man and gyrated wildly. The man looked like a figure from a diorama of Pleistocene life – hairy and rough with prominent cheekbones. His noisy ecstasy culminated in a single long scream. Eulina pulled away from him as his body writhed. I watched, horrified, as his chest and arms twisted and distorted into a trunk and heavy limbs, while his legs and lower torso rooted violently into the ground. His head stretched up into the air and split into a broad canopy of leaves. Before it burst into branches and twigs, the face bore an expression of agony. Once fully leafed out and barked over, the man became just another tree in the orchard. This one bore an unfamiliar yellow fruit.
Eulina reached up and plucked two of the plumpest ones. She turned her face and gave me a salacious grin. She then strolled languidly toward the cottage while munching one of the fruits and stopping from time to time to rub affectionately on the trunk of a tree. The way she moved was maddeningly seductive, yet I had just watched that man turn into a tree.
A flurry of shuffling behind me jolted me away from my terror and infatuation. I wrenched around to see the book flipping to a blank page. The quill popped out of the inkwell and, with a flourish, began scratching away. My gaze was riveted there until I heard Eulina enter the cottage. With my attention heightened by fear and anticipation, I noticed a new pile of artifacts next to my pack – a beaded leather bag, a loincloth with a hemp-like cinch, a thin fishing spear, and shell necklaces.
“You should eat this,” she purred and put the uneaten fruit on the table. “Modern Bantus call it a marula”
She stepped close and pressed her body against me.
“I don’t want to be a tree,” I stammered.
“Don’t underestimate the ethereal bliss of aching toward the daylight. But you are not ready to be a tree, anyway.”
“You’re a monster!”
“Don’t you know me better than that? He knew what would happen. I told him. He was ready.”
“Ready? He was in agony.”
“Agony? Exhilaration? What’s the difference? Don’t worry, Love, I’m not a monster. You won’t become a tree unless you come inside me. I promise. There are other things we can do instead to nourish your infatuation.”
Her flowery perfume and sensuous movement sent me into a delirium, and I quickly had another clothed orgasm that transcended the intensity of the first. She led me to the bed and settled me into it. Kneeling next to me, she laid her head on my chest and sighed.
“What is my book doing here? My book of imaginary lives?” I managed to ask.
She lifted her head, twirled a finger in my beard, and gave me a sly smile. “Really? Your book? Are you sure it’s yours? It’s been here as long as I have known this Between.”
“You collect men?”
“I collect lives. We are not so different, you and I.”
“But I just imagine them.”
“There’s a difference?”
Eulina got up, went to the table, and brought me the fruit. “I have to leave again. Eat this. Sleep. Before you miss me too much, I’ll be with you again.” I watched her saunter out the door. She gave me one bewitching glance over her shoulder. Her every curve was perfect, and she moved with seductive grace.
#
I am born in the bushes, and my childhood is very hard. I almost die several times from bug bites and fevers. I almost never have enough to eat or drink, and I must fish and gather berries with my tribe all day to have what little we do. The bright blue star we call Hyena, the one that shone high in the sky when my mother brought me out of dreams, has swung around the sky fourteen times. I have marked each cycle on the birthstone she gave me so I can count them. I am in our cave with the others, sitting around the fire pit. We are chanting songs of a long cold followed by a great wetness followed by an endless dryness that drove our small band here near the beach of the great salty water. We know of no others left of our kind. Then a god speaks to me. I plunge my hand into the ashes of the dying fire and savor the small burns from live embers. When I press my hand against the cave wall and pull it away, there is a picture of my palm left on the stone. Everyone gasps. I do it again. Soon, the whole tribe is blackening their hands and imprinting our shelter. It becomes ours in a way it was not before. It is later, as I walk with my fishing spear toward the water’s edge, that I see a woman in the trunk of a tree…
#
I awoke to find Brownie standing over my bed, chomping on the remains of the marula. After a last swallow, he said, “Squibble. Ya notice your beard lately?”
I looked down at my chest and gasped. I tried to sit up, but my limbs ached again like they hadn’t moved in years. I held up my beard in front of me. “My god, it’s longer, and it’s turning gray!”
“You’ve been having quite the winter nap now, by the dirt. Scritch, scratch.”
“Brownie, what’s going on here?”
“Not by me. It’s you two. Squibble. Fox’s nose, I just wanted treats, and she said I’d get some.”
“Where are we? Why am I getting older?”
“‘Scritch, scratch. Sniff one way, time passes; sniff it another, it don’t. The owl’s eye’ll be the death of us anyway. Squibble.”
Tired of Brownie’s riddles, I got on my wobbly legs and shuffled over to the book. Sure enough, it was open to a page that recounted the contents of my Neolithic dream.
#
And so it went. When I saw Eulina, it was usually after she turned another man into a tree. The quill would rustle off another life, and she would offer me the new fruit. After I ate it, I’d dream his life – the Maori navigator bringing his people to New Zealand, a cultured Afrika Corps tank commander who was merciless in combat but kind to prisoners, a poet and civil servant of the Tang dynasty exiled to a frontier outpost, an early Renaissance Danish lens-maker inspired to build a telescope after reading The Starry Messenger, a ribald Roman Centurion overseeing the construction of Hadrian’s wall. It was incomprehensible, but I could remember “elaborating” many of these lives over the years and entering them in The Book of Lives. Had Eulina and Between been calling to me all along or was my whole life a fable?
Sometimes, when Eulina was gone, I’d stroll through the orchard. Sometimes Brownie would appear, and we’d have another enigmatic conversation. He’d always eat the cores and skins of whatever I sampled. The weather never changed, just daylight and a gentle breeze. It never got dark, and, despite the bright and uniformly blue sky, I could never see a Sun, and there were no distinct shadows. The light was unchanging. I definitely missed the stars.
Alone in Between, I could not help wondering what I was doing here. I relished Eulina during her short visits – our discrete lovemaking, resting together on the bed. I also treasured the dream lives every time I ate a fruit. Yet, even though I experienced everything in those lives with a seemingly normal flow of time, there was something static about them. All the emotions, decision-making, and actions, they were not mine. I was just bearing witness.
When I dwelt on my irritating friends and relatives back in the real world, I missed the spontaneity and personal investment, for better or worse. I even missed my infuriating ex-girlfriend. I wondered what they thought had happened to me.
Sex was not often spontaneous with Brenda. Her attentions were sometimes meted out with ulterior purposes, lures toward conventional life, family – Responsibility, with a capital R. But I started to wonder if these were such bad things. What did my interludes with Eulina amount to? Pleasure? Comfort? Reassurance? Yes, but it was a bit like raising goats and growing kale again. It didn’t lead anywhere obvious.
A creek ran through the orchard and exited under a wall built from stones. The wall was too high to see over, so I brought out one of the chairs. When I stood on it, I found that the wall was just enough higher that I still could not see over it. I tried climbing a tree, with the same effect. Even though I never saw its height change, no matter where I was or what I did, the wall was always just high enough that I couldn’t see over.
So I tried to swim under the wall in the creek. My head hit stone. The water exited through slits in the stones too narrow for me to penetrate and then vanished beyond them into a uniform whiteness. I decided then that I did not want to see over the wall.
I tried to walk along the trail or into the woods in multiple directions. Trail or not, the vegetation on the forest floor quickly closed in until the way became impassible. I was also persuaded to stop by ominous growls and rustling in the undergrowth.
When I grew bored enough, I would eat another fruit and sleep. The fruit seemed to be enough to sustain me, but every time I awoke from the dream of another life, I was older. My beard took on a mythological length and turned stark white.
Brownie would come and go. I had no clue where he went when he was not around. He claimed to “nestle in the roots of the cottage”, but I never found a hole big enough for him to enter. I decided that he didn’t belong here any more than I did.
Lately, both he and Eulina have been restless. They have become impatient with me, but I am not sure why. I have become so very old, but time here has little to do with what I used to know. The cottage rarely accumulates a new backpack or walking stick. I often catch Eulina looking longingly down the trail in the other direction, not the one from which I came. She has warned me that she may soon disappear down that way forever.
#
Well, I’ve brought you up to date. You know as much as I do about this place and how I came to be here. It’s hard for me to believe it’s really happening. Things can’t stay like this, but I don’t know what the ending will be.
It has been a long time since Eulina has visited, but, right now, I am looking out the window to the orchard, and there she is, finishing an apple. I wonder how much she relishes her old lover as the pulp slides down her throat. She’s ambling down the path toward the cottage but isn’t making eye contact like she usually does. When she comes into the cottage, I notice she hasn’t brought any fruit for me. She stops an arm’s length away and puts a hand on my shoulder. I want to pull her body close, but I can feel the gentle resistance in her straightened arm.
“We need to talk, Love,” she says.
“Uh-oh. I’ve heard words like that before.”
“I’m leaving. Down the trail. Not in the direction back to what you call the ‘real’ world, but to my world.”
“Why? Is it something I did?”
“Oh, Nate. Can we ever know why things happen? Places like Between just go away sometimes. Maybe it’s partly your fault. Or partly mine. But maybe not. We can’t know.”
“What will become of me?”
“You have a choice. You can join me in my world or go back to your own. One thing is certain – you cannot stay here. Between is about to whither away.”
“I could go to your world?”
“Yes, but you are still mortal and would die there, in a place where everyone else is immortal. You would be an object of curiosity initially, and we would be kind to you, unless you encounter a harpy or a gorgon. Who knows, if some god takes a fancy to you, anything could happen. I won’t stop loving you, but I know I would find the satyrs and centaurs much more to my liking. It’s my nature.”
“If I go to your world, what would they think happened to me in my world?”
“The cliff on your topo map is real. In a year or two after you vanished, a park ranger would catch a glimpse of a red Kelty pack at its base.”
“And if I go back to the real world, would I go back to my own time? Would I be young again?”
“Maybe you think I should know. But I’m just a dryad, not a god. Probably even one of my gods wouldn’t know. In your world, do you ever know what your life will be?”
I reach out to her.
“Eulina, I love you more than I’ve loved anyone or anything.”
“Maybe what you are calling ‘love’ is just infatuation.”
“But you’re real, aren’t you? I didn’t make this up?”
“Don’t be insulting, Love! I’m no dream. I’m certainly not your dream. Maybe I’m not real the same way you are, this flesh and bone.” She squeezes my shoulder. “But I feel love, like you. I feel lust, like you. I collect lives, but I live my own life too. So should you.”
“What does this all mean, Eulina?”
“Mean? This is myth. Whatever it ends up meaning to you, my Curious Love, I think you have to earn it. But then what do I know. I’m just a dryad. Meaning has nothing to do with me.”
It is definitely spooky to hear that word “earn” again.
“If I don’t follow you, will I ever see you again?”
“There are many, many other Betweens and many, many other worlds they connect. Even if you stumble into another Between, it’s unlikely I’ll be there.”
“I don’t think I can bear missing you.”
“If you come to my world, there are others who would miss you back in your own, and you would miss them too.”
“It’s true, Eulina. I already do.”
I cry and gather her in to me. We nuzzle for a long time. When she finally pulls away, I see a line of sap dripping from the corner of her right eye.
“It’s time for me to go, Nate. You have a little time to decide.”
She smiles and shrugs. Her eyes twinkle with mischief like they always do. Then she steps out of the cottage and gives me a last coy glance over her shoulder. Once on the trail, she meanders slowly, with her typical extravagance. What a gift to be a creature of myths, having oceans of time in which to move. She admires her orchard as she passes, touches some of the branches, and fingers some of the leaves. She plucks and eats a pear. It takes a long time for her to disappear into the forest on the trail to her world. I admire her the whole time from the threshold of the cottage. She never turns back. No one else has ever been so kind to me or so honest. At the last glimpse of her, my heart clenches.
#
Time passes. I can’t tell whether it’s hours or days. I can’t sleep anymore, and I can’t decide which way to go. I grow more and more hungry, but I’m afraid to leave the cottage. Terrible things are happening outside. Trees shatter without warning, exploding as if lightning struck. When I watch, the splinters of wood turn into grotesque human pieces, sometimes while they are still flying through the air. Each time a tree detonates, the quill jumps out of its well and furiously crosses out another life. The book and the pedestal are sloppy with ink stains. Sometimes, the ink splatters me. I look out the window during a lull in the carnage and can see that the orchard wall is now much closer to the cottage. With each explosion, one of the piles of gear in the cottage disappears. The deaths of the trees whose fruit I have eaten pain me the most.
Suddenly, there’s a tremendous hammering on the cottage door.
“Fer love of all that scurries, will ya open up? There be limbs flying. Squibble.”
I open the door just as a nearby tree erupts, raining bloody shards against the cottage.
“Brownie! I thought you left with Eulina.”
Brownie ducks in and brushes gory debris off his clothes. Uncharacteristically, he sits on one of the chairs, balancing somewhat awkwardly, his feet off the ground. He looks angry.
“Ain’t my world,” he says.
I sit across from him. “Do you live in Between?”
“Squibble. Next t’all the fearful fawns in the forest, yer a dumb one.”
When he takes off his pointy cap, I notice the small size of his brain case, but then something slaps me across the face. His newly exposed left ear is all chewed up.
“Little Man!”
He bows his head, “Yer humbleness.”
“Why are you here?”
“Not by willing. Squeezed in the talons, I am. Squibble. I just wanted your chocolate is all, and, scritch, scratch, she fills me head. Squibble. `Help,’ she says, `and they’ll be chocolate and fruits.’ Damn me hungry nose.”
“Eulina’s gone forever. Why don’t you just go home?”
“Scritch, scratch. We’re in the thicket together, it seems. Squibble.”
“You can’t leave until I make my decision?”
“Yer slow for havin’ a noggin full o’ words. Yes. Scritch, scratch. By my pellets. We be twined.”
“Oh,” is all I can manage, as another tree comes to a thunderous end, and the quill gets busy again.
“So. Kindly pack yer nut stash and go one way or t’other. Squibble.”
“OK, Little Man. I will.”
“Thank ya kindly.”
At that, Brownie jolts his head violently sideways, as if someone smacked him, and he exclaims, “Ah! Scritch, scratch. That’s it! That be it! Don’t have to take it… any… more… These thoughts. What? Why? Hurt like thorns. Squibble… Need the dirt, need home.”
With that, his whole body trembles. He becomes a blur. Parts and clothes disappear, contort, and shrink, with assorted pops and rustles. By the time it’s over, there is only Little Man, a field mouse, on the chair. He jumps off and runs to my pack. I go over to it and open the pocket where I keep my waxy camping chocolate. I taste it first. It’s still good. When I bend down and lay the rest in front of Little Man, he eats with relish. But he makes only peeping noises, no more words.
#
Some time later, I’m standing in the doorway with my backpack on. Trees are still exploding, and the book is a blackened, drip-stained mess. I look in the direction of my world. I see Little Man cowering in the bushes next to the trail, waiting for me. I look the other way, where Eulina disappeared. There is a phosphorescent green glow emanating from the forest there. A loud bang nearby sends a spray of boney shrapnel past me. I look back at Little Man, toward the real world, and smile.
I know which way I will go.
AS PUBLISHED in the June 2019 issue of the print magazine ParAbnormal.