In the glade, far down below the McGuthries’ pond, there was a little knoll beside the pussy-willow. I used to walk there when I was a girl. I’d hike up my pants, and march through the marshy wetlands in my crocs, feeling the salamanders and toads swim past my toes.
Sometimes I’d catch them if I wanted company. But mostly I was chasing something else. Bigger fish, as they say. I would spend hours searching for him, romping through and leaving tracks that he could easily avoid. He would loop back around and glance at me through blackberry bushes I’d already passed twice, his blue lips stained a dark purple.
I guess I shouldn’t call him a he. That’s just what I called him when I was little, really he’s not a he or a she, but something else entirely. I think I only called him so because it was the aura I’d felt around him when he whispered. When his voice tinkled in the breeze and left me gasping from the soft vibrance it radiated. I’ve still never heard anything else like it.
As I got older, his visits became less frequent, while mine were more common. Sometimes I would see him dancing across the marsh and I would roll up my pants to the knee and wrap the long-sleeve my mother always insisted I take around my waist before galloping through the wetlands. He would see me and his eyes, green full through (as if I were staring at an ocean full of algae) would blink sideways. He’d tilt his head and part his lips as if just seeing me for the first time. As if I were troubling him in my difference.
Perhaps he knew I was changing and it troubled him. Perhaps he saw my shifting spirit from child to adolescent and grieved because he’d thought he’d had more time. I still hadn’t known what he was at the time, just that I longed for him in a way that made me traipse through the River Birch and glance around every Swamp White Oak.
He’d told me the tree names when I was a girl; held me on his shoulders so I wouldn’t soak my feet. He’d heard humans were fragile and could catch things like colds that would end their life in days. I’d told him that people don’t die from colds, but he’d held me in his arms and I was glad for it.
The funny thing is, now I can’t quite remember what he looked like. I remember his eyes, I remember his webbed hands, I remember his voice that wasn’t a voice, more of a whisp that I somehow understood and no longer could as the years went on. I remember that he never changed. At least not much.
Once, he’d come with his hair, or what I can only call hair, shortened to his shoulders, instead of trailing along in the water behind him. He said it was a great disgrace, but when I asked him why he’d cut it his antenna had buzzed a little between his eyes then stopped.
Sometimes he would take me swimming in one of the deeper parts of the swamp where the weeping willow was always green. I told him the trees back at my house were naked by November and he made a sound that sounded like a crow cawing from his stomach and his forehead at the same time. I think it was a laugh because his eyes went from their normal green to lavender. He doesn’t express emotions in his face, you see. But somehow I always knew what he meant. I think it’s why he found me so often.
I say I searched, but really it was never me who found him. He was like a wild animal that way, he was only ever seen if he wanted to be.
That’s why the years after I turned eleven were so challenging.
He would hide from me, though I went to the pond where the willow was always green, and the rocks where we used to sit and cook crawfish and reeds in the noon-day sun. I couldn’t catch any when he wasn’t around.
It started to become lonely to sit in the wetlands alone, and more and more often I couldn’t find him. So one day I stopped going. I don’t remember exactly when it was, just that there was a shattering inside me like broken glass, as if that decision cemented a sort of unbelief in myself that couldn’t be revoked.
Sometimes in the summer I would walk through the marshes again, I would let myself be eaten by the mosquitos and let the sweat cling my hair to my forehead, and sometimes, if I was very lucky, I would hear a clinking sort of flute-y wooden instrument, and I would glimpse him through the trees like a blink.
Then he’d be gone. Lost to the winds of time.