Junie runs away when it’s storming.
That’s why it takes me too long to notice. Mama gets restless when she can hear the thunder and the raindrops plinking off the roof. “That’s God weeping!” she screams. “He knows about all we done.”
I have to hold her down to her bed as the lightning flashes. She writhes and rages at me. She’s so skinny I hardly feel it, but she takes forever to tire out. The sick in her seems to embolden her just as it eats her away.
So, I don’t notice that Junie’s gone until the worst of the storm starts to ebb and I’m able to get up off Mama and breathe. When I see that she’s not in the cramped trailer living room that the two of us share, I hate myself for stopping to take those breaths.
I have no questions about where she’s going. I punch open the door to step outside and look out from the ridge down the mountain. Off near the horizon, the expanse of midnight green moss blanketing near-everything stares back at me. It’s darker than the color of the trees, but I’d be able to see where it begins even if they were the same shade. Moment to moment it rises and falls like the sea. It swallows the low-lying forests on the edge of the park. Further on, it swallows towns, cities, all proof of human life.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the way it twists up against our mountains was beautiful. Natural. But I do know, and I see that it’s neither of those things. It’s just hungry.
–
I used to be the middle sister. Now, I’m the oldest. Mama tells me I was born right around the same time they started talking about the plasmoss on the news. She says it was meant to be a good thing, for eating away at trash and plastic. Making the world greener. When I said once that it had done that pretty well, she slapped me on the side of the head.
By the time I was in first grade, it was clear that the fight against the moss was a losing battle. Most of the attempts at herbicides, cures and all that junk, were done with. It had taken its time reaching the continent from the garbage island in the Atlantic. Then it hit the East Coast and started eating its way in twenty, thirty miles a day.
Word got out that the moss didn’t like higher elevations and suddenly everyone was running to Colorado. Mama wanted to head there, but Pa didn’t believe in it. He believed in the Great Smokies. He’d been born and raised there, he said. We already lived in the foothills, so it was a shorter drive.
Mama still groans about Colorado as if we’ll all go someday, despite the fact that Pa’s been dead for two years and Kenzie’s been gone longer. I was ten and Kenzie was fifteen when she disappeared with a boy from one of the families living in the campgrounds.
People disappear a bunch up here, but we all know where they disappear to. The moss. For those of us that are left, it’s either going low enough to let it grow you over or dying from the sick that Mama has. The sick doesn’t spread from person to person, but you would think it did with how we’ve been shut out since she started to change. I know of seven other families left up in our stretch of the range and not one of them has offered to help us.
I hate them, but I also know that I probably wouldn’t help them either if they were in our place. Pa used to say one truth of the world was that you can’t help those who can’t help themselves.
I could help myself plenty, but it wasn’t as easy when I had to do it for Junie, Mama and I. So, I hated Kenzie for not being there and I missed Pa. I resented Ma for getting sick even though it wasn’t her fault, and I resented the person she’d turned into even more. Now she was always shrieking about nonsense I couldn’t understand.
Junie, I loved. I loved all my family, but it wasn’t complicated with Junie. She seemed shy but she wasn’t. It was only that she wouldn’t talk to you until you were real close to her. She’d tap my leg and I’d lean down for her to talk-whisper about the story she was thinking up. I’d drape the coarse old blue blanket Mama didn’t like on her skin over both of us and we’d sit there laughing and singing in the fake darkness.
I was afraid for Junie, though. Afraid because I knew that she heard Mama’s screams and ramblings when it rained and because she understood them in a way I didn’t. When Mama’s voice got all high and keeny like the moss was trying to talk through her, Junie knew what she was saying. I was afraid because when Junie got all quiet, I could tell she wasn’t just lost in her imagination.
She was listening to something else that I’d never been able to hear.
–
First thing I do when I realize she’s gone is scream, loud and long as I can.
Junie is young, but she’s always had a way with the land here. It’s the only home she can remember. She already has a head start, so I doubt I can catch up with her. Not if she’s headed downhill towards the green.
I imagine the horrible things that could happen to her, but that’s all it is. Imagination. None of us really know what happens after you get grown over because no one ever comes back.
I ask myself what Pa would have done. Probably storm down after her, find her in no time, and squeeze her so tight that she’d ache for a week. Then he’d fix me with a stern look that was worse than any fist and tell me that I had to do better. For all of us.
Mama finds me on our front steps eventually, stewing in emotion.
She’s a wraith in her dirty lilac nightshirt and underwear. Her legs are so thin that I can trace her bones with my fingers, feel their ridges and her skin’s easy give. Despite that all, she’s standing and her face is clearer than it has been in weeks.
“Where’s Henry at?” she asks me.
Pa’s name. I frown. She’s confused. “He’s dead, Mama. Why are you up?”
“I heard them whistling,” she says. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Who?”
“Henry and Kenzie were whistling for me. I told Henry I can’t whistle, he knows I can’t. He won’t listen. And he won’t shut up.”
“Junie’s gone, Mama,” I say, hollow.
“No she ain’t. She was whistling with them.”
My whole stomach goes cold as if I’m about to vomit. “What are you saying?”
“She’s bad at it, though. Lets too much air through.” She scratches her head. “I’m hungry. Go make me some food.”
I stand up. She’s taller, but I’m bigger. “Where do you hear them?”
“I said food, girl. I’m hungry!” She tries to sound demanding, but there’s a pleading note in her voice, like she is the child.
“Where do you hear them?” I yell at her, grabbing her shoulders. “Junie went down the mountain! She’s not anywhere whistling!”
Mama starts crying. Her tears leak a dirty light green like her piss does. “Where’s Henry? I can hear him but he won’t come back. I try to whistle, but he never hears me.”
“Henry is dead!” I repeat. “What matters now is Junie. You hear her?”
“Damn witchbody,” she hisses at me. “This is the devil’s world now. We reaping what we always sowed.”
She’s starting in on her delusions. I shake her back and forth. If I don’t get something out of her now, I never will. She doesn’t have the intuition that Junie has, but she’s got something. Enough to point me in the right direction, I think.
“I hear her,” she says. “I hear her. She’s singing her way down the sweet trail. How I used to sing to you. I’m tired, baby. Can you put me down and make me some food?”
I let her go and she stumbles back, sagging down onto the couch.
If I believe Mama, then I know which way Junie went. I can follow her. I grab my outside bag and my canteen, filling it with some water I brought in from the rain barrel yesterday. I put some nuts and chickweed in too, then pack our best hunting knife. We used to have a gun, but it was lost.
Mama watches as I do all this, moaning for food every so often. I try handing her some nuts but she just throws them onto the floor. When I’m ready to go, she rasps at my back. “You’re leaving me.”
“Not leaving. I’ll be back with Junie.”
“Can you put me to sleep?”
“Lie down there,” I say. “I won’t be long.”
“I can’t whistle this way. He won’t hear me!”
I don’t have time for this. “Lie down, Mama.”
“I want to whistle too,” she says. “You hear it? I want to whistle too.”
“Then do it!” I shout and slam the door behind me. Her cries fade away with distance until they’re only whispers in the wind.
–
Pa called it the sweet trail because it was sweet to us. It was out of the way enough to make run-ins with strangers unlikely, but we could find plenty to scavenge and hunt without having to step far off of it. It gifted us oyster mushrooms growing on fallen logs, cottontail rabbits, and if we were lucky, the occasional turkey.
Follow the trail East long enough and you’ll reach the green sea. Pa always told me to stop once it started to slope down again. Though the moss gets visibly thick at a certain point, there are spots between safe and contaminated land that are harder to tell apart. Unnatural, bad things happen in those places.
We foraged frequently, since there was never enough food. Over the years, his story about a lazy squirrel who didn’t save enough food had transformed into lectures about foresight and preparedness. I listened to them intently.
It was winter, and we were going out and checking all of our traps. Something about the moss made snow fall heavier and thicker. If traps got buried too deep, they were useless, so we had to clear them often. They had yielded us almost nothing so far that year, but Pa insisted that we do it all the same.
As the sweet trail weaved along the edges of the mountain, there were lookouts where the tree cover around it dropped away and you could stare out for miles. Our trailer was one of those places. To reach our farthest trap, we passed another lookout.
Pa stopped there, so I stopped with him. Despite all the snow in our pocket of the world, the moss was still as green as ever in the distance. He was quiet, so I was too. When Pa got quiet it meant he didn’t want anyone else interrupting his thoughts.
Finally, he spoke. “Your mother thinks that this happened because we sinned.”
“Us? We didn’t do anything.”
“Everyone,” Pa said. It seemed like he wasn’t listening to me much. “She thinks that living this way is our punishment. Our modern plague from above.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. “I don’t think it’s that coordinated. Tell me, what happens when you forage too much in one area?”
It was simple enough to seem like a trick question. “You hurt the plants. And the animals, you shrink their populations?”
“Right. What happens then?”
“The ecosystem fails,” I said.
“Yes.” Pa’s attention remained fixed on the far-off spot where white bled into shifting green. “We took everything the Earth had to give us and much, much more. The biosphere would have failed if another fifty years had gone by.”
I blinked. “It did fail.”
“Are you sure?” Pa asked. “Remember when you ate that pokeweed?”
I nodded. My cheeks burned. I had thrown up for a day straight because I hadn’t paid enough attention to what was safe and what wasn’t.
“Mother Nature knows how to defend herself,” Pa went on. “Part of me thinks that this was just her way of stopping us before we took it too far for her to fix.”
“I thought that bad scientists made the moss,” I mumbled.
“No.” Pa shook his head. “No. Something made that stuff, not someone. Could have been God like your mother thinks or the Earth, like I do. But no person could have done all this.”
“So, you do agree with Mama?”
“Mostly.” He turned, and I noticed how sunken his cheeks were. I saw the stress lines carved into his forehead. “Except for one thing. Your mother thinks that someday, if we’re good enough, we’ll be saved.”
“You don’t think so?”
Pa put a hand on my shoulder and I froze in place. He never hugged me and had barely touched me since Kenzie left. I didn’t want to startle him away.
“I think that we need to be our own angels,” he said. “You and me. Your mother is sick and June is too young. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” I would protect us, like Pa did. I could be that person. “I get it, Pa.”
“You have to,” he told me. “Because no one is saving us except each other. We’re all that we have.”
“I know,” I said, firm.
“Good.” He looked at me for a second longer, then patted me and kept moving. “One left. If we have light when we get back, we can work on your snares together.”
–
I go further than I should. By the time I realize that I am in the strangeness on the edge of the green, the afternoon is beginning to wane.
The awareness begins in my chest, which alternates between feeling empty and heavy as lead. When it feels empty, I get the phantom sensation of the breeze filtering through my body. When it is heavy, I thrum with some low, otherwise unheard beat.
I don’t let myself question my direction. If Junie was gone, absorbed into the moss, I would know. Never mind that I cannot sense the invisible connections that she was born seeing, the connections that Mama’s sick has planted in her. I would know.
The sweet trail becomes less defined. I follow the path where the trees are the shortest and where the ground is flatter. It takes me to a large stream that I know from further up the mountain.
I am not alone there, but I don’t notice it right away. I’m too preoccupied with how I’ll cross. The log resting across the water and the glossy stones protruding up from the surface both seem like bad options. I guess I could just walk through, but I don’t trust the water this far down.
I give a short laugh at my own logic. If I’m this far down, I’m probably infected with the sick already. The tightness in my chest should be proof of that. It doesn’t matter whether I get wet. All that matters is my sister.
It moves when I laugh, goes from bent over to ramrod straight in an instant. A doe. My hand goes for my knife on instinct. I could never kill it with a knife, but the thought of what it could do for us is too much to resist.
Then, it turns.
The ribs on its left side have punctured its skin and grown down as if they’re trying to make armor over its underbelly. Growths in different shades of brown and green protrude off of it. One is in the shape of a bird’s wing. Another is a human’s arm.
It breathes slick and wet. I see its mouth lolling open and my chest is empty. Its breath is whistling through the air between us and becoming lodged in my own lungs. I scratch at my arm because it is suddenly burning, but my head is clear. So clear.
Suddenly, I smell the earthiness of the ground. It is still wet from the rain. I am aware of the patch of poison sumac a few feet away from me. It is sharp against my nose in a way it has never been before. A creature fifty feet or five inches away in the brush steps on a twig and my ears twitch with the deer’s.
The deer’s wing flaps halfheartedly. The malformed hand on the end of its arm clenches then releases. My left hand does the same. I am too out of myself to be afraid. I wonder if this is how Mama feels when she’s writhing beneath me while I hold her.
Every weed and every leaf of every tree around me whistles. That really is the only way to describe it. It’s a keening, needy sound that draws me in. There is little harmony, but somehow all the discordant notes come together to form something whole. I’m part of that whole, the skinny girl with rough hands and ashy skin.
I step forward. I already feel like I’m touching the deer from across the water, but I need more. My foot skids on a muddy rock and I fall. The splash I make isn’t huge, but it’s enough to disrupt the whistling. The deer startles and darts back through the trees. Its human hand drags across the tree trunks it passes.
I slowly bleed back into my body and my chest is heavy again. Loneliness cuts into me as I settle back into the quiet of the forest. For the first time, my fear outstrips my determination. I want to turn around.
Yet, I also want the deer back. I want to be surrounded by the unity it gave me. Amidst the song it breathed into me I wasn’t expected to provide, to forage, to save. I was only expected to be.
I notice I’m crying. I ignore it and continue on.
–
I watched him die. At least, I think that I did.
It happened in the same area I’m in now, the strangeness. We normally wouldn’t have gone out that far, but we were tracking an elk. It was rare to spot one so far North by us, since most of them lived in the valley closer to the green sea. Maybe that should have been a warning.
The elk was a male with beautiful antlers that made him look as if he was wearing a crown. He leapt and dashed away from us no matter how quiet we were, but he never went too far for us to catch up to him. We were after him most of that day. Eventually I started to get tired. I wanted to give it up, but Pa wouldn’t stop.
Pa had a new fierceness in him, then. Chasing that elk, he looked years younger. He laughed as I had never heard him do. Finally, we managed to spot it without spooking it. We crouched in the brush and Pa laid down on his stomach with his rifle in front of him.
I waited for him to pull the trigger. He didn’t. Confused, I looked at him to see that he was breathing heavy. Beads of sweat rolled down his cheeks and his eyes were out of focus.
“Pa?” I whispered, not wanting to scare the elk. “You okay?”
“It’s all in me,” he said.
“Pa?”
“All of it. I got it all.”
I reached for him, touching his shoulder, and the rifle fired.
The elk fell to the ground with a high-pitched whine. Excited, I jumped up. The shot must have gone straight through his heart. That was good. A clean kill.
“You got it!” I yelped. “You got it!”
Pa didn’t say anything. When I looked at him, I saw that he was on his back. Blood was soaking through his shirt and his head was to the side retching. The rifle was still gripped tight in his hand.
I must have screamed. Then I was on my knees pulling at his shirt. The gun had misfired, I thought. I saw that wasn’t true when I got his shirt up. There was no bullet wound. The blood was seeping out through the pores on his chest.
He grabbed my arm with his other hand and I saw that he was spitting up green. Clumps of it, the same color as the moss. “Go,” he said.
“What happened? Where-”
“Go.” He coughed up more green. It rippled when it hit the dirt. I tried to staunch the bleeding but it was coming from everywhere and nowhere.
“I’m not leaving you,” I told him.
He dug his fingers into my palm, stabbing me with his nails. It was an effort for him to talk through his convulsions. “Angel.”
I knew what he meant. Mama and Junie needed me. Still, I couldn’t let him go.
“No, Pa. Please.”
“Go,” he forced out again. It was more of a deep hiccup than a word. I saw the green he’d vomited shifting towards him across the ground. It reached his jacket and began to cover it like water falling upwards.
I stumbled back, shaking. The elk was still whining, though he should have been dead. I stood there frozen until Pa’s coughing started to slow. Then, Pa’s mouth hung down and he whined just the same. High and long. Excited, betrayed, and sorrowful all at once.
I ran. The sound pierced me like a fish on a hook and even after I ran for miles I still felt as if the line would tense and yank me back any minute.
–
I catch up to her in a small clearing as it’s nearing sunset. She is surrounded. There are three of them in a wide circle and she is in the middle.
“Junie!” I scream, and she whips around to look at me.
She’s dirty. Something has scratched her face and there are burrs stuck to her jacket and her hair. Her eyelids flutter more than they blink, like she cannot figure out what she should be focusing on.
I see her mouth move, saying my name. It’s too quiet for me to hear, but it tells me that she is still present.
I run to her, darting between the two nearest figures. They’re not human, but they’re shaped like people. I wrap my arms around Junie, holding my knife in case one of the figures tries to come closer.
Their features are difficult to make out in the low light. Unlike the deer, they don’t have any strange growths or limbs where they shouldn’t. Yet, I could never mistake them for humans. They’re covered in moss. It moves their skin in a never-ending dance, one that’s accompanied by the familiar whistle-song.
As I’m glaring at the tallest one over Junie’s shoulder it starts to walk towards us. I glance around and see the others are doing the same.
“Stay back!” I wave the knife around. “Back!”
“Mama,” Junie mumbles..
“Shhh. Back!” Their advance is slow but steady. I move to hoist her up to try to run with her, but she won’t budge. Her feet have grown over with moss up to her ankles.
I’ll have to kill the three, if they can be killed. That’s the only thing I can try. I’ll cut them until they’re just particles floating in the air. Then I can free Junie and we can go back, leave this all behind us.
It’s a lie and I know it is, but I need to believe it. I don’t care if I’ve got the sick in me now from coming too far out of the mountains. She needs me.
The tall one puts a hand out. I slash at it and it comes off in a clump. It staggers.
“Stay away!” I yell.
Junie’s muttering something but her voice is too low for me to hear even though she’s right next to my ear. I let go of her so I can fend off the other two. Looking at them, I realize that they’re women and the tall one is a man. I cut one of the women’s arms and bury the knife in the other one’s stomach. When I try to pull it free after, it won’t come loose.
The skinnier woman gets her hands on my face and her moss burns where it touches me. I flail. This is it. I hope I can at least make it difficult for them.
“Stop!”
It takes me a second to realize that it is Junie’s voice and not my own. I’ve never heard her shout so loud. I didn’t know that it was possible.
“Stop,” she says again, huffing air.
And they do.
The skinny moss woman lets me go. My skin is still aflame but the intensity of it lessens. The other woman stops in her tracks and so does the man.
I stumble back to Junie. This isn’t how it should be. I should be the one saving her, but I can’t worry about that. “Can you make them go?”
“They don’t want to go.” She’s back to her normal whisper and she won’t look at me.
“Make them leave,” I half-snap. “Tell them to leave us alone.”
She’s blinking so fast that her eyes water. “I don’t want them to go either.”
“They’re going to take us. They’re going to grow us over. You need to tell them to leave. Mama’s waiting for us back home.”
Junie shakes her head. “Mama’s here.”
“What?”
“It’s them,” Junie says.
“No.”
It is them.
The skinny woman is Mama. I can see that now that I examine her face. The other woman is Kenzie. She’s almost the same as she was when I last saw her years ago. The man is Pa.
“Mama’s waiting for us,” I say again. Another lie. She was fine when I left her, but if she’s here then I know she is no longer there. If I went back, I don’t know if I would even find her body.
“I heard Papa and Kenzie calling for me,” Junie tells me. “For me and Mama and you too. They miss us.”
“This isn’t them. It’s some kind of trick.”
“It’s not a trick,” Junie protests. “They just changed and now that they changed, they can’t visit us no more. They want us to come be with them.”
I think of the deer, of how it felt to float in that sea of smells, sights, sounds. That’s what they have been doing all this time. Connecting with the Earth and each other and maybe with everyone and everything that the moss swallowed.
“I’m supposed to keep you safe,” I say. “Please, you have to be safe.”
She’s trapped up to her waist now, but her face is as peaceful as when she’s sleeping. “It’s all of us,” she says. “That’s safe.”
I look at Mama, Pa, Kenzie. I can’t read the emotions on their fake faces, if there are any. Still, I get the sense that they would let me leave if I wanted to. I could go back up the mountain to our trailer, alone. I could live up there not having to worry for anyone but myself.
The tall one, Pa, walks to me. I don’t run from him. He raises his arm real slow and puts his remaining mossy hand on my shoulder. I feel it burn, but it’s a good burn. He doesn’t say a thing, but I know what he’s telling me.
That I did good, the best that I could have, but it’s alright now. We all found each other again.
Almost all my life I’ve feared the moss and the sick, but I can’t fear Pa. He and the rest of them are my home. These mountains have nothing left for me.
“I love you too,” I say.
Pa nods his head towards Junie. Only her head is free. The rest of her is green, green, green. I take a breath, then I go and sit down next to her. Pa, Mama and Kenzie come to stand around us.
“Junie,” I murmur. “I’m scared.”
“Don’t be scared,” she tells me. “I think…I think it’s like going to sleep, except when you wake up you’re in the dream instead.”
I take her hand and it burns me too, sweet and sour, a rush of life. “Tell me what you’re going to dream of.”
“All of us,” she says. “We’re going to see the whole world. And I want to fly like I’m a bird and swim like I’m a fish. I want to see the ocean. I want to swim.”
My whole arm burns, and the moss is growing on me. Mama, Kenzie and Pa kneel down around us and embrace the two of us.
“I’m gonna be a really good swimmer, I think. Swimming is really just like running but in the water,” Junie says. “We can all swim together too.”
She talks until her mouth is gone, but I can still hear her.
We’re gonna do all the things we never could, she says. We’re gonna dive deep below that green sea. Hand in hand, we’ll grow like weeds.
We’re gonna whistle through the air and sing like birds waking up in the morning but all through the day and molt and change like snakes in the underbrush and dart and flit like deer and spread like dandelion seeds and dance like fire but fire that doesn’t burn, that grows and grows and grows and
About the Author:
Sebastian Deyoe-Snyder is a writer working towards his undergraduate degree in English from Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He enjoys speculative fiction that makes readers question their worlds, the weirder the better. He is also a bookseller, tutor and long-distance runner.
Isele Magazine 