Whisper, Whisper, Beneath the Leaves
by Allie Marini
The foundation of my home is but rubble now, gravel scattered across the floor of the glen like a game of jacks. Leaves sweep over the compact floor of concrete and stone studs over cold earth, a rustling like the tattered hem of long skirts across stone floors. Here and there I spy a bit of brick or rusted nail, long forgotten, out of place among the pinecones. These things are my secrets, hiding, hiding, like all the green women should have when the blaze of torches drew closer to our cottages.
Nature eventually takes back everything, and viciously. A chokehold of wisteria and kudzu envelop the remnant of a chimney, maybe once mine. The creeping vines stretch furiously towards a sun blotted out by lashes of pine branches. Once, it was nighttime and by the blaze of torch, the men looped a noose, leaving the shadows of seven in skirts dancing their death on the leaves and acorns. Fourteen feet sent a spell and a pall over the stillness of the ground.
After the fire, the grass knifed back up from the earth; greener, more tender, brighter somehow from the beauty of burning. Foolish fire, whispered we from the leaves. We beckon back the men, a safe flickering lamp of hobby lanterns. We draw travelers from their safe paths, receding back into the dark whips of branches by nighttime. Our ghost candles burn down the wick in the thatches of thorny blackberry canes and rotting rubble. We place them on a forgotten table, set to sup with boiled bread, spiced with ergot, a mouthful of madness and mushrooms gathered from the glen. Break bread with us, we invite them. And they always come. There is always an empty seat, an empty bowl, a bit of crust.
At dusk, we bring back a basketful of morels, ramshead fungi, both the fleshy fruiting bodies and the bodies of woody leather. We draw the knife across quarter-wise. We prepare the stew that will never be eaten, the echo of it always interrupted by the torches of men. We bake poisoned breads with honey fungus, harvested from beneath the stump. This magic thrives on the dead as well as the living, because here is where they are connected and eternal. Some will say it’s the season’s tainted blackstrap molasses that’s the flint, sparking small-minded men from their tables with torches; or it’s their unforgiving God and yearning daughters caught up in the thrall of amanitas, ghost fungus, and the death cap on rye, wheat, and barley.
In darkness, their calloused hands fashion knots, to say you may only know what we allow you to know, only heal what we say you can; you may only obey, never decide. By the pale light of stars, righteousness is obscured by the tops of scrub pines thatched together like a steeple of fingers at prayer. Our green women turn black at the end of ropes and accusations without the aid or word of God. They warn children to stay out of the woods, lest they discover what works the hands of their fathers have wrought. Children never listen. This is how they discover brutality. This is how they discover deceit. This is how their daughters discover the true value of daughters and the worthlessness of prayer. This is how fathers become forgotten. This is how more green women come back to the folds of the forest. This is how daughters learn from fairy tales and disappear.
Disappearing is where the pleasures of power are learned.
Every night, there is foxfire in the glen. Our bodies are taken back, eventually and viciously. We become bioluminescent toadstools and fairy rings. Everything in our glen glows and crackles until the sky lights up and dawn arrives. The first rays of sunlight always find cinders, smoldering from a fire that has never stopped burning because all time is all time and every night it is on fire. But in the daylight, there is only a foundation and a scarecrow, black now where once this forest floor was green. It feeds the crows who, bit by bit, scatter the bones and hair of the green woman for more miles than her legs might have taken her before. On a hundred fragile feet of the centipede, flesh is borne back to the dirt, the leaves, and the fungi of the forest, hidden now beneath all the things that live below the surface.
From beneath a blanket of moldering leaves, a whisper, the bones of a witch—I am still here, I am still here, I am still here.
Allie Marini is a Florida Woman, cross-genre writer, visual artist, maker, and tarot reader. Find her online: @kiddeternity or www.kiddeternity.com