The Green Dead Girl

Why eateth your Master with Publicans and sinners? But when Jesus heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance. 

Matthew 9: 11, 12, 13

She comes to me all the time.

When I’m sad and lonely she comes to me. When I am horribly cold, she puts herself around me

            She comes to me, she won’t tolerate my sadness. She tells me that she loves me.

 I can’t help but love her, even though she is what she is.

When I first met her, she would tell me that she was kind, sweet.  I wondered why she bothered to pretend to be this way. She was cruel and beautiful and a liar.

 She lied to me all the time. This became tiresome, was tiresome, but she laughed so prettily, smiled so wondrously that I had to forgive her.

 I won’t leave her there alone, in that place, in that terrible place to which she has been, The Lake of Fire.

I wondered what she wanted. I knew that she was lonely.

I saw her. I knew that she was dead. I wondered why she was green.  At first, the green dead girl frightened me. When I first saw her wandering about the wooded backyard of my house one night, I made sure to lock all the doors and windows.

Of course, she managed to come in.

Night after night. The light tread on the steps, the soft knock on the door, the turning of the knob, her laughter. The door would swing open and no one would be there. I would just hear her whispering and laughing. Whispering lies and telling me things that I knew were not true. She did this so often that I double-bolted everything. I didn’t want to hear her, to listen to her. I wanted to rest.

She became horribly angry, and I told her to go away; she was going to do terrible things, and I asked her how; she smashed open the windows, and I realized, it became real, tangible to me, how much she wanted not to be lonely. I began to wonder if she was just cold. Though she tormented me, I began to feel mean for turning her away, for locking her out.

On the night that I did what I did I hadn’t been able to sleep, to rest. I went down the stairs and through the house and towards the back. I stopped at the latticed glass doors letting out onto the veranda.

She was sitting next to the modest, still, lighted pool, wistfully gazing into it. I stared at her, her striking profile made sharp by the cool light of the shining white moon. She stood gracefully and turned towards me. She seemed to glide. She stopped at the glass doors.

Mere inches, a sheet of glass, tiny motes of air separated us. A vast chasm of time and space and miscomprehension separated us. Though my heart raced, I coolly regarded the dead girl standing before me, watching me. Her golden eyes shined.

She slowly and gently pressed her hand against the glass. She lowered her head for a moment, her long, sooty eyelashes brushing the high, delicate green cheekbones, and then, reluctantly, almost fearfully, she raised her head and ventured a smile, a true smile. She wanted to be true. She smiled at me, her teeth and fangs glinting bright white, accentuated by the singular pallid green of her smooth, flawless skin.

I raised my hand and pressed it against the glass.  I remember wondering if she was as sad and lonely as I was. I did know that she was replete with anger and fear, confusion and tenderness.    

I unlatched the doors.

Her smile widened, as did her eyes. She slowly traced the outline of my palm through the glass and then turned away, returning to her gazing into the pool.  

  My eyes continued to rest upon her. I continued to consider her and wonder about her. I then returned to my room and my bed and other pressing thoughts. It had been forty-six days times twenty-four hours times sixty minutes times sixty seconds, approximately, that The Terror, His sore judgment, hadn’t been laid upon me.

 Perfectly, of course, The Lord My God punished me, perfectly, forever. Even when I breathed and lived outside of the agony, the ever-present fear of The Pain had become almost as bad as The Pain itself. I reaped that which I had sown, and I had now no rest.    

When I opened my eyes some hours later she was there, sitting placidly next to my bed. Honoring an unspoken and unshared silent pledge, she had let me have the peace that I might have. I hadn’t even known that she was there. I reached out to her, I gently touched her face. She grasped my hand and pressed it against her cool skin. She sighed, her substantial bosom rose and fell, and she smiled again, and I was glad that she wasn’t alone.

He should love her, I thought. I didn’t understand why He didn’t seem to: she was so alone, and the sadness that radiated from her was so profound that it was tangible. She, too, longed for peace, happiness.

It was four nights later when The Terror came. Abruptly.

My senses-all of them-became clear. Absolutely clear. And then more clear, and more, and more, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times more until there was a dagger-like clarity of perception of everything around me that could not be shut out.

It was as if I were in a beautiful green plain filled with tall yellow flowers bound by astounding fragrances under the brilliant light of a brilliant sun under a vaulting blue sky that I saw It searching for me.

The clarity had become a living thing.

It saw me, and there was nowhere for me to go, nowhere to hide in that beautiful and lustrous field-I had searched and tried so many times before and had found nowhere to go, nothing or no one to help me. Like many other times, I told Him that I was sorry, I begged Him to spare me. I loved Him. I didn’t understand why He would let this happen.

I watched It sweep implacably towards me as I silently plead to Him for the mercy that I knew that He would not grant me. My Lord, my God, my dear Lord.

            The matter behind my eyes ignited and instantly became an inferno. It had come. I cried out with my living breath to The Perfect One, but He found this meet.

Perversely, I welcomed The Pain because I had become so tired of dreading Its arrival.

 Each and every breath, each and every beat of my heart, each and every blink of my eyes, all light, all darkness, all sound, all silence, all sensation, all thought created a mind-shattering cascade of brilliantly inescapable suffering and burning in every fiber of my being that made me choke and weep. Eventually, I wished that the heart-stopping pain would do just that-but it never did, and I found Him cruel, and I hated Him, and I hated myself for hating Him.   

  The green dead girl found me there, writhing on the floor, and she was kind to me. I was exhausted and rent. She arranged my head and shoulders onto her lap and comforted me. It had been some hours and my eyes were heavy. She gingerly stroked my face with her cool hand.

The Terror had had enough of me and had moved on, leaving me to the tender mercies of the pretty, dead Pilgrim. She smiled the most kind, loving, beautiful smile that I have ever had the pleasure of seeing.

 I smiled at her. I released her from her pledge.

 She spoke to me thoughtfully in her crisp, ancient English accent.

She no longer wanted to deceive me. While I rested, she showed to me and told to me all kinds of things that I knew to be true. She told me what she saw, what she had seen when she came here in 1657. She says that she is sorry. She says that she is sorry for the things that her father did, the things that her brothers did. She loved them. She loved them dearly. So she accepted the place to live and the wonderful land and the good things to eat taken from their bloody hands.

 Time no longer existed for her as it had, so she didn’t know how long she had been lonely, sad, in pain. She only knew that it seemed like forever.

I felt awful for her. I know what it’s like to be lonely and sad and in pain: I see and I hear. At first, I didn’t know, I didn’t know better. But as a child I eventually found it dangerous to tell people about the people around them, about the other people that so inexplicably few others could see. It was dangerous to talk to them, to help them, even to hear them and see them. In a way, this made me tremendously lonely: people made me so wrong, and they hurt me; they hurt me with the terrible electricity, the bright long needles, the terrible drugs and the terrible loneliness and the cold.  I stopped telling them. I stopped being honest with them. It was important to them that I see and hear and feel only the things that they did, the things that they wanted me to.

I decided to be lonely so that they could love me, so they could feel good about themselves, so they could stop hurting me.

But I never liked being lonely.

One night not long after she was standing in my room, next to my bed. Her hazel eyes glinted in the night light, as did her lustrous long brown hair. Errant locks adorned her oval face before flowing over her lime green shoulders. It wasn’t particularly cold, but she was shivering. I couldn’t leave the green dead girl there, so I made a place for her and she wrapped herself in the blankets. She held me tightly and thanked me over and over again, and then she put her head to my shoulder and wept. She told me her name.

Emily Jane Pritchard.

 She came here from across the Sea and witnessed what she felt was Our Lord’s Will, what she thought were the good works of Our Lord. She had seen the savage crushing of the brown savages whose lands her people took; she had seen the suffering of the black savages her people had taken from a faraway land to be enslaved here. She had seen these things and had found it all to be meet and good, that which they had done to my ancestors, brown and black. She found out afterward that she had been tragically mistaken.

I understood her.

Our Lord has punished me for the horrors that I inflicted in His name. Years ago we ranged over the deserts and through the bountiful woods and across the seas and through the skies and slaughtered and destroyed so many and so much for Him. For God and Country. To make the world a better place. I had been told that this was His will and I believed it…I wanted to believe it...I needed to believe. I had to. To be...more like everybody else.

So I could fit.

 I thus have an exquisite understanding of pain and Our Lord’s disfavor.

She and I both were born into worlds which neither of us created, worlds which seemed to demand mercilessness and cruelty of its children, and in our own fashions, both of us had been merciless and cruel.

She asked me to know me. I knew what she meant, and I was afraid of her knowing me, who I am, what I’ve done. But she insisted. She took her hand and touched my face. Emily Jane swiftly recoiled, pulling away her hand, her eyes wide with horror.

She looked into her interlaced hands resting in her lap as I thought, as my heart began to break: Even you. She knew my mind and gazed upon me.

 She gently lifted my chin and shined her golden eyes upon me. She smiled brightly at me and kissed me.

She forgave me.

She told me of a place. She told me how wonderful it is there. I go there with her. There is a forest through which we walk together, hands intertwined. There is beauty and beautiful fragrance and goodness and freedom from fear there.

There is a table by the river there, ladened with good things to eat. We walk through the fields, our feet bare, touching the soft green grass in a place that is suffused with shining, golden light. She kisses me, and we go to a house, our house, a house that is high upon a hill, a promised place, a mansion that is brilliantly lighted, high upon the hill, in the shining city upon the hill. 

And she is no longer alone, and I am no longer alone.

We are, in happiness, together.