This was a flash fiction story that I wrote more than a decade a go when I was first getting into Jungian Psycholgy . This was part of a set of flash fiction that juxtaposed the way the psyche deals with conflicct between the inner and outer worlds with suppernatural metaphors aka ghost stories. This story, The Green was first published in Coffin Bell and later in an anthology edition that is no longer in print.

The Tree

 

Set as a seal upon thy arm 

Set as a seal upon thy heart

For love is stronger than the grave

For love is strong as death 

As strong as death

– Gospel Round

The Clearing

The place in the woods where he took the girl was not a scary place. The large, established oak trees wove their elder branches together across the sky in a spider’s web that carpeted the soft ground in splotches of moonlight.

“Will we be together forever and ever?” she had asked the man. “Forever and ever,” he had told her.

He was the most beautiful man that she had ever seen, and she was in love with him. She had not known him long, but he had promised her love, fame, and adventure if she ran away with him. The clearing was there just as he had said it would be. It was beautiful, and the soft white blossoms of moonflower were just beginning to open in the dappled moonlight. She had told him that she loved moonflowers.

It was an old forest they were in, and the thick oaks choked out the smaller plants; their trunks spread out in all directions as far as she could see. At the edge of the clearing, a fat acorn fell in front of her and rolled onto the white grass. She picked it up and stroked its smooth shell. “The forest is missing a tree,” she thought as she walked out into the clearing, the white beam of moonlight making her pale face glow.

That was when she noticed the hole in the middle of the clearing, with the pile of earth next to it. “What is that?” she had turned to ask the man, but the knife was already in her back. She clutched the acorn tightly in her fist, even after her hand was cold, dead, and covered in earth. Her last thoughts were the soft white dreams of a child, reaching through the earth like roots to find the man who had said he loved her.

The Wanderer

The man had never known a home. Before he was old enough to understand why, he had been loaded on a ship with many other desperate people. He had committed many crimes in his lifetime, performing his horrors dutifully and dully, with little feeling.

Once, long ago, he had been sentenced to hang, and he had escaped almost by accident. He was a sad, restless spirit with no home. Every place his restless soul wandered was equally strange to him, and equally unsatisfying. Long ago, he had come from England in the belly of a wooden ship. The men who had told his mother they would take her to America were not good men, and they had done terrible things; both to him and to her. It was, however, far worse for him when they did their awful things to his mother. She had died, and he had lived, no longer caring if he did. And he had come to the shores of America.

His mind was as brittle and twisted as a piece of old wood from the things he had seen on the ship. The heart that has never known love is a strange thing. It is like the ear that has never known sound. He longed for something he had never known, yet he knew not what it was that he longed for. When he was hunted down and sentenced to hang for his crimes, he had not cared. He was hollow with the dry rot that eats away all the parts of a man’s insides that make him worthy of life. His escape was half luck and half cleverness; he had not a little of both.

Even after many years, there was still a youth and beauty to him, and he still hunted after innocence. He had wandered many places in his life. There was nowhere he belonged, but even a thing who is dead inside and horrible can only wander so far before he would cross places he had been before. All places were the same to him, and he was the same everywhere.

The White Oak

Many years later, another girl followed the man into the clearing. She was not unlike the first girl who had followed him there many years before. She too had been promised love, adventure, and all the thirsts of youth.

In the middle of the clearing was the most beautiful tree that she had ever seen. The man looked surprised to see it, even though he had told her that he had been here before. It was an oak, but pale as moonlight with moonflower vines twining up its trunk and into its branches. The entirety of its bark was smooth and pale, unlike any tree she had ever seen. There was an enormous wound in the middle of the tree, its bark peeled back and wood parted to reveal a dark cavern that led to the core of the wood. She wondered what had caused the wound to such a beautiful tree.

Suddenly, an acorn from above whistled through the leaves of the tree and came to a stop on the crown of her head. Her wonder at the tree forgotten, she turned around to see where the acorn had landed and saw the knife raised above her. She ran in terror, fleeing across the soft grass and into the darkness on the other side of the clearing.

When she turned around, she saw that the man had fallen, tripped by one of the white roots of the tree.

“Where are you?” the man called into the clearing. “Here I am,” a voice said, deep from within the blackness of the hole in the side of the white tree. It was a girl’s voice, very much like her own.

She could see the man reaching into the darkness inside the tree, reaching for where he thought she was hiding. Suddenly, the white bark began to close, sealing the wound in the side of the massive white oak. She could hear the man cry out from inside the tree for an instant before the sides of the cavern he had entered fused together. Then there was silence.

Then the wound in the tree was gone, and the man was gone, and they were together for ever and ever.