IT BEGINS . . .

When she wakes there is green coming in the window. She turns over on her pillow and closes her eyes again, smelling the clean white of the linen, willing it away. In another moment, however, a second breeze comes through the window and it is greener than the first. She stirs, she sighs. She sits up. Well.

By the time the third has arrived she is at the window seal to meet it. It comes into her lungs with a thin succulent hint of caressing cool chlorophyl and she feels her blood beginning to jump in her veins. She looks out over the land spread below her window. Everything is damp and brown. There are still patches of snow caught in the thickest parts of the underbrush. She lifts her eyes past the snow burned lawns, over the stubble of the fields to the dark woodlands, above the shadow of the trees to where the mountains stretch into the sky, still covered with a blanket of blue tinged snow. It doesn’t matter. She knows perfectly well that you don’t have to be able to see green for it to be there. The wind comes through the window again and it rocks her back on her heals, the insides of her eye lids are painted with visions; she sees those snow covered mountains lying in lush layers of emerald and jade in the soft turquoise twilight of summer. She hears the rivers of the woods, wet in her ears; sluicing downhill, streaming crystal, singing liquid songs over slick malachite moss, water hungrily splashing toward anything growing in a rush of yearning to create, to feast, to become - green.

She opens her eyes slowly and her lips twist. “Oh, very good!” she says to no one, but the wind. “I got the message, but the embellishment is certainly an added attraction.” She looks down at the inside of her wrist. Where the veins would normally show pale blue through her cream colored skin they are already a fairly bright green. She knows if she cut herself at this point she wouldn’t necessarily bleed red. “Well then,” she sighs, “That’s that! Ugh! I do hate arguments. Why do people argue with things that are inevitable?” She gazes out the window for another moment, her brow furrowed. “If something is inevitable it is unavoidable. If something is unavoidable it is inevitable, impossible, inescapable, why don’t any of them have their own word? In, un, in im? At any rate you can’t get out of it.” Another gust of wind comes through the open window and her golden hair is briefly frosted the color of clover. She shakes her head. “There wasn’t even anyone to see that. Wasted effort.” She puts her hand on the casement, considering. “Wind. Window. What is this an OW that the wind comes through? Like when someone pinches you and your mouth goes OW! If so, then all windows would be round. Maybe it hurts the wind to come through it? Because it’s not round? Hu?” She asks nobody. But nobody answers.

Margreth looks at the tray and is pleased. It looks very pretty and the Lady will notice. She always notices things that are pretty. Margreth has soaked last years berries in milk until they are plump again, then put them into fresh milk so they are floating like little red stars in a creamy white sky. Margreth shakes her head. That won’t do, little red stars in a creamy white sky indeed. “I’m just no good at this,” she mutters, “though I do keep trying. What DO they look like?” she gazes into the bowl of berries, her forehead wrinkling. “Agh! They look like red berries in fresh milk! How she does it, I don’t know, but I can’t!” She pushes her hair out of her face with the back of her wrist. “I can, however,” she says out loud, “make beautiful bread!” She surveys the small perfect loaf and the pat of white butter beside it with satisfaction. She is just getting ready to put the white teapot on to the tray when suddenly, from out of nowhere, there is the Lady Elizia awake, out of bed, standing there in a riding skirt braiding her long hair. And she is plating into it a narrow ribbon of deep, dark green.

(To Be Continued! ©Edwina Peterson Cross )