American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,154

she the lady from the courthouse, maybe? She isn’t sure. Megan wonders if the old lady is coming for her, but she veers away down toward the woods at the bottom of the hill. Right away, Megan realizes where she’s going.

Slowly, Megan creeps out of the jasmine’s branches. She walks to the edge of the hill and sees the purple-and-white pattern of the lady’s dress weaving through the pine trees.

She wasn’t wrong. The old woman is going to where Lady Fish lived.

The thought first terrifies her, then intrigues her. She thought she was the only one who knew about it. But there’s nothing down in the woods except that.

Megan wonders what to do. Should she tell her parents? She never told them about Lady Fish. But besides, what would she get out of her mother except a muttered plea for quiet, leaking out from underneath the pile of pillows on the bed? And her daddy… he wouldn’t say anything.

Megan begins following the old woman’s path down the hill. The soil grows very damp beyond the rocks at the bottom of the hill, and the trees ahead are very, very tall, unusually tall for this dry climate. A string of flat red rocks winds through the wet earth, and Megan has to hop from one to the other to get ahead, for just beyond the trees the ground just gets wetter and wetter, until it’s almost like a marsh.

Megan had never seen a marsh before she found this place. She knows the marsh is there simply because Lady Fish wished it to be. And she is fairly sure no one else has found it, for no one ever goes into the woods. But she isn’t sure why no one does. If people like Lady Fish live in the woods, wouldn’t everyone want to go there?

But then she remembers one evening when Lady Fish, tall and shimmering and undulating, sang her a song about the other people in the woods, and how some slept and should not be woken, and some were quite upset to be there and should not be approached, and so on and so on… really, from the way Lady Fish described it, she was the only nice one in the forest.

And she was nice. On the days when her momma went down to the basement and came up cold and pale and stinking of cigarettes, Lady Fish was always there. She always had a few kind things to say. She was a wise, lovely person, Lady Fish.

Once Megan asked her why her momma and daddy seemed so unhappy sometimes. It was a question she had asked a few people, like teachers and the parents of friends, but they always grew awkward and coughed and changed the subject.

But Lady Fish didn’t. She simply thought, and said (in her own special way of speaking), “Because they are pretending to be something that they aren’t. We all are, child.” And that was the perfect thing to say.

Megan misses her so much. How awful it was to come to her home, and call her name before the opening in the earth, and not hear the sucking of mud, the bubbling of water, and Lady Fish’s low purr as she rose up to visit. Megan called her name again and again, but she did not come. It was then that Megan knew she was truly alone.

She stops behind a tree. She can see the old woman standing in front of Lady Fish’s house. The opening in the ground is long and wide, like Lady Fish herself, and it turns away to coil underneath the hill. But though it is wet and stinking, the old woman hikes up her skirts and carefully descends.

Megan is shocked. She would have never dreamed of doing such a thing. Lady Fish’s home was her own. It was not a place for visitors, not even Megan.

She walks to the edge and looks down. How often she observed the curves and crenellations of the muddy earth conforming to meet Lady Fish’s long, swirling shape…

Then the old woman’s face appears at the bottom of the tunnel. Her face and hands are filthy with mud. “Hello, there,” she says.

Megan jumps. Then she draws back, slowly.

“Oh, don’t be frightened, dear,” says the old woman. She climbs out of the tunnel with remarkable agility. “I won’t hurt you. I’m not here for you at all.”

Megan still keeps her distance. The old woman smiles and sits down on the ground. “I think you’re here for