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Grandifolia

By Elliott Gish

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The first time I do everything the way I’m supposed to. I wait for the new moon and walk into the woods at midnight. I carry a jar of pig’s blood and wear a wreath of nettles, ignoring as best I can the stinging on my scalp. I tread silently, carefully, one bare foot settling deep into the dirt before I lift the other, until I find what I am looking for.

The tree sprawls lasciviously across the hollow that shelters it, its branches spread wide and low. An American beech, its pale bark gleaming silver in the dark. Fagus grandifolia. That’s the scientific name, Fagus grandifolia, big leaf beech. I looked it up before I came. I don’t know why.

No—that’s a lie. I looked it up to gird my loins with trivia, to guard against the utter foolishness of what I have come here to do.

I pour the blood in a careful circle around the trunk, careful to duck the lowest branches so I don’t dislodge my nettle crown. There’s barely enough. By the time I close the circle only a few stubborn drops slide down the glass.

I back a few feet away and kneel, my knees sinking into damp earth. Closing my eyes, crossing my fingers, I say the words, and I wait.

I know that she is there before my eyes open again. It is like electricity, maybe, a current making the hair on my arms stand and twist. Then again, it is like a smell, an odour that both attracts and repels me, an old lover’s sweat mixed with a new lover’s spit. And then once more again, it is a feeling, a great swooping shudder, like the sinking drop in the pit of the stomach before an orgasm or a fall.

She stands before me, moon-skinned, loose-limbed. She is so close I can see the veins in her arms, green and gold instead of blue, and the mossy brown of her eyes. There is no feeling in them as she looks down at me from a height, swaying slightly as if in a breeze. She is naked.

Beech trees bear male and female flowers, and the female flowers bud in pairs. They are susceptible to bark and leaf disease. They have dense, shallow root systems. Sometimes new saplings will spring up from their roots, foregoing the usual business of seedlings. My mind rifles frantically through these recently acquired facts, desperate for anything that might be helpful in this situation. I thought that the results of my experiment would be somehow more metaphorical, if there were any results at all. I had not expected her to be so solid, so very there.

“What do you want?” she asks. Her voice is just a woman’s voice, not unlike my own.

I prepared a speech at home, rehearsed it under my breath as I made my way through the woods. Now, staring at her, I feel those practiced words shrivel and die.

“They say that you give people gifts,” is all I can manage to say.

The dryad’s face is hard as the heart of a log. Like the scientific name of her tree, “dryad” is a word I learned for this occasion. I’m not sure it strictly applies to her, but it is the only one I found that came close.

“I suppose you want one, then,” she says. “What is it? Fame? Wealth? Vengeance? Tell me or leave.”

From her tone it is clear she has no preference. I could tell her, or I could turn and walk away without uttering a word. It would be the same to her either way. That helps. So does the deep breath I take before saying it.

“I’m in love,” I tell her.

I hate how simple it sounds out loud, a cliché before the words hit the air.

“In love,” the dryad repeats. She sounds bored already. “You people are always falling in love. Who is it?”

“A woman,” I say, and close my eyes against the memory of my thundering pulse, the nights spent sick with want. “She’s a figure model in my life drawing class.”

The dryad says nothing. The air between us fills slowly with the expectant hum of a forest at night, dreaming of summer.

“I’m not an artist,” I say. That isn’t important, but I want to explain the situation. To her, to myself. “But I used to draw for fun, back in university, and my job is really stressful. I’m a—” I stop and shake my head. She doesn’t need to know. “I wanted to do something to keep myself sane, after work. I saw this advertisement for drawing classes at the rec centre on Thursday nights. I’m always free Thursdays, so I thought, why not, you know?”

The dryad tilts her head. This encourages me.

“So the first night I go in,” I continue, “I’m ready to go with my charcoal and my brand new sketchbook, and the teacher tells us that we’ll be drawing nudes. I wasn’t expecting that right out of the gate, I thought we’d start with… I don’t know, fruit, or something. And then…”

Then the woman stepped in like a leopard, and I found myself staring. Pale brown skin with a dark scattering of freckles across the nose and cheeks. Grey-green eyes that glimmered even under fluorescent lights. A full mouth that twitched as she disrobed, as though she found the whole situation rather silly. All my drawings were of that, her mouth, her smile, and the teacher tutted when she walked up behind me and saw them.

“This is figure drawing,” she told me, her elaborate silver earrings swaying in time to her words. “You must look at the body.”

And so I made myself draw the rest of her, although it felt wrong, on some level, to look. Like I was getting too much out of it.

I came back week after week, drawing her over and over again: the sweeping arc of her delicate arms, the flare of her thighs, the little dips and shadows of her collarbone. Before she arrived, I would stare at the model’s stand and will her to appear. Her shape seemed to hover in front of me all the time, the afterimage of a bright light. I barely noticed that my drawings were improving, although the teacher did, and once showed my work to the other students in the class as an example of how to recreate shadow on skin.

I thought that perhaps that would be enough to get her attention. But she never looked at it, or me. She just shrugged her clothes back on and left.

I say none of this to the dryad, but her mouth curves, as though she has heard it anyway. She looks at me with the inscrutability of millions of years of evolution, centuries of standing still in time while humans buzzed frantically over the surface of the planet, living and dying in the space of a breath.

How young I must seem to her. How foolish, how unimportant.

“I want her to notice me,” I tell the dryad. “I’ve spent so long looking at her, I want her to look back. Just once, that’s all. I can do the rest.”

I don’t say please. That is one of the rules, I’ve been told—never say “please,” or she will change the price. But the please is in my voice, in my eyes, in the clenching of my hands in the dirt.

The dryad steps closer to me. One hand reaches out to grasp my chin, the touch such a shock that I flinch. Her skin is cool and slightly rough. Like bark.

“The next time you see this woman,” she says, “there will be a moment when she looks up from her pose. Her gaze will travel the room, aimlessly, lingering on nothing. Until it meets yours, and stops.” She smiles again. Her teeth are jagged at the edges. “That is what I can give you. Now, what can you give me?”

They told me what to offer her, those people who told me about the tree and her gifts. This time I remember the words.

“I will give you a memory,” I say.

“Which?”

Go young, they told me. Young and bloody. That’s what she likes.

“My very first one. I’m three years old, standing with my mother in an empty parking lot. She is trying to teach me how to ride my bicycle. I fall off and split my forehead open.”

The moonlight catches in her eyes, making them gleam as she sucks in a long, greedy breath. Her hand slides up from my chin to the side of my head, just beneath the crown of nettles. The fingers twitch, the nails dig.

“I accept,” she says, just as they said she would, and then her hand is in my skull.

I expected this to be more metaphorical, too. I am unprepared for how much it hurts, the way her fingers burn as they probe in my brain. I want to scream, but everyone I’ve spoken to has told me that the dryad doesn’t like loud noises, will withdraw her aid from anyone who raises their voice. I grit my teeth and clench my fists, fighting the urge to tear myself away.

A jumble of images swim before my eyes, appearing and disappearing in less time than it takes to draw breath. The pain of a failed dive at a swimming pool. The strange, mushroomy smell of a boy I kissed in seventh grade. A panicked dash across campus in my last year of university to get to an exam. Tastes, sounds, sights long forgotten but still stored somewhere in the maze of my brain, sifting through her fingers like so much trash.

Finally I feel her grasp something and pinch. Delicate as a spider, she draws the thread of the memory out of me. I see it as a glimmering strand of silver, barely visible in the dark. She winds it carefully around her index and middle fingers. The black well of her mouth opens and she sucks the memory greedily off her hand, her eyes closing briefly as though overcome by sweetness. I try to recall that day, that fall from my bicycle, but there is a hole in my mind where it should be, a darkness like the kind at the bottom of a cellar.

The dryad steps back, a faint flush rising on her cheeks and on her chest.

“Go,” she says, and turns. By the time I struggle to my feet, my head aching, she is already gone.

---

The second time I forget the nettle crown. It is two days before the new moon. Still, I walk carefully, and bring my jar of pig’s blood. A little more this time, just in case. My hand shakes as I pour it. My voice does the same as I say the words.

“I have seen you before, I think,” the dryad says. Her hair bristles around her like broken twigs. Her sex is brackish in the moonlight. “You have another request?”

I nod from my place in the dirt.

“You know the payment will be greater,” she says. “It always is the second time.”

I nod again, my heart thundering inside my chest. I am thinking of her fingers, plunging gleefully into my head. Her mouth, yawning open to suck at her fingers.

“She noticed you, did she not?” The dryad seems a little less bored this time, as though she actually wants to know the answer.

“She did,” I say, swallowing. “I went to my next class, and she was there, posing. One foot up on a block and her arms above her head. I was shading her fingers, and she looked at me. Just like you said.”

Those grey-green eyes met mine and I stopped drawing entirely, my pencil hovering a millimetre away from my sketchbook. I tried my hardest to hold her gaze, to keep our eyes locked over the top of my easel, but it lasted only a moment. She blinked and looked away, flinching as though stung.

“And after that?” the dryad asks. There is a touch of mockery in her voice. “I suppose you did nothing, did you?”

I want to snap at her, but am all too aware of what she is, the power she has over me. Deep breaths, deep breaths.

“She stayed after class that day to speak to the teacher,” I reply. “I took my time, packed my things up slowly, hung around in the hall until she came out. And I asked her what her name was.”

“Rachel,” she said, and offered me her hand. Her grip was firm, her skin cool.

“I asked her to go for a drink,” I continue, closing my eyes and letting the memory take me over. “She said sure, that she had nowhere to be. And…”

Drinks at the bar near the rec centre, hers a whiskey, mine the house red. Polite conversation for the first round, distracted by the line of her throat, the rough hum of her voice. The second round: broader smiles, easier laughter, her hand briefly touching my wrist as she described a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico with an ex. After the third round I let myself slide closer to her, my leg pressing against hers, feeling her liquor-sweet breath on my face, and she kissed me.

There was no fourth round, just the two of us stumbling back to her apartment and falling backwards onto her bed.

“You’re trembling,” she whispered into my mouth, and so I was, overwhelmed by her skin, the smell of her hair, the way the shadows changed shape in her face. I kept trembling all through the night, even after she fell asleep. I could not believe that I could turn to my left and look at her, the wild halo of her curls, the slight frown twisting her mouth as she twitched her way through a dream.

“You got what you wanted.” But the dryad’s eyes gleam with understanding. Once again, she knows exactly what is on my mind. Once again, she knows what I am seeing, what I am remembering. I don’t need to tell her, but I do.

“She woke me up early the next day,” I say. “She said I had to leave, that she was late for work. When I asked if I could call her, she just shrugged. When I did…”

“Look,” Rachel said, the exasperation in her voice clear even through the distortion of the telephone. “We had fun, but I really don’t see this going anywhere. I think we should just call it a day, don’t you?”

She hung up without waiting for an answer. The next time I came to drawing class, there was another model, a man whose form I rendered in quick, brutal slashes.

The dryad snickers. It is a joke to her, an ugly and marvelous joke, and that should keep me from going on, from asking her, but it doesn’t.

“I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I feel crazy. That morning—” I stop, wondering if I should really tell her this, but then remember that if I don’t say it, she’ll still know. “I went into her bathroom that morning, before she woke up, and I saw her toothbrush at the side of the sink. I… I put it in my mouth. Not to use it. Just to taste it. Her. It was sick. I want her to feel that.”

“You want her to be sick?”

“I want her to want me!”

I shout this over the objections of my own mind. The words echo through the woods, causing something to flee rustlingly through the underbrush, and I wince. She doesn’t like loud noises.

The dryad looks down at me thoughtfully, one slim finger tapping at her bottom lip.

“When you get home,” she says, “pour yourself a cup of tea. Sit on your red armchair and watch the rain fall outside your living room window. Wait for the knock at the door. Your Rachel will be there, soaked through and shaking with need. Pull her inside and kiss her, as deeply as you wish. She will want you. She will not stop wanting you.” She smiles. “Now. What do you offer as payment?”

None of the people I spoke to about her ever mentioned coming back a second time, and I have no idea what memory would be suitable. Should it be another first of some kind? Something from my childhood? Something bloody?

“My worst memory,” I offer at last. “Thirteen years old. I get my period at school and don’t notice until I bleed through my jeans and onto my seat. I stand up to answer a math question on the board and the room goes wild. The other students are laughing, screaming. The teacher has no idea what to do, so he decides the best way to handle it is to pretend nothing is happening. He makes me stay at the board, working through that whole equation, while blood spreads across my crotch. My classmates are beside themselves. They think I’m disgusting. I think I’m disgusting.”

My voice catches a little there. I won’t miss this memory, won’t mind not having it pop up every time I check myself in a store window for leaks.

“I accept your payment,” the dryad says, and steps forward to grasp my head. “Now, hold still.”

It hurts more the second time. A person’s fingers in your head isn’t something you can get used to.

As I walk home that night, keeping one eye on the thick rain clouds obscuring the moon, I try to recall the memory I gave to her. It’s a gap in a row of teeth, an empty space where something has been discarded.

---

The third time I don’t give a damn what the moon is up to. I slop pig’s blood hastily around the base of the trunk, barely forming a circle, and forget to kneel when I say the words. I still close my eyes, though. I have that much sense.

“You again,” the dryad says, her long hair a banner in the brisk night wind. There is no real expression in her voice, but I get the impression that she’s pleased to see me. Interested, anyway. “What could you possibly want now?”

“Look, it’s no big deal,” Rachel said impatiently. We’d been sitting on her bed for an hour, her explaining, me sobbing into my hands. The girl I found her with had tiptoed out during the first few minutes of our fight, making apologetic faces at both of us as she gathered her clothes. “I just don’t do monogamy, okay? I like you, I really do…” She trailed off there, her eyes unfocused, as though she were trying to remember why, precisely, she liked me.

“You like me, but you’ll fuck other people?” My hands were wet with tears and snot, my sleeves streaked with silver. “I’m fine, but any other warm body will do just as well?”

“Jesus.” Rachel rolled her eyes, naked and unbearably lovely, her chest warm and flushed from sex. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to run home to my bed and cry myself into a shriveled husk. But I knew that even there I would find reminders of her—her stray hairs scattered across the pillows, the sheets imbued with the smell of her sweat. “Why do you have to cry all the time?”

I watched her get up and walk into the kitchen to make coffee, elegant and bare. There was a wet stain on the comforter.

I don’t even bother to say it. I know she knows.

“You said you wanted her to want you,” the dryad says. “Not that you did not want her to want anybody else.”

“Of course I don’t want her to want anybody else! Why else would I have come back?”

The dryad rolls her eyes, just as Rachel did this morning, and my hands ball into fists.

“You are a stupid creature,” she says. She says it in the same tone a plumber might use when pointing out a dripping faucet. Here is a problem, have you noticed it? “Did you think that this was the beginning of a romance? She did not even see you in the beginning. Why would she want you and only you now?”

The night she showed up on my doorstep we lay in bed together, her fingers tracing dreamy patterns on my arm. The air smelled like the wet of her body, her spit, her sweat.

“I don’t know what happened,” she murmured. Her eyes were already fluttering shut, the lids heavy, bruise-dark. “I meant what I said, you know. I thought this was going to be a one-off. But then…” She shook her head slightly, gazing at me. “I just started thinking about you tonight. I can’t explain it. I had to see you.”

I could explain it.

“I think about you,” I told her. Why not be honest? “All the time. I have ever since you came into that class.”

She sat up in bed, letting the sheets fall away. Jumping to her feet, she moved over to the window where streetlight poured in, its glow warming her skin. She turned her back and looked over her shoulder, her face obscured by smoke-dark curls.

“Come on,” she said. “I can hold this pose for like a half hour. An hour, tops.”

I shuffled into a sitting position, staring at her graceful form, her strong legs, the elegant curve of her spine, and reached for my sketchbook.

“I want,” I start, and close my eyes for a moment, my blood pounding hot in my temples. This is it, what I’ve really wanted the whole time, even though I know I shouldn’t. Can I be the kind of person who asks for it?

“I want her to want only me,” I say. “No one else. Nothing else. I want her to need me the way I need her. I want her to be as desperate to hold me and touch me as I am to hold and touch her. I want to be the last thing she sees before she falls asleep, the first thing she thinks about when she wakes up. I want her to feel the way I feel about her.”

Yes. I can.

The dryad looks at me and shakes her head slowly. “Stupid,” she says again, and for a moment I wonder if that means she will not do it, if I have to turn around and trudge back through the woods with nothing. But then she continues:

“Tomorrow morning, ask her to meet you at your favourite coffee shop. Order a drink, sit in the corner, and wait. When she comes in through the door and sees you, her expression will be one of grim determination. But as she steps forward, the sun will spill across your face, and her expression will melt into something new. She will be dazzled, full of wonder. She will look at you like a woman seeing the sky for the first time. She will sit across from you, reach for your hands, and say everything you’ve ever wanted to hear.”

As though in pantomime, she reaches out to grasp my hands in hers. I do not like the way her fingers feel between mine, so delicate, so strong.

“And now,” she says, “my payment, please.”

Rachel leaned over to look at the drawing, her head so close it nearly touched my own. She had not yet bothered to get dressed. “Nice,” she said.

“You think so?”

“Yeah. It actually looks like me. I hated seeing the drawings in that class, you know. None of them looked anything like me, even when all the details were right. It was like they started drawing me with someone else already in mind, and just happened to fill in my eyes and tits and hair. They looked at me, but they didn’t see me.” She smiled. It was a different kind of smile—slower, softer. “But you always made me look like myself. I liked your drawings best. You saw me.”

I kissed her. How could I not?

“My best memory,” I say, and hate myself for saying. It’s real, that memory, maybe the only real thing that has ever occurred between Rachel and me. She liked my drawings before I ever came to the tree. I don’t want to give it up. I don’t want to forget. “Just take it, please. Hurry.”

The dryad’s fingers plunge into my skull. That soft, slow smile vanishes as though it never was.

---

The last time I run through the woods in daylight, screaming the words between frantic gulps of air. There is no blood, no nettle crown, no kneeling. I don’t even close my eyes. Somehow, I still don’t see the dryad emerge. One minute I’m alone, the next she stands before me, earth-black and birch-white, furious that I am so insolent as to wake her in daylight. She is about to speak when I grab her by the arms, shaking the voice right out of her.

“You have to fix it,” I say. I am still screaming, and I know I need to stop, but I can’t, I can’t. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know it was wrong. I shouldn’t have—take it back. Take it all back.”

There is no mistaking the expression on her face now, the pleasure, the cruelty. “Take it back?” she repeats, her voice warm with enjoyment. “Doesn’t she want you now, more than anything?”

After that day in the coffee shop, Rachel would not leave my apartment. She clung to me, keeping me close to her in bed, and refused to get up. When I asked about her job, she looked at me with confusion. “That doesn’t matter,” she said.

Her phone buzzed and rang as friends, coworkers, family members tried to get in touch with her. She deleted every text and voicemail, dropped every call. After a day or two, the battery died. She did not bother to recharge it.

I left for work and came back to find her in my bed where I had left her. The sheets were soaked with urine. She hadn’t bothered to get up to use the bathroom.

I ordered us takeout, made soup and homemade muffins, tried to tempt her with the prospect of a dinner out. She refused to eat. She didn’t want food, she said. She only wanted me.

I left town for three days to attend a conference. When I returned she was weak and dehydrated, her arms noticeably thinner when she reached up to pull me in for an embrace.

“Did you eat?” I demanded, pulling back. “Did you drink any water? My God, Rachel, did you sleep?”

She looked up at me with eyes that had already begun to sink deep into her face, the skin frighteningly thin, the cheekbones absurdly prominent, and smiled. The smile cracked the dry skin of her lower lip. A sluggish trickle of blood made its way down her chin.

“I don’t need any of that,” she said. “I have you.”

“This isn’t what I wanted,” I say, but before I finish my sentence the dryad is already shaking her head.

“This is exactly what you wanted,” she replies. “‘Only me’, you said. Nothing else. No one else.”

“I was wrong. Make it stop. She’ll die if you don’t make it stop.”

The dryad peels my hands from her forearms and takes a step back. She spreads her arms, looking more than ever like the tree behind her, its wide boughs reaching out to take the world as its lover.

“I will need payment,” she warns, and I nod.

“Anything. Everything. Whatever you want. Just help her. Please.”

Don’t say please. That’s one of the rules, and I am breaking it. I don’t care.

She smiles.

“In half an hour,” she says, “Rachel will wake up in your bed, thirstier and hungrier than she has ever been in her life. She will not recognize her surroundings, and when she finds your drawings of her, she will be puzzled, and a little frightened. She will have no memory of you, no idea why she was in your apartment. She will assume she blacked out after a night of heavy drinking and ended up sleeping in a stranger’s house. She will manage to pull herself into your kitchen and eat leftovers from the refrigerator to build her strength before she leaves for the nearest bus stop. The bus will take her away, back to her real life. Away from you. Forever.” She pauses and looks at her, her moss-brown eyes full of no emotion I can understand. “Is that acceptable?”

Even now, after all that I have seen, I waver. The wanting is still there; it still hurts. But I make myself think of her bleeding mouth, the stink of piss in the sheets.

I nod.

The dryad’s smile widens. Those jagged teeth are somehow worse in sunlight.

“Kneel,” she orders.

I obey, reaching out to place her hands on my head myself. The dirt beneath my knees is warm from the sun.

“You can take whatever you like,” I tell her. “Any memory at all.”

The dryad gazes down at me. One finger tickles my cheek before it sinks with all its fellows into my head.

“Stupid creature,” she says, beginning to grasp and gather. “I am going to take all of them.”

---

Host Commentary

Every editor has those days. Writers who argue with rejections, sometimes announcing they don’t want you to run their story anyway before flouncing off, never to hear the, “all right, don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” which is inevitably thought but never said. Then there are the submissions that don’t even come close to matching the submissions criteria – some people do seem to believe that publication is a lottery, and if only they can achieve enough entry tickets, they will somehow eventually ‘win’.

It doesn’t work like that. Story selection isn’t random. We’re looking for GOOD.

This story is good.

In fact, I think this story is fabulous. I knew we had to run this as soon as I started reading it, and I hadn’t changed my mind by the time I got to the end, but let’s go back to the start.

I love a good first line. Every editor does. When you have to make a lot of decisions, you appreciate a writer who makes it clear they know what they’re doing from line one.

And this is an excellent first line: “The first time I do everything the way I’m supposed to.”

Now that is eleven words long, and from them we have learned: the main character is carrying out some activity – probably, this being horror, a ritual – with multiple steps. They’re going to do it more than once. They’re not going to follow the steps as they should as time goes on. It’s almost certainly going to go horribly wrong.

Brilliant. This is a skilled storyteller telling us exactly what we need to know concisely and efficiently. We’re in safe hands.

And from there it just gets better. We can SEE the folly. We’re practically screaming, no, don’t do it! Definitely don’t do it AGAIN. Oh no. No, no, no.

We’re by turns entranced, delighted, horrified, reading through our fingers, uncomfortable, and yet unable to put the damn thing down.

That’s the craft of it. And then of course there’s the heart of it. Love magic: potions, spells, whatever. I’ve thought many times that it must surely be up there with the worst horrors. If there is anything that should always be free will, it’s love. To take that from someone, to compel them to feel a certain way. To steal their thoughts from them just because you want their physical presence for yourself… to turn them into a thing you own, rather than a mind you cherish.

It’s horrible. It’s REALLY horrible.

And the dryad knows it. But she isn’t about to explain any of that to a silly, tiresome, short-lived speck of a human. If she ever had any patience, she lost it a long time ago. No. She’s going to play along, show you just how stupid and self-absorbed and pathetic you are, and then extract her painful price. Which is everything.

But you did, after all, agree to pay.

Don’t mess with love magic, and never, ever, try to play games with the fae.