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A stream of rabid, pregnant, time-squirrels race after me. I hope the crabs get them all.
3. Green
The place between the Blue Country and the Green Country is full of dinosaurs called stories, bubble-storms that make you think you’re somebody else, and a sky and a ground that look almost exactly the same. And, for a little while, it was full of me. My sorrow and me and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen crossed the Blue Country where it gets all narrow and thirsty. I was also all narrow and thirsty, but between the two of us, I complained less than the Blue Country. I shut my eyes when we stepped over the border. I shut my eyes and tried to remember kissing Orchid Harm and knowing that we were both thinking about ice cream.
When I was little and my hair hadn’t grown out yet but my piss-and-vinegar had, I asked my Papo:
“Papo, will I ever meet a story?”
My Papo took a long tug on his squirrel-bone pipe and blew smoky lilac rings onto my fingers.
“Maybe-so, funny bunny, maybe-not-so. But don’t be sad if you don’t. Stories are pretty dumb animals. And so aggressive!”
I clapped my hands. “Say three ways they’re dumb!”
“Let’s see.” Papo counted them off on his fingers. “They’re cold-blooded, they use big words when they ought to use small ones, and they have no natural defense against comets.”
So that’s what I was thinking about while my sorrow and me hammered a few tent stakes into the huge blue night. We made camp at the edge of a sparkling oasis where the water looked like liquid labradorite. The reason I thought about my Papo was because the oasis was already occupado. A herd of stories slurped up the water and munched up the blueberry brambles and cobalt cattails growing up all over the place out of the aquamarine desert. The other thing that slurped and munched and stomped about the oasis was the great electro-city of Lizard Tongue. The city limits stood a ways off, but clearly Lizard Tongue crept closer all the time. Little houses shaped like sailboats and parrot eggs spilled out of the metropolis, inching toward the water, inching, inching—nobody look at them or they’ll stampede! I could hear the laughing and dancing of the city and I didn’t want to laugh and I didn’t want to dance and sleeping on the earth never troubled me so I stuck to my sorrow and the water like a flat blue stone.
It’s pretty easy to make a camp with a sorrow as tall as a streetlamp, especially when you didn’t pack anything from home. I did that on purpose. I hadn’t decided yet if it was clever or stupid as sin. I didn’t have matches or food or a toothbrush or a pocketknife. But the Ordinary Emperor couldn’t come sneaking around impersonating my matches or my beef jerky or my toothbrush or my pocketknife, either. I was safe. I was Emperor-proof. I was not squirrel-proof. The mauve squirrels of time and/or space milled and tumbled behind us like a stupid furry wave of yesterpuke and all any of us could do was ignore them while they did weird rat-cartwheels and chittered at each other, which sounds like the ticks of an obnoxiously loud clock, and fucked with their tails held over their eyes like blindfolds in the blue-silver sunset.
My sorrow picked turquoise coconuts from the paisley palm trees with her furry lavender trunk and lined up the nuts neatly all in a row. Sorrows are very fastidious, as it turns out.
“A storm is coming at seven minutes past seven,” the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said. “I do not like to get wet.”
I collected brambles
and crunched them up for kindling. In order to crunch up brambles, I had to creep and sneak among the stories, and that made me nervous, because of what Papo said when my hair was short.
A story’s scales are every which shade of blue you can think of and four new ones, too. I tiptoed between them, which was like tiptoeing between trolley-cars. I tried to avoid the poison spikes on their periwinkle tails and the furious horns on their navy blue heads and the crystal sapphire plates on their backs. The setting sun shone through their sapphire plates and burned up my eyeballs with blue.
“Heyo, guignol-girl!” One story swung round his dinosaur-head at me and smacked his chompers. “Why so skulk and slither? Have you scrofulous aims on our supper?”
“Nope, I only want to make a fire,” I said. “We’ll be gone in the morning.”
“Ah, conflagration,” the herd nodded sagely all together. “The best of all the -ations.”
“And whither do you peregrinate, young sapiens sapiens?” said one of the girl-dinosaurs. You can tell girl-stories apart from boy-stories because girl-stories have webbed feet and two tongues.
I was so excited I could have chewed rocks for bubblegum. Me, Violet Wild, talking to several real live stories all at once. “I’m going to the Red Country,” I said. “I’m going to the place where death is a red dress and love is a kind of longing and maybe a boy named Orchid didn’t get his throat ripped out by squirrels.”
“We never voyage to the Red Country. We find no affinity there. We are allowed no autarchy of spirit.”
“We cannot live freely,” explained the webfooted girl-story, even though I knew what autarchy meant. What was I, a baby eating paint? “They pen us up in scarlet corrals and force us to say exactly what we mean. It’s deplorable.”
“Abhorrent.”
“Iniquitous!”
The stories were working themselves up into a big blue fury. I took a chance. I grew up a Nowgirl on the purple pampas, I’m careful as a crook on a balcony when it comes to animals. I wouldn’t like to spook a story. When your business is wildness and the creatures who own it, you gotta be cool, you gotta be able to act like a creature, talk like a creature, make a creature feel like you’re their home and the door’s wide open.
“Heyo, Brobdingnagian bunnies,” I said with all the sweetness I knew how to make with my mouth. “No quisquoses or querulous tristiloquies.” I started to sweat and the stars started to come out. I was already almost out of good words. “Nobody’s going to…uh…ravish you off to Red and rapine. Pull on your tranquilities one leg at a time. Listen to the…um…psithurisma? The psithurisma of the…vespertine…trees rustling, eat your comestibles, get down with dormition.”
The stories milled around me, purring, rubbing their flanks on me, getting their musk all over my clothes. And then I had to go lie down because those words tired me right out. I don’t even know if all of them were really words but I remembered Mummery saying all of them at one point or another to this and that pretty person with a pretty name.
My sorrow lay down in the moonlight. I leaned against her furry indigo chest. She spat on the brambles and cattails I crunched up and they blazed up purple and white. I didn’t know a sorrow could set things on fire.
“I love you,” my sorrow said.
