Evergreen by Teresa Koeppel
A woman is haunted by recurring nightmares about a menacing fiery figure on a mountaintop, and must undergo a dramatic transformation to save herself.
This was never who I expected to be.
He came to me in my dreams, like a shining Freddy Krueger, radiating light and menace in equal measure. He was overbright, sharply outlined, unreal even by the standards of dreams, and my subconscious recoiled from him automatically.
When he spoke, his voice flashed through me like a lick of flame, and the rest of my dream fell away until there was only the two of us standing on a mountain.
"Do not be afraid," he said, and I flushed cold with fear.
"I won't hurt you," he said, and his golden eyelids widened ever so slightly, the rich black pupils beneath dilating.
The dazzling brilliance of his skin stung my eyes, and though I could not clearly remember his features later, the thought of him reminded me of dates gone wrong, of walking alone at night, of making my keys into a weapon as I entered a parking garage. I ran then, raced off with the effortlessness and fury of the dreamer, until the mountain was far, and his light was gone. Until all I could hear was the faint sound of footsteps pursuing me.
When I awoke the next morning, the sheets were damp with sweat, and I was chilled to the bone.
For the next few weeks, he came to me every night, tearing through the gauzy dreams of work or parenting or getaways with friends to pull me back to that cold, gray mountaintop and resume our pursuit. Always the luminous man said those same words, and always I ran.
I began to worry about my sanity. I looked up "recurring nightmares" and read about "unresolved issues" and "emotional distress." I considered finding a therapist, but there were none available nearby, and we didn't have the right kind of insurance coverage anyway. My husband held me each daybreak, but I could tell it was wearing on him - this cycle of nightmares and sweat and morning terror. How could it not? It was certainly exhausting me.
I dreaded bedtime, keeping myself busy with work and motherhood and the usual ephemera of unimportant chores and obligations that had somehow come to fill my days, eclipsing all else. At night I tried meditating, soothing beverages, no screentime. I coated myself with sweet-smelling lotions, wore soft pajamas, rested on perfectly fluffed pillows. Still the Man on Fire came and pursuit ensued.
Caroline was three, and I wondered if I was suffering a form of extremely delayed postpartum depression. But besides the nightmares, I had no other symptoms. Once I had been awake for a few minutes, the terror would recede, and I would charge into my days as I always had before.
I was neither religious nor superstitious, but I confess that there was, perhaps, a part of me even then that suspected the truth of him. His energy was too sharp, too overpowering. I felt small and unreal standing next to him, a drop of oil slicked on top of an endless ocean. Every part of my subconscious rejected his presence in a way it never did for the faceless demons of ordinary nightmares.
I resolved to take my dreams back, forcibly if I had to. I read up on lucid dreaming and decided to try to MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming) my way onto that mountaintop and put an end to this nonsense once and for all.
Lucid dreaming was rare, but the techniques to kick it off were numerous and had been practiced all over the world - I found references to it in societies from ancient Greece to early Buddhists. Of the more modern pathways, MILD sounded the most promising. Developed by a Dr. LeBerge in the 1980s, it involved focusing intention, a sort of forceful insertion of oneself into a specific dream.
That night I got ready for bed as usual. The sheets were cool, my skin smelled like jasmine, my neck was ergonomically cushioned. My husband wished me luck and watched me in the darkness, his breath growing more even until eventually he fell asleep. I thought deliberately about the Man, the way he glowed unnaturally, like an oversaturated stain on the pictures of my mind. I whispered, "The next time I am dreaming, I will remember I am dreaming," like a mantra until the words lost all meaning, and my eyelids grew too heavy to keep open.
I was wandering through a large country home, looking for Caroline. I could hear her chirpy voice nearby, laughing, and I felt very calm, in control. The house walls grew blurry and faded as he approached, and the mountaintop came into sharp relief. The snow was cold and wet beneath my toes, the rocks gray and brown. A thin evergreen clung to life feebly nearby. Caroline's giggles faded into nothingness.
His skin shone with light as if he were sweating it from every pore. His hair was gold and red, his lips large and luminous.
"Do not be afraid," he said.
"I won't hurt you," he said, and those eyes told the lie, just as they had each time before.
Every part of me wanted to run, but this was a dream. I knew this was a dream. (Well done, Dr. LeBerge, I guess?) And it was mine.
The Man drew closer, and the warmth from his skin felt like the furnace in our basement in the dead of winter, suffocating and over-hot. I stood my ground. In those wild eyes I saw the boy who had held onto me too long at an eighth-grade dance, the over-familiar smiles of men on the bus, the college boyfriend who never wanted to hear the word "no."
I rooted myself into place, becoming part of the scenery, as fundamental and undeniable as the rocks beneath my feet.
"No," I said, and he stopped his approach, surprised. "No," I repeated, letting my voice travel through my world and into his. "NO."
For a brief moment it worked. And then he smiled, and flames licked his teeth. He grabbed my arm as I turned to flee and pulled me close.
"Please," I screamed. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
"I love you," he breathed into my neck. "You're perfect." His lips burned my skin and left ash in their wake.
I wrested away from him and bolted. The lightness I had felt before, like a butterfly flitting from blossom to blossom, was gone. Nonetheless, I ran until my muscles screamed in pain, and I could go no further, collapsing among delicate evergreens whose branches hid swaths of purple and red berries like drops of blood collected on a wound.
He closed in on me as I lay there, his hands reaching for my waist, his breath stirring the hair at my neck. Beyond the trees I saw a flicker of movement, a figure swathed in greens and browns slipping in and out of the shadows. I stared at the trees, so incongruously beautiful and peaceful and deeply rooted in that moment.
"Why?" I cried. "Please, stop! Someone, help! Help me!"
And then, suddenly, someone did. The hands that had charred my skin fell away, the fiery air turned cool, and the shadow of a woman fell across me even as I tumbled through the grassy dirt down, down into a large country house where Caroline's laughter guided me to her, and sleep overtook me, finally and for true.
When I woke the next morning, there was no cold sweat, no mussed covers, no fading terror. My husband, relieved, held me close and we made the quick and urgent love of parents whose toddler could call from the adjoining room at any moment.
The next night I did not dream of the flame-wreathed Man, nor the next, and eventually it faded into the background of my mind, a memory of a bad time that was thankfully now done.
The first patch was on my big toe, a gray-brown splotch like a blot of sauce fallen from an errant fork. It spread outward, rough and slightly scaly, like eczema, with a papery quality around the edges. If I hadn't been staring at the floor to escape the toddler pulling at my leg and crying as I tried to pee, I might not have even noticed it. Caroline's wails seemed to recede as I patted her back and leaned forward to stare at the toe I hadn't looked at closely in years (maybe ever). I touched the rough skin, and the firmness startled me. There was nothing of the supple spring-back of flesh. But Caroline's sobs grew more angry and insistent, and I made a mental note to check back on it later.
It was Monday, and a busy one, so it wasn't until Caroline was in bed that night that I remembered about my toe. I was startled to find that the patch had grown over the course of the day, stretching to the ball of my foot now. I put it out of my mind again. My husband and I both had work deadlines, Caroline was starting Little Kickers soccer. There was no time for skin that turned gray and hard, especially when it didn't hurt.
When I woke, my other big toe was rough and weathered, like a digit wrapped in a slip of unbroken papyrus. Maybe it was some sort of fungus? That day, in between endless meetings, I made a dermatology appointment for the next available time, some two weeks later.
In the morning, my fingernails were longer and rougher, their purple polish rising like a wave cresting over pale nut-brown waters below. On my left pointer and pinky there were slips of dull beige nubs rising from the cuticles like bizarre hangnails.
In a growing panic, I showed my husband, who called in sick to work for both of us, took Caroline to daycare, and returned to find me trying to breathe myself into a state of calm. I suspected, by then. I couldn't admit it (not to him and certainly not to a medical doctor), but I could feel the solid thunk of wood when my fingertips met, could hear the firm hollow sound when I rapped on my toes.
He drove me to the ER, where, after much testing and prodding, it was concluded that I most likely had a hitherto unknown form of a rare condition called Epidermodysplasia verruciformis, or "Tree Man Syndrome." The patches would have to be excised, but there was a chance it would never recur. I thought about pointing out the wooden nature of what they called "lesions," but I worried that they might move me to a psych ward. Besides, I could sense a thrum inside, a deep and settled certainty like holding Caroline as a newborn. The rest of the world might be confusing, but this was suddenly becoming well-defined. I brushed the twigs of my fingernails together and remembered the Woman's shadow covering me with cool darkness.
They sent us home, and I held Caroline close that night, covering my hands with gloves. She fell asleep in my arms the way she had as a baby, and I endured the joy and boredom and exhaustion of snuggling her without moving, of feeling the release of the honeybee buzz of my worry into the smell of her rosy cheeks, belonging wholly to her and that moment.
I lay in bed that night, feeling the rough wood of my fingertips stretch over my top knuckles now. It was oddly soothing to rub my rough digits together, like caressing a worn walking stick. I listened to the crickets chirp, my house settle, my husband toss and turn fitfully at my side. I had had such plans for myself - a clean and mostly unbroken list of steps for everything from the personal to the professional. And then Caroline had arrived. In her wake, my efforts to steer things were like a toddler pinwheeling to keep their balance as they raced ahead. Yet the truth was that there was such peace in our lives, the ones that felt so chaotic all the time, if only we stopped to hear it.
When I slept, I dreamt of evergreens.
The next day the bark stretched up my wrists and ankles, jutting out from my joints with thin sprays of palest chartreuse. My husband brought Caroline to me before taking her to daycare, promising to be home soon, and I covered her in kisses, hiding my hands so as not to scare her.
She laughed in my face, confused but adoring. Her hair felt like silk on my cheeks and her wet-lipped smacks filled me with absurd and bittersweet delight. My husband choked back tears.
I waved with false cheer as she left my bedroom and rubbed my own tears dry on my shoulder. With the house empty, I rolled out of bed to find that even since I had awakened, the bark had grown over my knees. Walking was out of the question. Compelled by unknown instinct, I used my surprisingly strong limbs to pull myself down the hall and toward our yard. As I scooted onto the grass towards the line of trees at the edge of our lawn, I saw the growth from my ankles stretched out to link my legs like a rope of wood. It encased my pelvis, and my arms were now fully sheathed. Every breath caught as splinters pressed in against my lungs.
I could not stop crying now, my calm from the night before shattered. My husband pulled into the drive, and I could hear him yelling through the press of leaves that covered my ears and tangled in my hair. His arms wrapped around me, lifting me up into a standing position, and I leaned against him, willing the embrace to last.
He was calling my name, insistent and desperate, his face barely visible through the curtained sheen of wood and tears stippling my eyes. My heartbeat slowed and my breath caught in the thin reed of human tissue remaining in my throat. With one final exhale I drove my toes deep into the earth, pushing down with a force that would have stung if I had still had any pain receptors left. My arms stretched out with a sudden eruption of bark and greenery, and my husband fell back. I could see him there, in my mind's eye, staring at me from our yard even as the rest of the world melted away.
I was in the grove of evergreens from my dream, just one of many trees, and the Man on Fire approached me as if it had been minutes instead of months. He caressed a hand down my trunk, but there was no pleasure in it, only fury and lust denied. He said words that made no sense about my everlasting beauty and wasted love. With fingers touched by flame he stripped leaves from my boughs and fashioned them into a crown that he set into his sun-licked hair. I hated him.
My pursuer sank to his knees at my roots and recited poetry at me, lengthy self-indulgent messes about cheated love and the glory of the chase. His words were idiotic and irritating, a spoiled child's whine. I tried to tell him as much, but I couldn't speak, and he wasn't listening.
Eventually, he grew tired and bored of me. I was, after all, only a tree now. With a final triumphant paean about his greatness, he ran off. All was quiet at first, and then the forest filled with birdsong and animal noises, and insects alighted on my leaves and crawled up and down my bark. I felt my spirit grow still and slept.
I do not know how much time passed before I woke up again. Caroline was older, her baby fat falling away from her narrow cheeks and long neck. My husband was still young, although his eyes had dark shadows underneath them, and his face was more drawn than I remembered. They would rest at my roots in the afternoons, reading stories and playing games. I could not talk to them but I could feel them, like the featherlight brush of a finger on my cheek.
I existed in their world and also in the other, in the place where the evergreens clustered together and the ground was carpeted with their red and purple crushed berries in autumn. The snow covered my branches in winter and thawed into wet slush in spring. My emotions were smothered, slowed like my sap into an almost unreachable torpor. I began to know the earth and air intimately, the way the breeze shifted before a storm, the way the soil collected and broke apart from one root to the next.
I could feel the other evergreens around me where our roots touched, and we sang to each other in whispers, sharing thoughts in random pieces and half-recalled stories. They were fragments of beings - like tattered remnants of people from long ago. Through them I knew the grove to be old, older than memory, but somehow the thread connecting all of us was the same. Fear and pursuit and then peace. There were disjointed bits, too, nonsensical - people standing in the grove next to trees that seemed to mirror them somehow, others with weapons and fury marching forth toward the mountain I knew lay in the distance. I collected them all like fallen leaves in autumn, a great pile I didn't know what to do with but couldn't let go.
In the absence of the daily responsibilities and constant clamor of my former life, an unfamiliar quiet filled me. At first, it was unbearably boring. My mind drifted and sank, surface thoughts flitting across it unseen and unnoticed. As time passed I looked out on my old world less and less, and the tremors through the grove's root system became mere background noise. I began to relive memories long set aside of my adolescence and young adulthood. There had been a fearless me, once, striving and open. A quiet me, too, who loved to drive to a remote place and lie on the hood of her car, reading books by a stretch of beach, a thicket of woods, a corn field. There was a wondering me, the one who was happily curious about her future - who dreamt of it all the time, imagining a dozen different paths. The brave and gorgeous me who had insisted on getting a snapdragon tattoo on my calf, tilted so that it was twining around my leg, peeking out from the back like a wayward child. I had always felt such pleasure when catching a glimpse of it while showering, swimming, resting on the couch. The me who felt sexy and powerful, even when she didn't consciously think of herself that way.
It was strange how distant all of those parts were now. Not just because of my current state, but even before that, subsumed by the needs of maintaining a child, a home, a job, a partner. There was bliss in all of those things, too, but it was different, less ethereal. I examined the memories like a scientist cataloging samples - methodical and detached.
In my grove of evergreens, the Woman approached me, the first person I had seen there since the Man on Fire had run off in frustration. The winter's cold was long gone, and the ground she walked on was carpeted with lush grasses and dandelions swaying with their full coiffures of seeds. She filled my senses, a thick form of greens and browns, hands weathered and callused where she laid them at my roots.
"I have come, Child," she said, but her words did not hit my trunk like the sounds my husband and daughter made. Instead they rustled my foliage, touching as easily as a breeze, a welcome caress. "Are you prepared to leave this form behind?"
My emotions tumbled back to the surface, and I quailed and recoiled in fear.
"It could be your time, if you are ready," the Woman mused. "But I will not force you." She sat back on wide hips, unbound hair brushing the earth around her.
If she had asked me when I first arrived so long ago, I surely would have agreed immediately. But now, leaving this quiet haven felt overwhelming. I would be exposed, vulnerable.
As if she knew what I was thinking, the Woman nodded. "It is hard out there. There are many dangers. But pleasures, too. Pleasures you will never again experience in here." I thought of Caroline's cuddles and my husband's touch. I remembered eating ice cream and laughing so hard I couldn't stop and kisses that felt like they would consume me whole with passion.
"If you are prepared, simply see yourself as you were and as you are," she said. It made no sense to me, but I concentrated on my body as it was before the Man on Fire, before being a tree, and felt my hands clench and my heart beat somewhere deep within my trunk. The world shifted, and, like moving a muscle I had forgotten I had, all of a sudden I was trapped in my tree, separate but stuck. I fumbled blindly with limbs I barely remembered and pushed outward, feeling my body tear itself in half the way it had when I had birthed Caroline. If I could have screamed, I would have, but instead I just fell down next to the tree, my tree, fully undone.
The Woman came into sharp view now, her full Rubenesque figure reaching to help me stand, arms rounded with muscles and fat. Her face danced with laugh lines, and her skin was warm and mottled a deep mossy green in the dappling sunlight. I leaned against her and sobbed while she stroked my hair.
"Transitions are never easy," she said. "We all know it, it's the most obvious thing in the world, but it always bears repeating, because we so easily forget."
Eventually my crying eased, and my body stood on its own, feeling strange and tingling, as though the entirety of it had fallen asleep like a foot and was trying to shake itself awake. I was naked, but felt no shame or cold. The air was warm around me and my own folds and bulk did not cause me even subconscious embarrassment for once. I stepped lightly in between the trees, taking the Woman's hand into my own.
"These others are like you," she said, gesturing to the evergreens around us. "This tale has been played out so often, I am sometimes surprised that the players get any pleasure from it at all. It has been an age or more since the last cycle, and it is not easy to pull one of you into our realm, much less keep you here by coercion." She sighed. "But some things never change."
I stared at her, confused.
She smiled sadly. "Too many gods see others as mere playthings. Humans are caught up in immortal revels against their will." She brushed an arm through a nearby tree, shaking the newly formed berries so that they danced like purple-red bells. "Honestly, they don't even care about the object of their infatuation. It is their infatuation to which they are truly in thrall. Their fellow deities would believe them even if they pointed to a swan and announced that it was a beautiful woman they had been chasing who was transformed moments ago. They would all commiserate in the 'lost love', and the swan who was only ever a swan would swim on with its life. Indeed," she said, "I happen to know for a fact that this has happened on multiple occasions."
"Why me?" I asked.
"Why not you?" she replied. "Besides, that is the wrong question. Their motivations are meaningless, just acting out the same script again and again. It is your purpose that matters. You ran. You stood your ground. You called for help. Even if you had done none of those things, you would still have your own being. You would still matter. So where do you go from here?"
"I don't know," I said. "What are my options? How do I know it won't happen again?" "Your choices are yours to conceive," the Woman said. And I did. My mind opened like the petals of a flower, seeing a world, a universe of possibility in front of me. It was a dizzying array - a seemingly infinite number of me. They were marvelous, each in their own way, and I was dazzled by the sight of them.
But, in the end, I reached out with my head or heart or gut or whatever spiritual organ truly makes these decisions and felt the Woman squeeze my hand in hers. I looked away, took in all the other trees that had once been people running from pointless cruelty.
"Did any of them stay evergreen?" I asked.
"No," she replied with a smile. "They all chose to return to their original forms... eventually. But a small piece of them stays here, just like a small piece of you will remain." The leaves around us rustled as if in agreement, and I remembered their stories, the images of a hundred different dryads dancing through my head.
"Why don't you stop the gods? If you have this power -" I faltered as the deep brown of her iris-less eyes turned on me.
"That is not my part to play. As long as the cycle has existed, I have been a shield when I can be. And that will be my role for as long as it lasts." She took my hands in hers and rubbed her thumbs along mine. "I have only a few paths in front of me. You are granted many. And the beauty for you is that going down one does not preclude others." Her gaze was inscrutable. The trees around me rustled, sang their memories through their roots into the me that was still communing with them. "It is time, little one." With a great shove, she sent me reeling, plunging through the ground and down until I somehow emerged in my own bed, sitting up with a deep breath as the covers fell away from me.
My husband reached for me and held me as I shivered. "What's wrong?" he said. "Did you have a nightmare?"
I pulled back and stared at him. But his face was not drawn, his eyes sleepy but not shadowed.
I threw myself out of bed and ran down the hall to the front door, letting the warmth of our heating gust out into the cool spring air. There on the edge of the lawn stood my evergreen tree.
My husband was close behind me. "Dee, is everything all right?" he asked.
I shook my head. "How long has that tree been here?"
He stared at it, perplexed. "I mean, it must have been a while." He yawned. "I don't know. I've never really paid attention to our shrubs and trees and stuff. Are you okay?" I could hear Caroline's toddler murmurings from her room down the hall.
I nodded and rubbed my hands together, their skin smooth and unblemished. If I peered closely enough I could see the echo of a forest of evergreens surrounding me, the shadow of the Woman as she slipped out of sight.
My husband and Caroline remembered nothing; and no time, it seemed, had passed since that first night of dreaming of the Man on Fire. It was easier this way, better that no one had to explain why "my wife turned into a tree." It made a strange sort of sense, I supposed, that the gods themselves were unbound to concepts like time and, apparently, responsibility.
I remembered it all, though. It didn't fade like a normal dream. It was a part of me. I wrote everything down and reread it again and again, trying to sort it all out in my mind. I thought about the universe of me, the millions of versions fanned out around me like a cloak spread in the sand. I thought of the rustling evergreens, the stories of others who had returned to the realm of the gods to face their oppressors, those fragments that now made sense. And the Woman's words reverberated through my consciousness. Why not you?
Looking at my husband and Caroline settled my determination. I could not bear the thought that they might get caught up with the gods, too.
One night, as I closed my eyes to sleep, I whispered the lucid mantra again and again to myself under my husband's snores. "The next time I am dreaming, I will remember I am dreaming."
When I open my eyes, I am standing in the forest of evergreens. I do not want to see the Man on Fire again, but I will do what it takes. My chosen purpose eclipses my fear, my determination shines from me brighter than any sun. The thin threads of all the others who had lived and ran and fought pulse inside me, granting me a collective experience far beyond what any who came before me had known. I remember the possibilities I saw for myself, the cryptic look the Woman gave me. There was one (at least one) where I stood in this realm triumphant, a thousand shattered cycles of violence and casual cruelty at my feet. I remember more of this place than I could've thought possible.
I smile at the rustling trees around me and set forth. The gods at play will never see me coming.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
He came to me in my dreams, like a shining Freddy Krueger, radiating light and menace in equal measure. He was overbright, sharply outlined, unreal even by the standards of dreams, and my subconscious recoiled from him automatically.
When he spoke, his voice flashed through me like a lick of flame, and the rest of my dream fell away until there was only the two of us standing on a mountain.
"Do not be afraid," he said, and I flushed cold with fear.
"I won't hurt you," he said, and his golden eyelids widened ever so slightly, the rich black pupils beneath dilating.
The dazzling brilliance of his skin stung my eyes, and though I could not clearly remember his features later, the thought of him reminded me of dates gone wrong, of walking alone at night, of making my keys into a weapon as I entered a parking garage. I ran then, raced off with the effortlessness and fury of the dreamer, until the mountain was far, and his light was gone. Until all I could hear was the faint sound of footsteps pursuing me.
When I awoke the next morning, the sheets were damp with sweat, and I was chilled to the bone.
For the next few weeks, he came to me every night, tearing through the gauzy dreams of work or parenting or getaways with friends to pull me back to that cold, gray mountaintop and resume our pursuit. Always the luminous man said those same words, and always I ran.
I began to worry about my sanity. I looked up "recurring nightmares" and read about "unresolved issues" and "emotional distress." I considered finding a therapist, but there were none available nearby, and we didn't have the right kind of insurance coverage anyway. My husband held me each daybreak, but I could tell it was wearing on him - this cycle of nightmares and sweat and morning terror. How could it not? It was certainly exhausting me.
I dreaded bedtime, keeping myself busy with work and motherhood and the usual ephemera of unimportant chores and obligations that had somehow come to fill my days, eclipsing all else. At night I tried meditating, soothing beverages, no screentime. I coated myself with sweet-smelling lotions, wore soft pajamas, rested on perfectly fluffed pillows. Still the Man on Fire came and pursuit ensued.
Caroline was three, and I wondered if I was suffering a form of extremely delayed postpartum depression. But besides the nightmares, I had no other symptoms. Once I had been awake for a few minutes, the terror would recede, and I would charge into my days as I always had before.
I was neither religious nor superstitious, but I confess that there was, perhaps, a part of me even then that suspected the truth of him. His energy was too sharp, too overpowering. I felt small and unreal standing next to him, a drop of oil slicked on top of an endless ocean. Every part of my subconscious rejected his presence in a way it never did for the faceless demons of ordinary nightmares.
I resolved to take my dreams back, forcibly if I had to. I read up on lucid dreaming and decided to try to MILD (Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming) my way onto that mountaintop and put an end to this nonsense once and for all.
Lucid dreaming was rare, but the techniques to kick it off were numerous and had been practiced all over the world - I found references to it in societies from ancient Greece to early Buddhists. Of the more modern pathways, MILD sounded the most promising. Developed by a Dr. LeBerge in the 1980s, it involved focusing intention, a sort of forceful insertion of oneself into a specific dream.
That night I got ready for bed as usual. The sheets were cool, my skin smelled like jasmine, my neck was ergonomically cushioned. My husband wished me luck and watched me in the darkness, his breath growing more even until eventually he fell asleep. I thought deliberately about the Man, the way he glowed unnaturally, like an oversaturated stain on the pictures of my mind. I whispered, "The next time I am dreaming, I will remember I am dreaming," like a mantra until the words lost all meaning, and my eyelids grew too heavy to keep open.
I was wandering through a large country home, looking for Caroline. I could hear her chirpy voice nearby, laughing, and I felt very calm, in control. The house walls grew blurry and faded as he approached, and the mountaintop came into sharp relief. The snow was cold and wet beneath my toes, the rocks gray and brown. A thin evergreen clung to life feebly nearby. Caroline's giggles faded into nothingness.
His skin shone with light as if he were sweating it from every pore. His hair was gold and red, his lips large and luminous.
"Do not be afraid," he said.
"I won't hurt you," he said, and those eyes told the lie, just as they had each time before.
Every part of me wanted to run, but this was a dream. I knew this was a dream. (Well done, Dr. LeBerge, I guess?) And it was mine.
The Man drew closer, and the warmth from his skin felt like the furnace in our basement in the dead of winter, suffocating and over-hot. I stood my ground. In those wild eyes I saw the boy who had held onto me too long at an eighth-grade dance, the over-familiar smiles of men on the bus, the college boyfriend who never wanted to hear the word "no."
I rooted myself into place, becoming part of the scenery, as fundamental and undeniable as the rocks beneath my feet.
"No," I said, and he stopped his approach, surprised. "No," I repeated, letting my voice travel through my world and into his. "NO."
For a brief moment it worked. And then he smiled, and flames licked his teeth. He grabbed my arm as I turned to flee and pulled me close.
"Please," I screamed. "Who are you? Why are you doing this?"
"I love you," he breathed into my neck. "You're perfect." His lips burned my skin and left ash in their wake.
I wrested away from him and bolted. The lightness I had felt before, like a butterfly flitting from blossom to blossom, was gone. Nonetheless, I ran until my muscles screamed in pain, and I could go no further, collapsing among delicate evergreens whose branches hid swaths of purple and red berries like drops of blood collected on a wound.
He closed in on me as I lay there, his hands reaching for my waist, his breath stirring the hair at my neck. Beyond the trees I saw a flicker of movement, a figure swathed in greens and browns slipping in and out of the shadows. I stared at the trees, so incongruously beautiful and peaceful and deeply rooted in that moment.
"Why?" I cried. "Please, stop! Someone, help! Help me!"
And then, suddenly, someone did. The hands that had charred my skin fell away, the fiery air turned cool, and the shadow of a woman fell across me even as I tumbled through the grassy dirt down, down into a large country house where Caroline's laughter guided me to her, and sleep overtook me, finally and for true.
When I woke the next morning, there was no cold sweat, no mussed covers, no fading terror. My husband, relieved, held me close and we made the quick and urgent love of parents whose toddler could call from the adjoining room at any moment.
The next night I did not dream of the flame-wreathed Man, nor the next, and eventually it faded into the background of my mind, a memory of a bad time that was thankfully now done.
The first patch was on my big toe, a gray-brown splotch like a blot of sauce fallen from an errant fork. It spread outward, rough and slightly scaly, like eczema, with a papery quality around the edges. If I hadn't been staring at the floor to escape the toddler pulling at my leg and crying as I tried to pee, I might not have even noticed it. Caroline's wails seemed to recede as I patted her back and leaned forward to stare at the toe I hadn't looked at closely in years (maybe ever). I touched the rough skin, and the firmness startled me. There was nothing of the supple spring-back of flesh. But Caroline's sobs grew more angry and insistent, and I made a mental note to check back on it later.
It was Monday, and a busy one, so it wasn't until Caroline was in bed that night that I remembered about my toe. I was startled to find that the patch had grown over the course of the day, stretching to the ball of my foot now. I put it out of my mind again. My husband and I both had work deadlines, Caroline was starting Little Kickers soccer. There was no time for skin that turned gray and hard, especially when it didn't hurt.
When I woke, my other big toe was rough and weathered, like a digit wrapped in a slip of unbroken papyrus. Maybe it was some sort of fungus? That day, in between endless meetings, I made a dermatology appointment for the next available time, some two weeks later.
In the morning, my fingernails were longer and rougher, their purple polish rising like a wave cresting over pale nut-brown waters below. On my left pointer and pinky there were slips of dull beige nubs rising from the cuticles like bizarre hangnails.
In a growing panic, I showed my husband, who called in sick to work for both of us, took Caroline to daycare, and returned to find me trying to breathe myself into a state of calm. I suspected, by then. I couldn't admit it (not to him and certainly not to a medical doctor), but I could feel the solid thunk of wood when my fingertips met, could hear the firm hollow sound when I rapped on my toes.
He drove me to the ER, where, after much testing and prodding, it was concluded that I most likely had a hitherto unknown form of a rare condition called Epidermodysplasia verruciformis, or "Tree Man Syndrome." The patches would have to be excised, but there was a chance it would never recur. I thought about pointing out the wooden nature of what they called "lesions," but I worried that they might move me to a psych ward. Besides, I could sense a thrum inside, a deep and settled certainty like holding Caroline as a newborn. The rest of the world might be confusing, but this was suddenly becoming well-defined. I brushed the twigs of my fingernails together and remembered the Woman's shadow covering me with cool darkness.
They sent us home, and I held Caroline close that night, covering my hands with gloves. She fell asleep in my arms the way she had as a baby, and I endured the joy and boredom and exhaustion of snuggling her without moving, of feeling the release of the honeybee buzz of my worry into the smell of her rosy cheeks, belonging wholly to her and that moment.
I lay in bed that night, feeling the rough wood of my fingertips stretch over my top knuckles now. It was oddly soothing to rub my rough digits together, like caressing a worn walking stick. I listened to the crickets chirp, my house settle, my husband toss and turn fitfully at my side. I had had such plans for myself - a clean and mostly unbroken list of steps for everything from the personal to the professional. And then Caroline had arrived. In her wake, my efforts to steer things were like a toddler pinwheeling to keep their balance as they raced ahead. Yet the truth was that there was such peace in our lives, the ones that felt so chaotic all the time, if only we stopped to hear it.
When I slept, I dreamt of evergreens.
The next day the bark stretched up my wrists and ankles, jutting out from my joints with thin sprays of palest chartreuse. My husband brought Caroline to me before taking her to daycare, promising to be home soon, and I covered her in kisses, hiding my hands so as not to scare her.
She laughed in my face, confused but adoring. Her hair felt like silk on my cheeks and her wet-lipped smacks filled me with absurd and bittersweet delight. My husband choked back tears.
I waved with false cheer as she left my bedroom and rubbed my own tears dry on my shoulder. With the house empty, I rolled out of bed to find that even since I had awakened, the bark had grown over my knees. Walking was out of the question. Compelled by unknown instinct, I used my surprisingly strong limbs to pull myself down the hall and toward our yard. As I scooted onto the grass towards the line of trees at the edge of our lawn, I saw the growth from my ankles stretched out to link my legs like a rope of wood. It encased my pelvis, and my arms were now fully sheathed. Every breath caught as splinters pressed in against my lungs.
I could not stop crying now, my calm from the night before shattered. My husband pulled into the drive, and I could hear him yelling through the press of leaves that covered my ears and tangled in my hair. His arms wrapped around me, lifting me up into a standing position, and I leaned against him, willing the embrace to last.
He was calling my name, insistent and desperate, his face barely visible through the curtained sheen of wood and tears stippling my eyes. My heartbeat slowed and my breath caught in the thin reed of human tissue remaining in my throat. With one final exhale I drove my toes deep into the earth, pushing down with a force that would have stung if I had still had any pain receptors left. My arms stretched out with a sudden eruption of bark and greenery, and my husband fell back. I could see him there, in my mind's eye, staring at me from our yard even as the rest of the world melted away.
I was in the grove of evergreens from my dream, just one of many trees, and the Man on Fire approached me as if it had been minutes instead of months. He caressed a hand down my trunk, but there was no pleasure in it, only fury and lust denied. He said words that made no sense about my everlasting beauty and wasted love. With fingers touched by flame he stripped leaves from my boughs and fashioned them into a crown that he set into his sun-licked hair. I hated him.
My pursuer sank to his knees at my roots and recited poetry at me, lengthy self-indulgent messes about cheated love and the glory of the chase. His words were idiotic and irritating, a spoiled child's whine. I tried to tell him as much, but I couldn't speak, and he wasn't listening.
Eventually, he grew tired and bored of me. I was, after all, only a tree now. With a final triumphant paean about his greatness, he ran off. All was quiet at first, and then the forest filled with birdsong and animal noises, and insects alighted on my leaves and crawled up and down my bark. I felt my spirit grow still and slept.
I do not know how much time passed before I woke up again. Caroline was older, her baby fat falling away from her narrow cheeks and long neck. My husband was still young, although his eyes had dark shadows underneath them, and his face was more drawn than I remembered. They would rest at my roots in the afternoons, reading stories and playing games. I could not talk to them but I could feel them, like the featherlight brush of a finger on my cheek.
I existed in their world and also in the other, in the place where the evergreens clustered together and the ground was carpeted with their red and purple crushed berries in autumn. The snow covered my branches in winter and thawed into wet slush in spring. My emotions were smothered, slowed like my sap into an almost unreachable torpor. I began to know the earth and air intimately, the way the breeze shifted before a storm, the way the soil collected and broke apart from one root to the next.
I could feel the other evergreens around me where our roots touched, and we sang to each other in whispers, sharing thoughts in random pieces and half-recalled stories. They were fragments of beings - like tattered remnants of people from long ago. Through them I knew the grove to be old, older than memory, but somehow the thread connecting all of us was the same. Fear and pursuit and then peace. There were disjointed bits, too, nonsensical - people standing in the grove next to trees that seemed to mirror them somehow, others with weapons and fury marching forth toward the mountain I knew lay in the distance. I collected them all like fallen leaves in autumn, a great pile I didn't know what to do with but couldn't let go.
In the absence of the daily responsibilities and constant clamor of my former life, an unfamiliar quiet filled me. At first, it was unbearably boring. My mind drifted and sank, surface thoughts flitting across it unseen and unnoticed. As time passed I looked out on my old world less and less, and the tremors through the grove's root system became mere background noise. I began to relive memories long set aside of my adolescence and young adulthood. There had been a fearless me, once, striving and open. A quiet me, too, who loved to drive to a remote place and lie on the hood of her car, reading books by a stretch of beach, a thicket of woods, a corn field. There was a wondering me, the one who was happily curious about her future - who dreamt of it all the time, imagining a dozen different paths. The brave and gorgeous me who had insisted on getting a snapdragon tattoo on my calf, tilted so that it was twining around my leg, peeking out from the back like a wayward child. I had always felt such pleasure when catching a glimpse of it while showering, swimming, resting on the couch. The me who felt sexy and powerful, even when she didn't consciously think of herself that way.
It was strange how distant all of those parts were now. Not just because of my current state, but even before that, subsumed by the needs of maintaining a child, a home, a job, a partner. There was bliss in all of those things, too, but it was different, less ethereal. I examined the memories like a scientist cataloging samples - methodical and detached.
In my grove of evergreens, the Woman approached me, the first person I had seen there since the Man on Fire had run off in frustration. The winter's cold was long gone, and the ground she walked on was carpeted with lush grasses and dandelions swaying with their full coiffures of seeds. She filled my senses, a thick form of greens and browns, hands weathered and callused where she laid them at my roots.
"I have come, Child," she said, but her words did not hit my trunk like the sounds my husband and daughter made. Instead they rustled my foliage, touching as easily as a breeze, a welcome caress. "Are you prepared to leave this form behind?"
My emotions tumbled back to the surface, and I quailed and recoiled in fear.
"It could be your time, if you are ready," the Woman mused. "But I will not force you." She sat back on wide hips, unbound hair brushing the earth around her.
If she had asked me when I first arrived so long ago, I surely would have agreed immediately. But now, leaving this quiet haven felt overwhelming. I would be exposed, vulnerable.
As if she knew what I was thinking, the Woman nodded. "It is hard out there. There are many dangers. But pleasures, too. Pleasures you will never again experience in here." I thought of Caroline's cuddles and my husband's touch. I remembered eating ice cream and laughing so hard I couldn't stop and kisses that felt like they would consume me whole with passion.
"If you are prepared, simply see yourself as you were and as you are," she said. It made no sense to me, but I concentrated on my body as it was before the Man on Fire, before being a tree, and felt my hands clench and my heart beat somewhere deep within my trunk. The world shifted, and, like moving a muscle I had forgotten I had, all of a sudden I was trapped in my tree, separate but stuck. I fumbled blindly with limbs I barely remembered and pushed outward, feeling my body tear itself in half the way it had when I had birthed Caroline. If I could have screamed, I would have, but instead I just fell down next to the tree, my tree, fully undone.
The Woman came into sharp view now, her full Rubenesque figure reaching to help me stand, arms rounded with muscles and fat. Her face danced with laugh lines, and her skin was warm and mottled a deep mossy green in the dappling sunlight. I leaned against her and sobbed while she stroked my hair.
"Transitions are never easy," she said. "We all know it, it's the most obvious thing in the world, but it always bears repeating, because we so easily forget."
Eventually my crying eased, and my body stood on its own, feeling strange and tingling, as though the entirety of it had fallen asleep like a foot and was trying to shake itself awake. I was naked, but felt no shame or cold. The air was warm around me and my own folds and bulk did not cause me even subconscious embarrassment for once. I stepped lightly in between the trees, taking the Woman's hand into my own.
"These others are like you," she said, gesturing to the evergreens around us. "This tale has been played out so often, I am sometimes surprised that the players get any pleasure from it at all. It has been an age or more since the last cycle, and it is not easy to pull one of you into our realm, much less keep you here by coercion." She sighed. "But some things never change."
I stared at her, confused.
She smiled sadly. "Too many gods see others as mere playthings. Humans are caught up in immortal revels against their will." She brushed an arm through a nearby tree, shaking the newly formed berries so that they danced like purple-red bells. "Honestly, they don't even care about the object of their infatuation. It is their infatuation to which they are truly in thrall. Their fellow deities would believe them even if they pointed to a swan and announced that it was a beautiful woman they had been chasing who was transformed moments ago. They would all commiserate in the 'lost love', and the swan who was only ever a swan would swim on with its life. Indeed," she said, "I happen to know for a fact that this has happened on multiple occasions."
"Why me?" I asked.
"Why not you?" she replied. "Besides, that is the wrong question. Their motivations are meaningless, just acting out the same script again and again. It is your purpose that matters. You ran. You stood your ground. You called for help. Even if you had done none of those things, you would still have your own being. You would still matter. So where do you go from here?"
"I don't know," I said. "What are my options? How do I know it won't happen again?" "Your choices are yours to conceive," the Woman said. And I did. My mind opened like the petals of a flower, seeing a world, a universe of possibility in front of me. It was a dizzying array - a seemingly infinite number of me. They were marvelous, each in their own way, and I was dazzled by the sight of them.
But, in the end, I reached out with my head or heart or gut or whatever spiritual organ truly makes these decisions and felt the Woman squeeze my hand in hers. I looked away, took in all the other trees that had once been people running from pointless cruelty.
"Did any of them stay evergreen?" I asked.
"No," she replied with a smile. "They all chose to return to their original forms... eventually. But a small piece of them stays here, just like a small piece of you will remain." The leaves around us rustled as if in agreement, and I remembered their stories, the images of a hundred different dryads dancing through my head.
"Why don't you stop the gods? If you have this power -" I faltered as the deep brown of her iris-less eyes turned on me.
"That is not my part to play. As long as the cycle has existed, I have been a shield when I can be. And that will be my role for as long as it lasts." She took my hands in hers and rubbed her thumbs along mine. "I have only a few paths in front of me. You are granted many. And the beauty for you is that going down one does not preclude others." Her gaze was inscrutable. The trees around me rustled, sang their memories through their roots into the me that was still communing with them. "It is time, little one." With a great shove, she sent me reeling, plunging through the ground and down until I somehow emerged in my own bed, sitting up with a deep breath as the covers fell away from me.
My husband reached for me and held me as I shivered. "What's wrong?" he said. "Did you have a nightmare?"
I pulled back and stared at him. But his face was not drawn, his eyes sleepy but not shadowed.
I threw myself out of bed and ran down the hall to the front door, letting the warmth of our heating gust out into the cool spring air. There on the edge of the lawn stood my evergreen tree.
My husband was close behind me. "Dee, is everything all right?" he asked.
I shook my head. "How long has that tree been here?"
He stared at it, perplexed. "I mean, it must have been a while." He yawned. "I don't know. I've never really paid attention to our shrubs and trees and stuff. Are you okay?" I could hear Caroline's toddler murmurings from her room down the hall.
I nodded and rubbed my hands together, their skin smooth and unblemished. If I peered closely enough I could see the echo of a forest of evergreens surrounding me, the shadow of the Woman as she slipped out of sight.
My husband and Caroline remembered nothing; and no time, it seemed, had passed since that first night of dreaming of the Man on Fire. It was easier this way, better that no one had to explain why "my wife turned into a tree." It made a strange sort of sense, I supposed, that the gods themselves were unbound to concepts like time and, apparently, responsibility.
I remembered it all, though. It didn't fade like a normal dream. It was a part of me. I wrote everything down and reread it again and again, trying to sort it all out in my mind. I thought about the universe of me, the millions of versions fanned out around me like a cloak spread in the sand. I thought of the rustling evergreens, the stories of others who had returned to the realm of the gods to face their oppressors, those fragments that now made sense. And the Woman's words reverberated through my consciousness. Why not you?
Looking at my husband and Caroline settled my determination. I could not bear the thought that they might get caught up with the gods, too.
One night, as I closed my eyes to sleep, I whispered the lucid mantra again and again to myself under my husband's snores. "The next time I am dreaming, I will remember I am dreaming."
When I open my eyes, I am standing in the forest of evergreens. I do not want to see the Man on Fire again, but I will do what it takes. My chosen purpose eclipses my fear, my determination shines from me brighter than any sun. The thin threads of all the others who had lived and ran and fought pulse inside me, granting me a collective experience far beyond what any who came before me had known. I remember the possibilities I saw for myself, the cryptic look the Woman gave me. There was one (at least one) where I stood in this realm triumphant, a thousand shattered cycles of violence and casual cruelty at my feet. I remember more of this place than I could've thought possible.
I smile at the rustling trees around me and set forth. The gods at play will never see me coming.
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