aithne | Fiction: Green As Any Glass

A quick first draft of a Glory and Sara story.

Glory waits.

The light from the window illuminates her froth of fire-red curls, spilling over freckled shoulders and down her tanned back. She's got a glass of water, does Glory, but it's gone all warm in the time she's been waiting here. She's curled up, watching the door with wary eyes.

Such is the scene I walk in on when I come in, unlock the cabin door, stand frozen with the key in my hand, seeing the girl on my bed entirely naked. "Ah, hello, Glory. How did you get in here?"

Sly smile. "I have my ways." She shifts fluidly, unrolling herself, showing me the long scars on her thighs, the thatch of hair between her legs, the small breasts held high. I stopped being jealous of Glory long ago; my own body has fallen into human disarray, my black hair sprinkled with more and more white every year, the sun drawing lines on my face. Weathered, I say. Aged as finely as wine, says Thomas, who is my friend and occasionally my lover.

But between him and I are two things: landscape, and Glory. So I do not see him nearly as often as I'd like.

"Sara, Sara." Glory bounces to her feet, interrupting my reverie. "Sara, the summer is ending. The days are getting shorter. It's almost the harvest season."

"And?"

"Where have you been? I thought we would run the hills today. See the last of summer and the first fires of the leaves. Why are you wasting so much time? Why weren't you here?"

I let the bag I've been carrying thump to the floor. "I went to town. I needed a few things--sugar and salt, and some supplements for the horses. I work for a living, Glory. I can't spend all my time rambling the hills with you." This is an old argument, worn smooth by the years. I pull things out of the bag and start putting them away.

"Well, you're home now. You can come with me! There is still daylight left. Please, Sara? Please?"

She pleads like a child, all innocence and upturned face. I have to admit that the hills call me, too, the late-summer cicadas droning in the trees. Everything I have to do can wait until tomorrow, or be done by lamplight tonight. So I agree, and we go.

She is barefoot and naked, running up the paths before me, nimble as any wild thing. I am slower, heavier; I have been tamed. But that means I am the first to notice the shotgun blasts from the valley before us, as I have stopped to rest, listening. "I wonder who's out hunting?"

Glory is poking an anthill with a stick. "Nobody lives down there. Just manzanita and granite in that one. Not many deer, but that was a shotgun. Who goes hunting quail with a shotgun?" She drops her stick and swarms up a nearby tree, unconcerned by the scrapes the rough bark leaves on her skin. The sun is edging towards late afternoon, and she shades her eyes, looking. "Hunh. There! Nobody we know. Should we go say hello?"

"Glory. You have no clothes on."

"And?" She grins, white teeth flashing. "I know, I know. Just kidding you. We should go. I think they're moving this way."

Retreat becomes breathless, heady, headlong flight, through the long dusty pine-smelling afternoon. Even my feet feel light as we race each other, running as I remember us running when we were children, when we were both innocent of the world. Glory has never known anything but these hills. Her kind, I am told, do not travel. I went away, but came back, granite dust in my blood.

And flight ends in a hard tumble down a hill, ending up under a tree, tangled in one another and Glory kisses me, her sweaty body pressed to mine. I give her what she wants without her asking for it, as I always have. She tastes of rain and electricity. It's like making love to a thunderhead.

I once thought I'd marry Thomas. But then Glory laid her static-charged lips on mine and I knew that I never would. Not while I stay in these hills.

Not while green eyes and freckled shoulders hold me hostage.

She whispers in languages I cannot understand, she holds my body with hers and cries out, Eithne, eithne, lu an edrach! She does not love me, but I am hers, as much as I belong to these hills. I sometimes think that I have the same place in her life as one of her dogs, her pack of malamutes, each of them uncannily intelligent, with mismatched eyes and silent dog grins.

I belong to her as my mother belonged to her mother. We will each have one child, both daughters. And when I die, she will depart just as her mother did. Such it has always been between our two families. She has never explained to me why this is, and I have never understood.

All of these things I think as we lie together in the shade of the tree, pine needles and duff cradling us. Glory kisses my brow.

"Thomas comes tonight," she said. "You won't tell him, will you?"

"He won't know, no."

"He'll stay away, after." Again she kisses me, fills me with some tickling feeling like cat's whiskers brushing my skin. "There will be time enough."

"I know." And I do. Because tonight, Thomas will make love to two women. He will slip from my bed while I pretend to sleep and meet Glory in the forest, and she will clasp him between her tanned thighs and drain him dry. And in the spring, our daughters will be born.

She lays a hand on my forehead and the thought is whisked away. "Sweet Sara," she whispers. "You do love me, don't you?"

"Hopelessly." It is the rueful truth.

"My pet, my dear, and you will never leave me. Never."

"No, never. Never, Glory."

Content, she smiles and curls her small body against mine. I think of Thomas, our own Tom Lin. I have seen his unwary blue eyes, his open smile, the beard beginning to go grey. I have seen how he looks and me, and does not suspect.

If he tried to take me away, I would turn to ice and then fire in his arms. I would be the serpent coiled around his body, crushing him. I would be the bear and the ox, rending with claws and horns. He would not survive the holding, and I would be free, but alone.

He will never know, will Tom Lin. For I will never tell him.

*****

This is based in part on the story of Tam Lin. It'll be longer, one of these days.