| |
 |
|
traces
by francesca forrest |
| |
|
 |
| |
|
|
“Look,
look!”
My little
neighbor Robin came running up to me as I was finishing the
morning dog walk. His cheeks were two red circles, and his
nose matched. He was holding a battered leather glove, frost
whitened.
“All that’s
left is the glove,” he said, eyes wide. “They took him away
and left the glove.” He thrust it forward, and Shadow
sniffed at it and glanced at me, wrinkling her eyebrows.
I smiled.
“I think
someone just dropped the glove, probably earlier this
winter,” I said. “It happens all the time. Haven’t you ever
lost a mitten?”
|
|
|
 |
|
|
Robin
nodded, solemn.
“So you
don’t need to worry. No one’s been taken away. Someone
probably misses their glove, though.”
Wordlessly,
he handed me the glove and walked slowly back the way he had
come, a funny bundle of textures and colors--pale, straight
blond hair, deep brown wooly sweater hanging to his knees,
the hint of overalls, and then the bright yellow rain boots.
Always the rain boots, even in the dead of winter. I brought
Shadow into the house, and after feeding her, I sat down to
e-mail Aiden about the encounter. He was as fond of Robin as
I was, and the story would probably be a welcome change of
pace from his conference panels. |
|
 |
|
|
Robin and I met up again in the late afternoon, when I
emerged from the swampy area behind both our houses--my
shortcut home from the post office. The day had been warm
for January, but now it was cold again; the mud was freezing
and ice was forming at the edges of the hummocks of tussock
sedge. Robin was balancing on one of these, and this time he
was holding an ancient boot, caked with mud. He held it up
to me.
“He has no
glove, and he has no boot,” said Robin. A breeze hissed
through the sedge, and Robin hunched his shoulders. “His
foot and his hand must be cold. Are you going to rescue
him?”
“I don’t
think anyone needs rescuing.”
It was
funny about the boot, though; people drop gloves by
accident, but they don’t generally leave boots behind, and
this must once have been a nice one; it reminded me of the
ones Aiden and I had bought, some years ago, for hiking.
Maybe kids had tossed a boot into the swamp for a prank. I
suggested this to Robin, who stared at me, noncomprehending.
“They’ve
pulled him deeper in,” he said, pointing into the swamp, a
dim place, now that the sun was setting, all desolate, bare
trees, their feet in water that was stiffening by the
minute, and humps and lumps of sedge, some still encrusted
with the remains of the last snow.
“What if
his toes freeze? What if he can’t walk? They won’t leave him
alone...”
“It’s
getting pretty dark; let’s go back up to the houses, okay?”
I said. “I don’t think your mom can see you down here.” |
“But
what about him?” He held out the boot again. I frowned. How
to answer?
“This boot
is old,” I said at last. “It’s been in the swamp a long
time. I’m afraid it’s way too late to rescue the owner now.”
I shivered. Not a very good answer. I relieved Robin of the
boot, took his hand, and walked him back to his house, then
went in to my own to mix up some hot chocolate and send
Aiden another e-mail about our eccentric little neighbor,
though he still hadn’t responded to the first.
Miranda had
been dropped home from drama club in the meantime and looked
up from the living room floor, which was covered now with
her school books and papers.
“Is that
one of dad’s old boots?” she asked, glancing in distaste at
Robin’s gift. “What’d he do, bury it or something?”
“Robin
found it in the swamp. It does look like the ones dad and I
have, though, doesn’t it.”
I set it
down by the door and went to hang up my coat in the closet,
but my eyes were arrested by the boots in there. Really,
they were just like the one Robin had found. And why were
there only three? Why was Aiden’s left boot missing?
In an
irrational panic, I grabbed the boot and headed back
outside, a mistake without my coat; it was quite cold out
there, and dark, but I didn’t go back inside, because there
at the edge of the lawn stood Robin, his pale face only just
visible. He was holding something else now: Aiden’s
red-and-black checked lumber jacket, that I hadn’t seen in
ages, stiff with dirt and covered in leaf mold.
Never mind
that Aiden had set out just two days ago, in dress shoes and
a new coat, for his conference half a continent away. This
other reality was more sharp, more perilous. I took the
lumber jacket from Robin and put it on.
“Down
there, you think?” I asked, looking toward the swamp.
“It’s not
too late,” whispered Robin. “You can use my flashlight.” It
was bright yellow, like his rain boots. “Good luck. I hope
you bring him back.”
Down the
hill and into the swamp. It’s a tiny place; it’s not even
really a swamp, it’s just a wetland area between two roads,
I told myself. That, and I’m crazy. But beneath that mental
chatter, How to find him?
A
flashlight in the dark is a bad idea. Aiden’s often said
this. Your eyes rest on a tiny circle of light and become
all the more blind in the surrounding darkness. After only a
few minutes, I flicked off the flashlight and stuck it in my
pocket, took a deep breath, and looked around. I could
barely see my feet, but I could make out something of the
rise and the fall of the ground, so I aimed for the fallen
logs and tussocks and avoided flat expanses, which might be
firm, but might be mud, or water under a thin skin of ice.
Once I missed a tussock; mud swallowed my right foot and
clung to my ankle. Fortunately my left foot was secure, and
I was able to brace myself against a tree and yank my foot
free, but it was chilled through and hurt to walk on. I
started shivering.
Ahead, I
could see some pinprick lights, faint, but in the darkness
they drew the eye. A treacherous hope flared at the sight of
them. It’s the lights from the houses on the other side of
the swamp. I’ve come clear through to the other side, and
there’s nothing here. I let myself get carried away, that’s
all. I’ll go home and call Aiden, and we’ll laugh at how
Robin spooked me. I picked up my speed, but a strange
dizziness made me slow right back down again. It was sky
above that was making me dizzy. No, it was the black swamp
trees, with their thin, bare branches, and their slender
trunks, the uncountable number of them, stretching out into
an unresolvable darkness, that were making me dizzy.
This wasn’t
the swamp I knew. It wasn’t a sliver of wetlands between
roads. This place relaxed out in all directions, expansive,
maybe endless. Those weren’t the lights from the houses on
the other side of my swamp that I was seeing. I pulled
Aiden’s jacket more tightly around me. At least the lights
seemed stationary; at least I seemed to be getting closer to
them. Not will-o-the-wisps, then.
Closer
still, and I saw the lights, softly phosphorescent, were
clinging to an old wreck of a tree, a ruined trunk whose
crown had long since cracked and fallen and been digested by
the swamp, leaving a broken pillar, leaning at a dangerous
angle, thickly draped in some leafless vine, and hosting
these glowing lights, these fungal fireflies.
The tree
trunk changed beneath my gaze, the way things sometimes do
in darkness, and now I saw it as a man on his knees, too
tired to throw off the weight of vines and stand, barely
able to hold up his head and turn a gaunt face skyward. The
furrowed brow and sunken, bearded cheeks did not belong to
Aiden; this was some ancient traveler, some tramp. I
screamed all the same.
At my
scream, the lights lifted from the tree--or man--and grew
bodies of their own, each head topped by a phosphorescent
glow of hair as pale and fine as milkweed floss.
“Why”
“Are you
here?”
“Go away!”
“So noisy”
“Awful”
“Unless
you”
“Want to
stay?” |
They
shared the words among them the way leaves share the wind,
and with the last words a few of them advanced on me,
reaching thin arms up to me like children asking to be
carried. One touched the sleeve of Aiden’s jacket, and I
drew back sharply. Thin, white mycelium strands stretched
from where the creature had touched me to its slender
fingers. I broke the connection with a sweep of my arm and
tried to brush the stuff away, but it clung, sticky, and
smelling of earth.
“Then go
home!”
“Go away!”
They made
shooing gestures now, and several of those that were closest
to the tree drifted back to it, their bodies melting away
until only a soft circle of light remained, embedded in the
tree. Or man. I shuddered, gritted my teeth, and took a step
closer, back into their midst.
“Keep off,”
I growled as they reached toward me again, and they shrank
away. I put my hands on the tree trunk, so waterlogged and
rotten that its bark crumbled away at my touch, and my palms
rested on cloth and flesh, a bare shoulder and the faded
remains of tattered shirt.
I swallowed
and took a deep breath. Then, though I cringed to do it, I
started pushing the lights off the tree.
“Stop!”
“Stop it!”
“She’s
another one, come for a harvest.”
“You can’t
take us away.”
“Not like
the other one.”
The lights
that I had shaken free had grown bodies again and were now
encircled by their friends, who stared at me with anger and
accusation in their eyes.
“I don’t
want to take any of you,” I said, trying in vain to wipe my
hands clean. “I don’t want anything to do with you; he’s the
one I want.”
“The other
one who came”
“She stole
one of us away”
“He never
came back”
“She
changed him”
“He’s not
one of us anymore.”
Robin? In
my mind’s eye I saw Robin, with his pale, white-blond hair,
balancing on a hummock of tussock sedge. Robin’s mother was
older. Wishing for a child and slow to conceive, had she
walked into the swamp and come out with a changeling baby, a
baby that she had weaned of some, but not all, of its
strangeness?
“This is
who I want,” I repeated, knocking more bark from the arms
and legs of the unmoving man. I looked into his eyes, but
they stared past me without seeing.
“Are you
alive? Can you hear me?” I asked. I hesitated to touch his
cheek. This haggard creature was not my husband. But the
boot, the jacket, were my husband’s. Did that mean that
somewhere else in this endless swamp, Aiden needed rescuing?
Was this old wreck a distraction? Would I save a tramp and
lose my husband?
“You don’t
want this one,” said the lights, swarming about the trunk
and its viney chains. “We need this one. You find someone
else.”
I could see
both his arms now, and one bare hand, gnarled as an old
root, and blackened. The other hand was gloved. I felt an
inward pang. I had brought the boot and the jacket, but not
the glove. The bare hand looked frostbitten, useless. I
pressed both my own hands around it. It was cold and stiff
as wood.
One of the
lights had managed to slide itself between me and the man: I
was face to face with this strange being.
“This one
is ours,” it said, resting an arm on the man’s arm. The
creature’s fingers vanished into the man’s flesh, and the
luminescence about its hair and face seemed to glow
brighter. Murmurs of assent came from the others; they were
pressing in close now.
Between my
hands, I felt a faint heat rising.
“So you are
still alive.” I moved my hands to his cheeks and forehead.
In a minute I felt warmth there too.
Something
soft and light brushed against my neck--another of those
damn creatures, burying its mycelium fingers into my skin.
In a panic, I pulled it off and hurled it to the ground.
There was a soft thud, and its body vanished, then
reconstituted.
“It’s
someone else you want,” this one said, sweeping its arm in
an arc, and an image of Aiden flashed before us, Aiden
smiling and waving as he got in the car to drive to the
airport. The image vanished, and the creature tilted its
head, watching me.
I
hesitated, and several of the creatures reestablished
themselves along the spine of the poor man whose face lay
under my hand.
“Robin sent
me to rescue the man who lost a glove and a boot,” I said,
to myself as much as to the ghostly lights. “This man has no
glove and...” I looked down “...no boot.” I knelt and pushed
the mud and twigs away from the man’s foot. Carefully, I
slipped the boot onto it.
“What about
Aiden?” said a voice, my voice, but coming from the creature
that I had knocked from the ground.
“She
doesn’t care”
“She
doesn’t love him”
“She likes
this old thing instead”
“She’s just
another kind of thief” |
|
“Selfish”
“Greedy”
“Trying to
take away what we need,” chorused the lights.
I pushed
more of them off his spine, and more bark fell away. I took
off Aiden’s jacket and wrapped it around the man’s
shoulders. I shivered with the cold and pulled the sleeves
of my jersey down over my hands.
“Oh-ho,
look!”
“Fresh!
“New!”
Their
bright heads leaned toward me.
“Keep
away,” I said, grabbing a stick and shaking it at them. I
turned back to the man.
“Are you
awake? Can you hear me?”
He made a
groaning sound, like an old tree limb creaking in the wind.
His eyes closed, then opened, and he turned to look at me.
“I never
thought I’d see a human face again,” he whispered.
“Can you
stand? You can lean on me.”
He
struggled to stand, and the groan that escaped from him then
was so pain filled that I felt it in all my own limbs and
joints. I put his arm over my shoulders.
The lights
surrounded us.
“You won’t
leave”
“You’ll
fall”
“The mud
will grab you”
“The old
logs will trip you”
“Then we’ll
have you”
“Both”
“One almost
finished”
“And one so
new.”
“Just clear
off,” I shouted, waving my stick. The man and I took three
successful steps forward--and then I heard the crack of ice,
and this time it was my left foot that was plunged into cold
water. I pulled it out and cursed; we staggered but managed
not to fall. The lights were laughing at us.
An
inspiration hit me, and I reached into my pocket and pulled
out Robin’s flashlight.
“Here, you
lot--a present from your old friend.” I turned it on and
shone it on them; they shrank back, covering their faces.
“It’s got two D-cells in it; why don’t you see what you can
make of it. Maybe it’ll be just the flavor you’ve been
craving.” I tossed it into their midst. They gathered in a
wide circle around it, and slowly the circle tightened, long
hands reaching for the light. The creatures didn’t look up
again.
The man and
I continued on our way, and gradually the journey became
easier. The man seemed to be gaining strength, and by the
time the silhouette of my house roof came into view, he was
no longer leaning on me. We stopped at the edge of the
swamp.
“Thank you
for rescuing me,” he said. I stared into that weathered
face. Despite the beard and the furrows and creases, there
was something about it, especially the deep set brown eyes,
that reminded me of Aiden.
A rectangle
of bright light appeared up at the house as Miranda opened
the door and peered out.
“Mom? Mom,
are you out there? It’s Professor Fosse on the phone.
There’s been an accident. He says Dad’s all right, but you
should come to the phone. He’s in the hospital.”
I looked
over to where the man from the swamp had been standing, but
he had vanished. I was alone at the foot of my backyard.
“I’m coming
right up,” I called, and hurried to the door. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Francesca Forrest lives at the edge of
a swamp in western Massachusetts. She polishes words for a
living, enjoys exploring the wilds, and sometimes writes
stories or poems based on her experiences.
Her website is her blog,
asakiyume.livejournal.com |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
