Today I struck up a conversation with a man on the Seattle/Bremerton ferry. His work, primarily, is to write ad copy for a large video game company in Washington. Over twin Doubleshots (caffeine, like cigarettes, make strange fellows... though, I must admit, I can’t stand cigarettes... but I won’t go on about it because addiction is addiction and anyone--me--who’ll pay $6 for a custom cup o' joe is addicted) we chatted amicably.
He told me he loves his job and I wondered why I wasn’t convinced after his bland work day description and its plethora of “if it only weren’t for”s. It reminded me of the old adage that creative people are supposed to use to remind themselves that every struggle is worth it, “I could always have been a (insert deplorable and hideously demeaning job here)!"
I guess I’m pretty picky about the perfect career which is why, at past twenty-five, I feel like I’m just now starting to solve this puzzle. I want it just so. I want a publisher who is big but small, has lots of money but is insanely careful with it (because “spending” doesn’t equal “marketing,” thank you very much), and whose corporate Campus might very likely be haunted by Greenmen.
Okay. So “haunted” isn’t the right word. They aren’t dead. Not nearly. Actually, maybe they’re Immortal like Celestials and Terrapyres. Maybe these Greenmen have lived in Banner Forest (which borders the eastern edge of the Windstorm Campus) for generations and now they’re starting to creep out of the dense woods into the almost as dense cedars, alders, birch and spruce that tightly circle the Campus.
I’ve seen them myself. Not spectral, not entirely benevolent, fully living creatures, up-right like us, forever just outside my field of vision until I turn directly toward them and there’s only trees and ferns and huckleberry branches moving quietly in no apparent breeze.
There haven’t always been Greenmen on the Campus. They started appearing after an illegally off-leash dog got onto the property and slaughtered nine of the beloved rabbits that had, for two years, inhabited a meditative atrium for authors and staff. Despite legal action, the dog returned again and again. Small towns can mean limited resources and apathy always leads to a lack of personal responsibility.
Then the dog stopped coming. Was it the hundreds of dollars in tickets? Was it the threat of a date in court? Or fear that the law says, “Shoot the dog if it threatens your livestock”? Or maybe the dog stopped appearing at the same time that the Greenmen—slender, masculine, long-haired bipeds drenched in foliage, wild and untamed—began to appear.
Perhaps the Greenmen were there that horrible morning when two amazing women and their children were screaming and sobbing into the silent air. The only witnesses to the meaningless destruction of lives that meant so much joy to so many people.
Maybe, when the human world doesn’t do right by its own, when politics and lies form obstacles, and grief and fear go unresolved, maybe then, sometimes, other creatures—ethereal, powerful, unknowable—step in to make justice.
E.J.
