So? So.
I cannot forget the grubby, unkempt kid I saw in the mirror earlier. That is not how I’ve been imagining myself, all this time. I think of myself as me, as looking like me. I’ve been seeing myself in terms of what I can do rather than how I look. Runner. Stalker. Tree climber, ditch jumper, mushroom hunter, game spotter. I had no clear physical image of myself. I’ve only seen the view from my windows. I never thought to wonder how I really looked, to others.
It was bad.
And yet a stubborn part of me doesn’t want to yield, refuses to rush home and wash up, brush my hair, put on clean clothes, and nag my mother for new clothes and new shoes. A part of me says, tough for them. Maybe I’ve only discovered this today, but I suspect they’ve known it all along. All along. They haven’t done right by me, and even if I never knew it until now, they knew it all along. So let them live with it. If they’re embarrassed by my looks, too bad. That’s how I am. And if they’ve never cared enough to come to me kindly, to gently help me change, then screw them. I’ll look this way. Always. Forever and ever and ever. And let them be ashamed. I won’t ask for new clothes, for new shoes. And if they offer them, I won’t want them. Not ever.
I close my eyes, imagining how horrible it would be if I went home and my mother and sisters had gone out and bought all new clothes for me, new shiny shoes, a coat with no teethmarks on the sleeve, jeans with knees in them. And if they gathered around me and brushed my hair and cut it and curled it. And then I went to school. And everyone would see the big change in me, and they’d gather around me and ask me questions. “Where’d ya get the new dress?” “Are those new shoes?” “I like your hair that way a lot better.” “You really look nice.” And I would have to smile and let them sniff me over. It would be admitting that I had been wrong, had been unkempt and shaggy. It would be admitting that they had been right to feel sorry for me all this time, to be disgusted by me all this time, to ostracize me all this time. It would be surrender. It’s too late. It’s gone too far, I can’t even surrender now. Not if I want to survive as me.
My eyes are stinging like I’m going to cry, but this doesn’t make sense. I’m angry, not sad. Angry. I take the knife from my bucket and stab it deep into the moss. Angry. I stab the moss again, and again.
Rinky comes back, snuffles my hair, snuffles at what I’m doing, nearly getting his black nose cut off by my knife in the process, finds it incomprehensible and hence uninteresting, and goes off again. Comes back a second later, licks my ear comfortingly, and leaves again.
The music begins, tentative and breathy. I lift my chin a fraction of an inch, and freeze, listening. There are only five or six notes to the simple melody, and it seems familiar, but I cannot put a name or words to it, nor say where I have heard it before. I turn my head slowly, listening. Sound travels strangely by water, and it takes me a minute before I am sure I have my direction. Across the slough. Damn.
I stand, catching up my bucket. There is a place to cross the slough, one where I will not get more than knee wet, and I head that way. As I go, I keep an eye out for wild mushrooms. My mother loves wild mushrooms, and has taught me twenty-seven different edible varieties, as well as those that I must not touch, and those that are merely useless or unsavory. I find several orange delicious, their caps actually a mottled green, but a secret orange ring hidden within their stems that makes identification easy. I draw the knife tip across the gills, watch the milky liquid rise to the cut. Lactarius family. Same as the pepper cap. I roll Latin names on my tongue as I scavenge mushrooms and walk.
The bottom of my bucket is covered with mushrooms by the time I get to the crossing place. I stand on the bank, picking my most likely path, and then set off, stepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, edging along an old log for part of the way, and then working my way again from tuft to tuft. Rinky comes, crashing and splashing to catch up with me, and nearly knocks me into the slough as he races past me. I have only two misses, and it is the same foot each time, so when I reach the other bank, I am only knee wet on one leg, and ankle-wet on both feet. Not bad.
The music has not ceased, but is smoothing out, as if the player is becoming more practiced. I know who it is, I do not need to catch the elusive tracery of his scent upon the air. I follow my nose and ears now, follow the sound and scent trickling between trees and brush, still pausing every now and then to add another mushroom or two to my bucket. Here is a hedgehog hydnum, a shingled cap with spiny little underpoints instead of gills, and a small orange boletus, its orange cap still tight to its white stem, hiding the soldierly rows of tubes that substitute for gills on it.
And here is a faun, goat legs akimbo, perched on an old log, cheeks red with puffing, eyes merry at my approach. He doesn’t stop playing, but plays for me, deliberately, showing off how well he blows his pipes. For they are genuine panpipes, the little wooden tubes bound in a row with some vegetable twine. They look new, the wood unscuffed, unworn, new-made for spring. I sit next to him on the log, watching how it’s done, how his mouth leaps from pipe to pipe. He is sweating, his curls are damp as they bob on his forehead, and I am struck again by his odor, sweeter than the warm breath of nursing puppies, pungent as crushed herbs, like tree resin and squashed raspberries and rich crumbly loam in the hand. Like all the sweetness of the earth embodied by a scent. It is a pleasure to sit beside him and smell him, and the music he plays has a similar unity to it. Breathless and soft it whispers like wind, like water over pebbles and rain dripping from branches, like birdcall and yet like the trumpetous sounding of an elk. He plays on and on and I listen.
When he stops, it is not the end of the song, but only the end of his breath. The song goes on around us, paler now, slurring its notes, but still there, breathing through the forest, and I understand what he has been doing. Not harmonizing with the forest, but amplifying it, anticipating its song, and playing beside it. He sees in my face my wonder and grins at me, unabashedly proud of himself. He wipes his pipes down one of his hairy thighs and offers them to me.
I take them cautiously, fearing for an instant that it is some kind of challenge from him, a dare for me to play as well as he has. If it is, I know I will not try. Something inside me is in full retreat from dares today. But in his eyes there is no challenge, only sharing. He watches me eagerly as I lift the pipes to my mouth, try my breath cautiously against one. It hoots softly, wistful as an owl, and my heart leaps in me with joy. Each pipe speaks to me with a voice I already know, and I forget the faun, forget everything but playing with the sounds I can utter now. It is like speaking a new language, no, like being mute all my life and then being granted speech, the speech of my dearest friends. I speak as the water, and then as the wind through branches, speaking as they do, not their thoughts but only their own being.
The faun’s hand is on my knee, and I suddenly feel it, breathe the last of my breath down the pipe. I stop reluctantly, and wipe them on the cleanest part of my sleeve and then offer them back to him. He takes them with a smile that says, “Wait, wait now, just a minute.” He holds them in his hands, and his rounded nails are the same color as his hooves, and two shades lighter than the tiny points that push up from amid his curls. His horns are growing this year, and I lean forward to touch one, knowing he will not flinch away nor resist my curiosity. Hard horn, smooth as polished wood yet knurled like diamond willow almost, the tip sharp against my palm. He angles his head away from my touch, gives me a glance that is through his lashes and over his cheekbones, then leans his head back, baring the browned swell of his throat, and lifts the pipes to his mouth. He closes his eyes.
He plays Pan.
He plays a glimpse of sunlight on a dappled flank in a birch grove, he plays brown eyes that light green with laughter, he plays the unwary clack of a cloven hoof against a glacier-worn stone, the deep breath drawn after a race through the woods, the grip of strong fingers on my wrist when he bids me be silent, the nudge of his shoulder against mine when our heads are close together over the first pale wood anemone, he plays the wind through brown curls and the trickle of rain over his shoulder blades. My throat closes up with how beautiful he is.
When I open my eyes, he has