Summer Environmental Writing Program

Writings

Poorgirl in the woods
by Lindsay Sainlar
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--I dedicate this to all the gnomes I stole these stories and images from, and to the little, shy black dog who never let me pet him.
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fantasia: a work in which the author’s fancy roves unrestricted.
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• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The beginning • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
There was a girl, a most beautiful girl who didn’t understand herself or the body she was given. Her name was Lucy and she lived for 21 years and for 21 years she roamed the earth like a caveperson. She was here and there, and never stayed for long.
Lucy lived in the barrens, on a prairie surrounded by forests in a peach house with sea green shutters. She resided herself with an artist who draws fantastic creatures and a Hearst winning photographer on a hill that was surrounded by a million caves and college students who never remembered what they did, but knew they were having a good time doing it. She went to a cheap school in a cheap town. It wasn’t a challenging school, but she found her niche as the newspaper girl (she was the George Willard of her college town) and the town knew who she was. Some people liked her and some people loved her and some people hung up nasty fliers around the school about her, questioning Lucy’s habitual consumption of alcohol and her writing abilities, and Lucy hung up that flier in her living room to show anyone who cared that some people were genuinely evil in this world. She enjoyed pushing the buttons of this predominantly Christian haven, and so she pushed away, digging a hole and sticking her foot in her mouth, choking on the desire to say no more. She was a bully who loved the burrows she had dug for herself.
Things could get unbearable at times, with pressure from school and family and friends and boys and work, but she could always escape to the nearby metropolis and stand small against the leaning bat tower that was built to ensure cellular reception. She could go and listen to bad country music and go thrift store shopping and listen as the angry voices in her head dwindled to a slight hum.
But sometimes she had to work, and work never let her leave the greens of the bowling hills she walked amongst. She told me she felt like she was stuck with the insecurity of never finding something else to make her happy. She told me sometimes that she felt like she was drowning in a world driven by senses.
She didn’t have cable in her apartment, so she didn’t watch television often. She mostly sat around with her roommates and a congressman’s son and played Spades while drinking strawberry milkshakes and getting stoned to pish the days away. They were all weird, they all did some strange shit, but they were some very interesting people that Lucy thought could change the world somehow. She said she wasn’t sure how they would, but she knew they could if they ever quit playing video games.
Lucy lived a monotonous life she wished to escape. Everything was lovely and dandy, but she talked about needing a break from the same old people, the same old thing, the same old moon and elevation. She needed a change in scenery because she was going crazy and she was desperate for something new and blue and borrowed and anything but old. She would stay up late and do nothing at all but be and be and be and she wanted to do something, she was tired of just being, she wanted the doing.
A guy dressed up like Michael Myers and stood and stood and stood outside her peach house on Halloween last year, so Lucy always left her lights on when she knew she was coming home to an empty house in the middle of the night. The guy who wrote the movie was from the town she dwelled in and she knew he would return one day to seek revenge on some unsuspecting college student with long hair. Plus, a girl had been murdered on her campus in the most heinous way possible and so she never really felt comfortable walking into a dark room. She had no tolerance for scary movies. She stopped watching horror movies after seeing “Scream,” hadn’t seen anything from the terrifying genre in years, but the image of pouncing predators still lingered somewhere in the back of her mind. She knew they were out there so she always left the lights on; it was for her personal safety, she said. But one night I guess it didn’t matter. She could have left on all the lights in all the world and it wouldn’t have helped her case that night.
They’re still not really sure what happened to her. It happened sometime in the night on Sunday or early Monday morning. Her roommate came home and she was gone but her car was there and the door was wide open. There was a struggle, shit thrown everywhere, I saw it the next morning. Her roommate called me crying and I came running. Lucy was gone. No one could understand. She never said she was going anywhere, but she left two checks for her roommate—one for rent and the other for electricity. I don’t know but I really think she might be gone forever.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • Miss Lucy would like to say something • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
This is Lucy. I am not a reincarnate. I am as I was before. I’ve just been kidnapped by a fairy and momentarily misplaced. I was watching Sex and the City, the episode where Charlotte finds out Trey is impotent, when someone knocks on the door to my apartment. The door was locked, so I got up to open it and when I did, there was a strange woman with a hole in her chin and long stringy hair, wearing a long tan hippie skirt with a white flowered blouse waiting on the other side of the threshold. She looked like a towney—the grotesques who were born and live and suffer in this small town I go to school in—so I was a bit alarmed. And with good reason because out of nowhere this lady jumps forward and grabs for my arms, but somehow I manage to jerk back in the nick of time, and remembering the self-defense article I had to write for the school paper, I grab for the copy of The Awakening that was sitting on the coffee table and I start using it like a two-by-four against this woman’s head, trying to escape past the door. She’s yelling stop it, and I’m yelling who are you, and she’s yelling I’m not a bad guy, I’m just a fairy coming to whisk you away. And I freak out even more because obviously this woman was on drugs and people will do anything when they’re on drugs, so I start running around throwing anything I can at this woman to get her out of my apartment. She was blocking the door and I couldn’t escape. I tripped and fell over the art easel my roommate conveniently set up in our living room and I went flying across the floor, completely losing my balance. The woman rushes to my side and pushes her hand against my hand and I felt numb all over. I couldn’t move and it felt like I was sleeping with my eyes open. I could feel my stomach churning and the posters on the walls began moving and the owl from a painting started moving his lips, but I couldn’t hear or decipher what he was trying to say. And the ground felt like a waterbed, and I was sinking and rising and the white light of the living room lamp began glowing in different colors, dancing like a rainbow and twirling in circles. I started laughing and laughing, and everything was funny, even the lady who sat beside me because it was like she wasn’t there.
But she looks at me then and says would you like me to help you? And suddenly I felt a lump in my throat and I couldn’t swallow and I couldn’t make sound and I felt like I was choking on laughter. She says snap your fingers and tell that feeling in the back of your throat to go away and it will. It’s all in your mind, you have complete control my darling, you are in control. So I snapped and I snapped and it all went away and so did I. It was dark for a minute and all I could hear was the sound of wind. I was being channeled through a hole and it was splendidly entertaining. I looped around because it felt like there wasn’t any gravity, so I looped like I was a ballerina doing a pirouette and I loved looping.
After a few loops, I fell out of this portal and landed at a gas station. The fairy said do you trust me and held out her hand and I said, sure why not? So she picked me up off the ground and said wait here. And so now I’m sitting at a gas station waiting for the fairy who plans on taking me to a different world. I can see her now, she’s walking with an Ale-8 and she hands me a Diet Pepsi and we hit the road in her black hovercraft that looked like a Toyota. She said it was a hovercraft and I believe her because I don’t think fairies can lie.
After a moment or two of silence, I turn to the fairy and tell her straight up that she doesn’t really look like a fairy and she says, then what do I look like? And I tell her she looks normal, that I’ve only seen fairies in Disney movies and those fairies floated around and had wands. And this fairy sighs and tells me to quit asking so many questions and relax. She tells me she is going to save me from the place I was just in, the place she thought I needed to escape. And I want to believe her when she says we’re going someplace cool, but it’s hard to trust something new. She’s being quite vague in her descriptions of where we are headed. I’m not even sure what she’s saving me from, but I’m going, I’m diggity down for whatever. She did steal me from a nasty place and she’s promising me the adventure of a lifetime, who can pass that up?
This adventure seems promising. She speaks of quaint towns hidden in rolling hills and living a quaint life with a few select individuals who are supposedly brilliant in their own ways. She talks about running with herds of elk or whatever they’re called and climbing mountains and fireflies illuminating the night. She says there will be a river, a big river with lots of damselflies and slippery rocks and toads. She tells me we can caulk a wagon and go drifting downstream if it tickled my fancy. She says I can do anything because there’s nothing I’ll really have to do. So I let her take me and I left the place that questioned me. This is my strange, strange story. I hope you believe it.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The forest • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
She picked me up. This mystic dreamer with braids in her hair and a hole in her chin who drove a black hovercraft. She took me to her lair; it was a 3-story brick house with four huge columns and empty beer cans on the front porch. She took me into her homeplace and told me to get dressed. She handed me a periwinkle fish costume, with gills and scales and all that jazz. I didn’t ask questions. I dressed with haste, ready to get the night over with. I was tired and altogether confused and indifferent about anything, just happy to be out of the other world.
She came in the room where I had changed and grabbed my hand; she said she was ready to go and so I went. We walked a bit and I asked her what to expect, asked for her name, and she just giggled like an excited little girl with pigtails and kept walking. I followed, unsure of where I was going, unsure of what this adventure would be like. She kept telling me I would be fine and to quit acting like a baby, but she would never tell me anything else.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The fish tank • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
She took me to a fish tank. To this point we had been on dry land, I was breathing the oxygen I was used to, the dry kind, and nothing had seemed particularly out of place just yet, not even the periwinkle fish suit that sucked in my fat rolls.
We reached a bubble shaped building with a blue awning and she told me to take a deep breath and show the man my fins, he needed to make sure I was old enough to swim. The kind man let me enter and I dove right in. I was swimming in the most crystallized liquid I had ever seen. It was cerulean blue, which appeased me because that was always my favorite crayon in the box. There was liquid everywhere. I could see the molecules floating around me. Each molecule had a name. I knew some of them. I didn’t know any of them very well, they were just molecules I had seen around. I didn’t chat with them for long, I still felt like I didn’t belong in the fish bowl. I wasn’t used to the fish bowl. I was used to home and the more I looked around at the molecules the more I felt like sitting down and smoking a cigarette. But you can’t smoke a cigarette inside the fishbowl, my friend. You can’t, it’s too wet in there. The lack of oxygen made me dizzy and I felt like letting myself sink to the bottom with the other bottom feeders. The social scene in the bowl wasn’t kosher enough for my standards. I was feeling as blue as the water I was drowning in until a mini-tetra came and talked to me. I recognized him right away, I knew him my freshman year of college. His name was Drew. He asked me what the hell I was doing in the fish bowl and I reciprocated his question. He told me he had been frolicking on a sandy beach in Florida when he came across your standard genie in a bottle, the kind that grants you three wishes. Drew said he had already used two of his wishes. I asked him what he wished for and he threw up his fins and pointed at his tetra-mini costume and screamed this is what I bloody asked to be, A DAMN FISH YOU CAN BUY AT A PET STORE. I could have been a shark, he said, or even a friggin’ free willy whale. I laughed and reminded him that he could always reverse his predicament with the third wish. He shook his head and said that was the thing, he didn’t want to change because his second wish was to be in a band, and now he was in a fish band called “Fish” and that they were actually pretty good. So good, he said he could retire and do nothing else for the rest of his life and still manage. He said he didn’t want to be human anymore and he offered me his third wish. He said I deserved it for the time he blew up my microwave and I said I wished to go home soon. So we floated there for a bit and talked about the time he blew up my microwave and the time he drove my car in the rain, when the raindrops had turned to diamonds as they drummed like a drummer boy on my windshield. He remembered the diamonds and I remembered how much I missed seeing him everyday. And then he left me to go eat some flakes that were floating at the top of the bowl. He offered to get me one and I obliged. I had eaten a few already. They tasted terrible but they made me feel loopy inside. After the first one I started to smile a little more and suddenly I became a bit more talkative with the molecule strangers, and after the second one I was telling my whole life story to this beta fish who wouldn’t stop looking at my gills. I couldn’t quit talking about the Japanese restaurant I worked at because I already missed the taste of miso soup and soy sauce, and the way they called me Roo-cee instead of Lucy and because I thought it was funny to tell stories about them. I liked telling people that the principal of my manager’s high school called him “titty” at his graduation and that his name was really Titi, pronounced tee-tee. I always thought that story was funny. It never ceased to amuse me. Maybe you have to know them. By the time Drew, the tetra-mini, brought me a flake, and I had bored the beta to death with asinine recollections, I was ready to leave and I asked my fairy if I could go home. She said the fish bowl was getting a little overpopulated for her too and she was ready to leave anyway. So we got out and dried off and I realized how long I had gone without breathing. I took a deep breath that turned into a yawn and I followed the fairy back to her homeplace. I changed out of my soppy fish suit and into a big t-shirt and boxers and fell asleep on a sofa.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The next day • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I was exhausted. The water wore me out. I slept there until I woke up to the fairy throwing me Tevas and old t-shirts and jeans to change into. She said we needed to go, that we would miss the moment if we waited too long. I said give me a minute, I still needed to wash my face and pee. I peed and as I sat there I almost felt like going back to the other side and chancing it, maybe I wouldn’t die, maybe I could save myself from the monotony, but I remembered that I wasn’t very strong and that I was kind of little and essentially defenseless against everything frumpy in the world. And so I got up from that toilet and flushed it, and as the swirls got sucked into the earth, I walked to the black hovercraft.
The fairy with a hole in her chin pressed a few buttons and talked to some people she already knew and I fell asleep immediately. We entered the woods as quickly as we left. And when I woke up, she gave me some leaves and told me to smell them. So I inhaled the smell, let the fumes and chemicals intoxicate my senses. A sensation entranced my body. I felt it first behind my eyes, a floating feeling that spread to my lips and back, a spiral of giggles tickled my insides and I let my mind gander with thoughts that weren’t normal and told the fairy a story about something that escapes me now. I handed the leaves back to her and asked if she wanted a smell and she took them from me. We exchanged and re-exchanged the leaves several times and then she told me to go. And I was confused. She said it wouldn’t be so bad. I shook my head and said it’s weird and the fairy punched me and told me to quit being a shit. She said, just go and try to enjoy yourself. Don’t box yourself in. Go, she said. Go now.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The gnomes • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
So I went and I went. I went until I was exhausted. I was everywhere and I was never sleeping. I walked for days. There were little gnomes pointing out plants and animals and mushrooms telling me this is this and this is that and telling me I should be writing all this down, that I’m going to want to know this kind of stuff later on in life. I was glad to learn, I had so many questions and sometimes I asked some of them. I didn’t talk to many of the gnomes, I thought they were scary looking. The fairy with the hole in her chin wasn’t there to guide me, and I didn’t really expect her to. Sometimes I found myself alone on a rock, staring out at things I didn’t understand. There were kamikaze bugs who taunted me, aiming for my eyeballs, flying right towards them at full steam. I swatted and swatted them away. I could see them laughing at the girl who didn’t belong there. They laughed and they laughed and they held their sides with amusement. I swore at them and threatened genocide for their species. So they fought back twice-fold and I lost to the kamikaze bugs. One bug, I couldn’t see what he was wearing, flew into my left eye. It didn’t hurt, but it was an uncomfortable feeling. I made a gnome touch my eyeball to free me of the speck that made blinking hurt.
The bug came out and I trudged on. The gnome came with me and I asked her if she knew about the leaves the fairy had showed me. She said she knew and so she led me to a field filled with the leaves and we inhaled the smell of plants and she told me stories about a far away land she had once dwelled in. She said she was close to a big body of salty water with a lot of free-thinking bronzed bodies who ended up by the salty water in a quest to find something golden. She told me she was a writer who noticed things and she was wearing a pink visor. I shook my head up and down and asked if she wanted to smoke a cigarette together and she said sure.
I liked this gnome. She was a funny gnome who didn’t take life so seriously, and I sought refuge in her indifference. We sat on a rock by the river and let nature play its movie for us. We let the animals and plants live their lives in front of us. We watched the damselflies hover above our heads. I kept my distance, but she let them dance on her skin. This gnome stood with a smile and extended her arms out until she couldn’t reach any further. She spun in circles and the damselflies watched in adoration. She stopped and looked at me. Straight at me, the flies were circling her, I could hear birds chirping in the distance and the water running downstream, the frogs were croaking with happiness and then things slowed down. She reached her right hand towards me, it was clenched in a fist, and when she spread her palm open, a swarm of flies flew up, up and away, following nothing but the desire to keep moving. It was a beautiful sight, actually.
We took their cue and pushed forward. We waded the river and watched the water shoot around our ankles. We let the forest, the different greens and browns and grays, encompass our minds. We walked against the current as I pretended to be interested in the liverworts perched on a rock structure that looked like pancakes stacked on top of one another. She tapped me on the shoulder and asked what I was doing in the forest.
I told her I wasn’t sure and she laughed. She told me she had found this place on her own. It seemed like a good idea to get away from the salty water, and closer to something with a little more steam in the weather. She thought it would cleanse her and I watched her as she told me this, I watched the way she looked up when she spoke, the way she placed her right hand on her hip and tapped her foot to the beat of some song that was stuck in her mind. I watched and the more I watched the more I realized she was mimicking my every movement. She stopped and stood straight up, she was taller than me now and she asked why I was chewing on my nails. She told me to quit, to quit being nervous. Her demeanor told me I didn’t have to be afraid. The gnome’s eyes danced with intellect and understanding and convincing compassion. She said there was nothing so bad in this world for me to be chewing on with such an appetite. Not right now, not here, she said. You need to take this time to find a balance. Find a balance, she said. If you try to boil a pot of water with too much heat, the water will topple over. If you use too little, it’ll never boil. You have to find that balance, sweetheart. You just have to find it.
I asked where this balance was and she said she wasn’t sure. She said her water always boiled, it didn’t matter what she did. The gnome looked to the west and asked what I was feeling. Her silhouette amazed me. She was sitting perpendicular to me now and the sun was shining on her like someone was standing behind her with a flashlight. Her hair lit up like diamonds, sprinkles of sunshine highlighting the blonde strands I could tell she never combed. I said I felt like a fish. The words leaked out of a small crevice in the back of my mind. I said I felt like the kind of fish you buy in a plastic bag at a pet store. I felt like I was still stuck in that bag, floating in the tank, my new home, just adjusting to the temperature.
She wrinkled her forehead and told me she was confused and asked what a pet store was. I shrugged and she pointed and said look at that, man, isn’t that something? I looked in the direction she was pointing and saw a pink sky brushed with strokes of gray and yellow clouds with the sun dipping behind the tallest mountain in the world. Look at that sun, she said. I think you should follow that sun. That’s what you should do. I see it in your aura man, you have a pixie green aura and you should go. Find that place where the sun sleeps at night. Find that spot my dear and never leave. She shooed her hands at me and told me to leave. Feeling confused and somewhat energized to do something spectacular, I stood and felt the wind shift downstream. I stared at the gnome and she shooed me again. The wind seemed to whisper “go” in my ears and so I told her I wanted to climb to the top of a mountain, and she told me that seemed like a good idea.
She said she wanted to stay by the water for a little longer. So I left her. I took what she said and I left. As I was walking away, I stopped to look back at her for a minute. She was braiding her hair with a smile on her face. The rays of sunlight were circling around her, dancing a reggae tune it wished would escape its brain. There was a pink polka dotted butterfly sitting next to her, eating the salt to boost his sperm count, and she was smiling at him. She seemed to be talking to him without words. The interaction between the two seemed strangely beautiful. For a second I wanted to eavesdrop, but I thought that would have been rude so I turned in the direction the wind pointed me in and put one foot in front of the other.
I imagined they talked about the things I would want to talk about. I imagined they wanted to talk about bad reality television shows and good reality television shows. I imagined they wanted to giggle about girl stuff and talk about periods and imagination, all while listening to Elton John sing in our ears from a boombox somewhere. I imagined they wanted to eat a baked potato with spray butter at ten o’clock in the morning and talk about what happened the night before. I imagined they wanted to talk about country music and how it made them feel, about how confused I felt, how silly I felt being in the middle of no where while there was so much going on elsewhere. That I was worried sick about going home and having nothing, knowing nothing. I was worried about having to explain where I’d been, who I’d talked to because this place wasn’t like anything my friends or family knew. I wondered if the gnome had a boyfriend back home, and if she thought he would go and find someone else while she was gone. I wondered and I felt silly for wondering. I decided it would be a waste of time to worry and think about something I was so disconnected from. So I let it all slide away, I snapped my fingers and let passivity seep into my soul. I thought I would take time to dance in the sunrays that moved around me. I would go see this and that and what and which, and I would let the people sing to me what they’ve learned. I would meet new people at every show and I would dance with blinders on, I wouldn’t care whether I caught a baseball at a baseball game or not, I wouldn’t care if there wasn’t an albino tiger at their zoo, I would go and let myself worry about less important things. This would be my vacation, I thought.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • the Stinging Nettles • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
And on vacations I like to feel different, and I thought I had spotted some of those leaves that the fairy had shared with me. I wanted the feeling the plant gave to me earlier so I walked to it and picked it with my hands. It stung a little but I grabbed it again and then my hand started to burn. This plant was on fire. The flames were burning my hands. The plant was punishing me, and I was pissed. I tried to grab its leaves again, to rip the goddamn leaves off. I just wanted some of those leaves but the plant wasn’t having it. I looked at my hand and the small welts that appeared on my hands. I cursed loud. I kicked the plant and called it a motherfucker. My hand was on fire.
I screamed a little as my eyes filled with water, and a gnome must have been startled by my oration of discomfort because he came running to witness my predicament. He asked what happened and I said that fucking plant over there stung me. The gnome, who was a very tall gnome, said yea man, that’s a stinging nettle. They’ll sting you, man. The gnome said come here behind this rock, I’ll tell you more. I followed and walked right into a spider web. I stopped for a second to spit the sticky strings from my mouth and to wipe the spider’s ruined home from my person. I walked right into his living room and I could see him glaring at me from the kitchen, the only room in his web that I didn’t manage to destroy. I shrugged and apologized and looked forward to see the gnome waiting patiently for me and I followed. He said listen man, those stinging nettles don’t really mean to hurt anyone. It’s been so deep rooted in their nature, they can’t help but hurt people. It’s a part of their tradition, it’s inherited anger man. A long time ago, he said, the man came in here and discovered the stinging nettle. It was called something different then. I can’t remember what it was called, he said. But the man came and found that if he took all the plants he found and ground them to grains and poured it in a bathtub and bathed in that bathtub, that his skin would turn an olive color. He remembered reading somewhere that tanned skin is something more respectable, that olive was a more fit color than white for men. So the man mass-produced this self-tanner and watched as millions of dollars poured into his industry. Everyone and their mothers were paying money to turn themselves a different color. The girls thought the olive color made them feel prettier and the men thought it made their muscles more definite. But the stinging nettles man, they got pissed. The man wasn’t thanking them anymore for their service and that annoyed the nettles. It became normal for the man to rip them from where they stood and so the man stopped being grateful. He stopped replanting them and became careless with their neighbors. The man was killing the nettles and everything around them. He was being destructive with their species, so the nettles got together one night when the man was on vacation in Key Largo. They decided they would host a revolution, they wanted a change of politics, they wanted a say in what happened to them because they were tired of listening to someone who didn’t appreciate them. So they clammed up and started biting back. They fought back and hurt the man until the man wanted nothing more to do with them.
In their minds they won, but you can tell they get sad sometimes. They want people to love them like they love the jewelweed, but they’re scared of getting hurt again, scared of getting taken advantage of. As far as they’re concerned, the ball’s in their court and they‘re content with their exclusiveness if it ensures their entirety. So they’re mean. They don’t smile for outsiders. They don’t trust people anymore because the pathos of human destruction was too heavy to handle, and can you blame them? That’s why they lash out. I heard there’s nettle in California that doesn’t sting; I wonder what they’re doing differently in the movie star state?
I said that’s a pretty cool story, and he said, yea man I totally made that shit up. I walked away from the yea man gnome and told him to jump off a tower and he told me that I was the implied exclamation point after the word misery. He looked at me and asked me about the last time I cried. His question startled me and I shook my head to the left and right to shake his question. I asked him if he cried and he said, yea man I cry all the time, but I’m a loud crier so I do it alone. I laughed and asked him to excuse me because I had to use the little girls room. He said yea man, and by the time I returned from relieving myself, he was gone.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • Little Miss Susan • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
But I met a pretty flower in his absence. She said her name was Susan and her eyes were brown. She told me I could call her black-eyed Susan because everyone else did.
This flower was a sad flower. She felt sorry for herself, she had no self-confidence, I could tell. But I couldn’t understand, I thought she was pretty and nice, so I sat down next to her and told her to tell me about herself. She laughed a little and asked me if I was serious. I said sure, why not? And I watched her and stared at the grass beside her stem and listened as she unraveled her history for me.
I used to be a tomboy, she said. My best friend was my next-door neighbor and he was a boy and we collected baseball cards, and rolled around in mud and played war on our front porches. He was America and I was Russia. He was the only friend I had for some time. He was a Common Ragweed, but that didn’t bother me. We were pretty nerdy, she said, but we sought solace in one another. We knew we were different and we didn’t want to be like everyone else for the time being. I didn’t even feel like talking to the other floral. But that all changed when I was in seventh grade and developed a teeny crush on a rare kind of boy, she said. He was a Ragged Fringed Orchid, his name was Chris and he made me laugh. He didn’t stand out in the crowd, not like the Tall Coneflower, everyone takes note when he comes to town. But Chris was inconspicuous, he was nothing special but beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I thought he was beautiful. I only saw him once. He didn’t last long. Only 5 days. It was June 13. I remember when he came out of hiding, I met him at a hippy concert and I fell for him and scraped my petals and pistols, and I wanted to be a girl. I wanted to fall in love. I started reading books about people who were meant for each other and I wanted what I read about, I wanted that fairytale kind of feeling.
Susan stuttered a little and paused her thoughts as she looked away. I could tell she was at the point where she might not want to say anything else—there was that glossiness in her pistil. But I asked if she fell in love with Chip anyway, I had to know, I’m a sucker for boy-talk. I asked her to tell me and she raised her stamen, asking for a minute. She was crying.
That boy broke my heart, she said after swallowing the bubble in her receptacle. For those five days he was mine, he loved me the way I dreamed of being loved. He was chivalrous and charming, and he always knew how to say the perfect thing. He could be mean at times, he had a bad temper, but even in his asshole rants, I felt a particular connection with him. I knew he wasn’t always like that. He was a weird guy, and I love weird. But one morning we woke up together and he got up and left. He probably left me for one of the blue-eyed Marys, the bastard. I haven’t seen him since. He left one of his flowers. I still have that flower and no one knows I still have that flower, not even my roots. I don’t know why I still want it, or even need it. I just wanted a souvenir of his affection. Something I could look at occasionally, even accidentally when I clean my stem, just to be reminded of what it was like to smile forever for no reason at all. That’s what I want. I want that feeling all the time. That glowing ball of elation that bubbles in the pit of your stomach when you’re in love, or lust, or whatever—that’s what I need.
I have a friend named Sleepy Orange, she said, everyone calls her that but I call her Encyclopedia Brown. She’s a butterfly and she’s the smartest butterfly I’ve ever met. I always have to ask her about these new plants that keep moving in around me. She knows all of their stories, she knows where they came from and where they are going. You can ask her anything and she’ll either know it, or she’ll try and make it up. But she fell in love, just recently. A journalist from a city came to visit for a day. He was a cute boy, he was one of those gnomes you see running around here. She followed him to the campfire. I couldn’t go and sit with them. It’s hard to move when you’re rooted in the ground. But they weren’t that far away. I could hear them talking and I saw her laughing with him. She was talking all intellectual like and reciting environmental jokes that I didn’t quite understand, and she was flapping her wings at him. I could tell she was flirting. She asked when he was leaving, and he said hopefully sometime before sunset and she said she loved that he said that. I heard her say that all the other gnomes would have said a time. Encyclopedia loves nature you see, she lives and breathes the land I’m planted on, and I never really knew there were beings out there who could be so devoted to a religion, a religious love of nature.
But I could tell she was digging this journalist fellow. She left with him and I haven’t seen her for days. And I’m jealous of the way she just lets herself float around, spending her love lavishly on boys without fear of going in debt. I wish I were as brave as her, she said. I talk about love like I’m good at it, but I’ve really just read a lot of books about love, I’ve never found it myself. I might as well live on a wall, Susan said. I think I’m scared of letting people in and getting hurt. I’ve been hurt before by plants I thought loved me, and it makes me nervous to cry again. But I like to think I’ll find it someplace real soon. And next time I hope I’m ready for it.
I told her she was never going to stick her stem in the same soil twice. Never, I said. You should give it a chance. Let your heart be broken because sometimes something has to hurt to feel good. Don’t live on a wall miss flower, I said, you don’t belong there, you’re much too beautiful.
I enjoyed talking to Susan because she was humble.
She talked about her life for several hours. She had a lot to say and so I listened and occasionally she would stop to ask me if I was growing restless of her rambling, and I said no. She laughed and carried on about her life, about her mother who smoked during her gestation period and about her father who pushed her too hard to reach the sky. She blamed her weirdness on her upbringing. That’s why I’m weird, she said, I can’t help my weirdness, it’s a birth defect. Cows won’t even eat me, she said, I AM AN INDICATOR OF POOR SOIL for crissakes. Who’s going to love that?
She was angry and swigging the water that had moistened the ground she inhabited. She started making jokes and cussing me out, and told me to leave her alone. She said the gnomes were having a party further up the hill, she could feel the reverberations of their drunken debauchery in the earth. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but I could tell she was used to being alone and probably preferred it. So I gave Susan my business card and told her to look me up if she ever made it to the city.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The party (not the Mickey Mouse Club band) • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I saw them ahead, the gnomes frolicking with their nakedness. I said hello and someone summoned me to come over. I heard someone yell, make her take her shirt off, and in utter confusion I stripped the shirt of my past from my torso. As I got closer I saw they had tapped a white oak tree and were drinking a magic potion they had stored in the bark years ago. They were pounding that shit. They told me to take a drink and the next thing I knew, I was singing songs from Disney movies and talking with someone about breaking hearts and listening to a girl with blue eyes and shiny, fine brown hair strumming on a guitar, singing with a voice I recognized from my childhood. I listened to her melodies, the change of chords, the soul in her body escaping through her windpipes as she sang the songs distant people once bellowed in front of thousands for a living. I started thinking about my family, about my friends and I cried for what they would never understand, for the beauty of this forest and the simplicity of a reclusive reality. I cried for the feelings I would never be able to fully share with the people I used to know. I turned and saw the fairy with a hole in her chin walking towards me with a mason jar of honey and a cup of tea. I hadn’t seen her since the morning after I grew fins and wallowed in a pool of strangers. She sat beside me and didn’t utter a sound. I tried swallowing my feelings, wiping away the tears that scared me. After a moment I let down the floodwall, I let go of myself and I cried like a bitch. She sat there sipping on her tea drink, understanding that what I needed was someone who wouldn’t ask questions, who could just sit beside me and be there for a minute. The fairy looked at me and said she felt unsure about herself too. I stared at her, the glossiness in my eyes made her appear startlingly angelic, she seemed to be glowing and her glow entranced me. It’s normal to feel unsure, she said. Don’t be scared of what you don’t know, be afraid of what you already know, that’s where you’ll get stuck.
And I don’t remember much after that. The magic potion caught up to me and that’s all she wrote before I woke up on the living room floor in some gnome’s hut without a shirt on. I asked why I was on the floor and all the gnomes laughed. They said I started talking to a chair and fell on the ground and proceeded to roll around screaming, look at me, I’m a rolly polly. They said two gnomes had to carry me home, and I giggled and nodded even though I didn’t believe a word they said.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The diner • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
They had cooked food and they offered me a feast that sounded foreign. I eagerly asked where the kitchen was, for I was as hungry as a hippo. A tiny gnome with wiry, blond curly hair offered to show me the way. She was wearing a green sweater with stripes of orange and brown and blue with a jersey material skirt and she smiled as she introduced herself as the lunch lady. A long time ago, the other gnomes decided that she would do all the cooking, and they would do all the cleaning. She loved cooking she said, she wanted to become a professional chef sometime in the near future but for now she was trying her hand at academia. She led me through a small cabin, through a living room with text papers thrown haphazardly on the couch, and books with the word “nature” in their titles littered the shelves, coffee tables, and floor. We walked past a bathroom and into a room with a big table and tomatoes on the windowsill. She told me to sit down at the table while she made me a plate. I asked if I could help and she told me to sit down and make myself comfortable. She asked me if I knew what day it was and I told her I thought it was Tuesday. She said that sounded promising.
She handed me a plate of noodles with mounds of vegetables and marinara sauce and said there’s some bread if you like. I nodded and she returned with a piece of bread and a canister of butter. The butter has no fat or calories, she said. It’s perfect, it’s all I use in my cooking.
Do you have anything to say, she asked me. I grinned and wiped spaghetti sauce from my chin and thanked her for the food. She said, just clean up after yourself and come outside, we need to leave soon.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • Something remarkable • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I walked outside and the gnomes asked me if I wanted to go see something remarkable. I didn’t, but I went regardless. I had nothing better to do. Everyone piled into a big blue hovercraft, a crazy tall, old gnome told me to sit shotgun and control the tunes. I sat next to him and my journalist instincts kicked in and I started asking questions about where he’d been, what he knew. He told me jazz and rock used to be slang for fornication. I asked how you used jazz in a sentence, whether it was a noun or verb or adjective or preposition or adverb, and he said he didn’t know. That was probably the only question I asked that he didn’t have an answer to. He drove and I sat, he told me about his long hair, about his family who lived in a different forest somewhere, and he drummed on the steering wheel like my dad does when Sam Bush is singing to him from the speakers in his red jeep. The old gnome drove and drove slowly, while the other gnomes sang and slept and talked about things that didn’t matter, complaining intermittingly about the songs I decided were fabulous and necessary to hear. Finally we reached our destination point and we set out on a trail someone had carved in the forest, the gnomes walked in a single file. I stayed with the slow gnomes, the ones who weren’t in a hurry to conquer the mountain, the ones you could tell didn’t exercise on a regular basis.
We saw a sign that said “Bowling Blue” and we walked to the edge of a cliff to see what was spectacular enough to have a sign, and down below there was something spectacular. Down below there was a waterfall. A few of the younger gnomes, eager with excitement and anticipation dispersed themselves down the ledge. They swung on grapevines to get from rock to rock, and hugged trees they found in their way to break their fall. I followed wide-eyed and grinning, this waterfall was beautiful and I was thirsty to dabble my feet in this big puddle. The water was descending down a massive boulder and through the boulder and all around the boulder that was stunningly beautiful and gracefully accentuating the overall allure of natural running water. I stopped several times in my descent to catch the momentum that was shooting me forward. I stared and took note of all the gnomes playing with different things in nature. I continued walking and made it to the bottom, and watched as two gnomes splashed around in their skivvies, yelping in ecstasy as the freezing cold water slid down the rock and through its holes and onto their backs, washing them clean and giving them the joy that only drowning in water can bring. Some of the gnomes didn’t want to get their clothes wet so they sat and stared off in the distance, playing with millipedes that needed attention. Some man wearing a turtle on his necklace started preaching about carpe diem. He kept praising the carpe diem mentality of the gnomes who were already splashing around in the water, he said they were really something. CARPE DIEM, he screamed as he grabbed a grapevine and swung towards beauty. Seize the day, I thought, and I remembered that I was supposed to be taking advantage of what was before me. So with this newfound sense of inspiration to live minute to minute, I took off my socks and shoes and decided to join them. I was going to live immoderately at this moment, even if it only lasted a minute.
I waded through the water, over the rocks and around the vegetation and found myself face to face with the falling water. Drops of water were piercing my forearms and kneecaps, the coldness made me shiver and my senses were keener than ever before. I could feel every drop hit me. I could smell the freshness of the water, hear the trickling, trickling, trickling of water as it fell off the wall and into a puddle of rocks. The water was being pushed further down stream by the rush of other molecules surging forward in anticipation of immersion into bigger waters. I could see an opening behind the falling water. Much like the surging water, I surged forward through the coldness, the wetness and joined the dampness behind the waterfall. There was a gnome perched on a rock in this crevice, she hollered for me to join her and so I found a comfortable rock to sit on to watch the water fall from its backside. The gnome was smiling like a child wearing a black fanny pack filled with chocolate candy bars, and the magic she saw and the magic I was beginning to realize struck a chord in the back of my brain. A Canadian folk song I once knew bellowed through my ears and out my mouth and before I knew it I was singing about making it all a little less cold. About slamming doors and being gone with the wind and doing things you would never do again, and how haunting and dangerous things can be when they come back to you.
And before long the giggling gnomes were joining me in song, they knew this song and it struck me as odd that these gnomes knew this song, because I didn’t think it existed in their land, but I shrugged and kept singing with them, basking in the harmony of different people. I sat there for sometime, screaming my thoughts over the deafening roar of rushing water, and my thoughts echoed. I heard myself say it was time to go, and so I went. I walked out and stood in the rushing water, letting every ounce of its wetness envelop my being and seep into my brain. I baptized myself in the loveliness and dwelled with the sadness of knowing good things don’t always last. I came out feeling refreshed and cleansed.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The departure • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
One of these gnomes, who looked like a character off this zip code television show I was raised on, looked at me with his piercing blue eyes and said that it was my time to go. He looked kind of sad and I didn’t feel so right anymore. He said, it’s time for you to leave this place and be yourself again, you need to go back to reality. And I shook my head, and my heart started beating frantically in my ears and I told him I didn’t think I was ready, and he said I would be, that I would have to be because there was no other choice. You can remember this place, he said, you can always look at a piece of grass and remember the places you walked, it’s as simple as a piece of grass. Let your surroundings be this story and remember it always in the pit of your stomach.
The gnome with blue eyes and unwashed hair said we would have to climb a very steep mountain before I could go, and so we went. We went up a few stairs and around some winding turns, past a few poles with mile markers and through a smorgasbord of trees and bugs and mushrooms. The mushrooms were glowing. There were red ones and green ones and ones with helmets and some that looked like turkey tails, and each one waved goodbye to me and I flashed them a final v-sign, smiling dreamily and wishing I were asleep.
We made it to the top of that mountain and I saw most of the characters that invested their time in me. I saw almost everybody I met in my quick adventure into the wilderness. I saw Susan and the stinging nettle and the butterfly that the gnome was talking to, and I waved goodbye to them. It was quite sad and I was feeling sentimental, so I etched a note in the dirt they inhabited. I wrote, “and so I will marry the world because I can’t stand the thought of tying myself down in this strange country”. They all nodded and winked. I knew they were happy I found something to love.
All the gnomes gathered around me and held hands as I wrote my name in the dirt. One by one they said, it’s been real, but it’s time to go Miss Lucy. They circled me like a fast train stuck on a circle track and I looked at each gnome and said thank you. They opened their embrace and there was a set of stairs in front of me connected to a large, looming and dominating steel tower with a red lookout chamber on top. A gnome with a bright, blinding yellow shirt popped forward and said you need to climb to the top. You’ll know what to do from there.
So I climbed. I climbed and climbed, turning in circles and gripping onto the handrails, reminding myself not to look down. I made it half way and looked out at what sat before me and I sighed in relief that there will always be pictures of this place if something ever happened to it. I surprisingly found myself loving nature and I wished to stay with it for a little while longer, but it was too late to make that wish and I kept climbing to my destination.
I made it to the top and sat down. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do from there. So I sat and looked out across the horizon. I saw trees from heaven and trees from the west and south and east and north and I smiled at the attempt the different species made to get along with each other. They even accept litter as their own, I thought. Wouldn’t it be nice if the humans worked like that? Wouldn’t it be nice. Wouldn’t that be a good song to wake up to every morning?
I talked to the nature that surrounds me and they sang me their secrets, their stories. Some stories I’ll never repeat again, some I’ll probably talk about a lot, but mostly I collected stories that will make me smile when I see a black-eyed Susan again.
The gnomes invited me in and told me what to do, and I was grateful for their instructions. Right now I’m standing atop a fire tower. An enormous structure made of metal parts and wooden boards. I’m at the highest point a human can go without access to the key that unlocks the actual tower part of the fire tower. My hands are still shaking from the overall overwhelming sensation of facing death at such a high altitude. The cigarettes have shortened my breath and given me fatigue. I can feel the sweat gathering in the cups of my padded bra and beading in the small of my back. I wipe the sweat with the shirt I purchased for a dollar at the Nashville Goodwill Supercenter when I was with my debutante friend visiting a guy named Red.
I felt a strong breeze and I felt normal again. The breeze got stronger and stronger and I lost my balance and I fell.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • Falling and getting eaten • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
I fell from the tower. I literally fell for yards and yards at a very slow pace. It was strange how slow I fell, I was creeping along, looking at the hills painted like broccoli, the dinner roll shape of their curves. I was flying, but I was falling. I never felt so fancy free and I let myself fall and I felt a feeling of elation in the pit of my stomach. I stretched my arms out and let the air rush throughout my hair, around my body, up my legs and across my arms. I let it surge with power, it was like freezing cold water falling all over my body from every tip of my toes to the strands of red and brown on my head. The breeze was refreshing, it made me want to sing rock and roll and put on a pretty dress and wear a cowboy hat. It made me want to dance on tables and drown in a puddle of molecules I’ve known for years. The breeze reminded me of a boy who bought me a flower at a gas station and pressed me to a fence and asked why I smiled when I kissed him.
I was falling and every good memory I’ve ever had was resurfacing, dancing in my head to a song Bob Marley would have sung. The notes swirled and swooped like a pipevine swallowtail dancing in the wind. And anytime I started to feel sad I snapped my finger and told the bad thoughts to go away and the bad thoughts politely obliged and made room for a good story, a flood of stories that I’ll never try to forget.
I fell for a really long time, it felt like a lifetime, but I eventually approached the bottom and the ground opened up and swallowed me whole. The earth ate me and I went through his digestive system. I slid like a mad woman, screaming with sheer ecstasy down this slippery slide-like tube and I saw everything the earth had eaten as I slid past the stomach and into a small room that led into a big room where I hung out for a while and marinated on my experience with the gnomes. There was a picture on the wall of a flower who strangely resembled Susan, and I stared at the flower, wondering how Susan was and I didn’t worry for long because I knew she would be fine. She would work out her issues and blossom in her poor soil and snap out of her funk. They always do, I thought.
Eventually the earth squeezed me out of its hold. Mother Earth squeezed and squeezed me like a hug and I never felt so loved by something I didn’t understand. She squeezed the depth of my soul and I popped out on the other side of the world, spiraling down a tunnel of friendly faces who smiled when they saw me and there was music being played by my past and I reveled in the free world because I knew I didn’t need money to love. I slipped out in an unfamiliar land I’d been to before and stayed there for a few days. I sat on porches and watched cars go by and yelled at a hippie walking her dog and smelled leaves on a busy street with three rocket personalities I’ve known forever, and I felt like I was home again. I wasn’t even home, I wasn’t at the place where they send my mail, but I was at home. It felt like home at least, and nothing had really changed.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • The ending • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
This is me again, the narrator from earlier. My name is Lindsay and I am the author of this fantastic story you just read. A story so fantastic you should feel delighted that you got the opportunity to read it. You should feel so pleased and moved to send me a Christmas card when winter comes around. I’m actually stealing this idea of talking to the audience from another author of a fantastic story. His name is Gurney and you should read his books. I’m eating tuna steak with a fork and wearing a baseball tee and writing what you’re reading on a piece of filler paper with a black ink pen from the Hampton Inn.
Lucy happens to be a very good friend of mine and she told me all about her adventure into her woods, and since I am an aspiring writer, I thought I would jot her story down for the world to read and so Lucy could cherish her memories in a story-like fashion. A good story changes you—I read that somewhere and I find that to be astounding. I really do. I think stories can change you. Have you ever read The Giving Tree?
Anyway, Lucy came home a few days ago. She’s back on the saddle and glad to be home for the time being. She told me one evening after a few drinks that life in the city is fast. She had forgotten about responsibilities and how to drive, but she was transitioning with ease. I’m her best friend, so she tells me more than she would normally tell other people, and she told me she might have become a little nature nerd. The plants she sees interest her now and she bought a few of the books she saw in the gnome’s diner. She said she would like to live in the woods with interesting gnomes again, but that it would probably never happen again because good things never happen twice. And I told her that I would have to kill her if she went off and became a do-good, vegetable eating, Walt Whitman loving hippie, and stopped shaving her armpits and legs. She laughed and told me not to worry. She said she liked making her life a little less hairy, and if shaving made her life feel a little less cluttered, she said she would shave her days away. But as for everything else, the possibilities are endless. She was who she is and I laughed because some things never change.

The end.