I left my car by Daisy's, close to her hut and scrambled out of the vehicle. Then I stretched my back in the overgrown, haphazardly planted garden and let out a secret moan. It was a ten minute drive. But age hadn't come alone. Had I been younger, I could have walked to Daisy's. I had used to do it. When I had still been closer to fifty than sixty. And Daisy had been young.

Well. Daisy was still young. She was still in her thirties. It made no sense but in my memories she had always been in her thirties. I had known her for a full decade. And she hadn't aged a bit. Her wrinkles hadn't deepened into grooves, and she didn't have a bad knee as I did (not that my good one was perfect, but it had been operated.) She didn't have bad shoulders either ( Rose didn't have a good one.)

Witch. I did remember her flying on a broomstick. The memory had been formed heavily drugged. But I did remember it. I had in my mind's eye a crystal clear image of her sitting against a full moon above my head one saturday. These days, I didn't know if it had rained yesterday. But I remembered that the girl who had come to fetch Timothy one Saturday had worn a black suit. Her eyes had been brown and I would recognize her on a street.

I remembered with equal clarity hitting a delicate man with a baseball bat. I remembered him turning into a raven.

"Mmm. Yes. Daisy said he was a vampire," I said to myself, lifting a basket from the back of the car. "Why not?"

Daisy's home looked exactly like an abandoned hut from a children's tale. The overgrown garden was full of pots for plants I couldn't name. And they weren't really in earthenware pots either. Daisy had put her plants into whatever containers would hold soil, including an old bathtub, kettles of all sizes and what could have been an oven mold. Her tool shed door had been left open and spilled out a miscellaneous collection of broken objects her neighbors brought her, because Daisy collected everything. From bathroom mosaics to apparently a broken blender.

And the main hut seemed like it kept itself together with magic only. I had never been able to guess what material the roof was made of, a thick layer of moss covered the whole building. I guessed the young sapling by the chimney might have been a maple. But my sight wasn't what it had used to be.

If that hut one day grew a spindly pair of chicken legs, I probably wouldn't bat an eye. It looked like it just might. As if it was just nesting in the middle of the tall grasses.

I patted Daisy's peugeot as I passed it.

She had flown to the City with a broom. That was what she had said. May it be so then. It was only three days until the next Saturday. And on Saturdays it was very natural for her to do so.

I took a brown bottle from below the steps to the toolshed. Daisy had left it there for my visit. I held it in the same hand where I had hung the basket from my arm.

I tried to kick an escaped football back into the shed, but didn't manage to get it moving in the grass.

I sighed. Maybe it was for the best. I could have strained my back with the abrupt movement.

From behind the shed started a pathway into the forest. I followed it into the cool shadows of the spruces that later gave way to pine trees as I climbed up the hill. Around the same time as the trees changed, mosquitoes became horseflies. It was inevitable. That was why I had left one hand empty.

I had told my husband I was spending the day with Daisy. He hadn't lifted his head from the newspaper he had been reading. It was to be expected. I was at the library, at Daisy's, at Rose's or in the Gnarled Duck. I came and went. And he had planned to spend the day in the hunters' club.

I came to the grassy banks of a small lake. There was an opening to the water cut through the vegetation just where the path ended. Daisy maintained it. She liked to swim. The scythe that was used for the task rested against a tree. It was covered in a black plastic sac to prevent rain ruining the edge completely and the stone that was used for sharpening the tool was in a small plastic box beside it.

I cleared out of the way a small fish skeleton and sat on a rock. I suspected a weasel had left the fish bones.

I looked over the water. Somewhere, a bit farther along the bank, a hose ran into the lake. It snaked from the lake downhill, all the way to Rose's house and connected into the outdoors taps Moth and Bramble had attached there, for watering the garden. They had to get the lake end to dry land every year before the snows came. Otherwise water would freeze in the tube and break the whole system.

There was no one else but me out here. I rested my small basket beside me on my mossy seat. I opened the brown bottle I had taken from Daisy's and took a long deep gulp.

I resumed looking over the waters.

I was five years older than Rose, the same age as her sister had been. We had often come to swim here with Lily when we had been young. Well, we all had come, Rose, Moth, Lily and I. Moth was the eldest and we had been his little gang. His Ladies.

I supposed we still were. Half a century later. Then again, all of Grenbrea had turned into Moth's gang. He kept up the only settlement where people could gather. And held the knowledge of mapa-how to collect it and from where. He didn't charge for the mushrooms, just for the beer. But he kept stock. He was the only one person who probably knew all the addicts by name.

I took another gulp of the brown bottle.

The shade of the greenery had grown a bit deeper and in my vision were appearing bright smoky tendrils. They were faint, but I saw them now.

Moth had been my secret enemy, back when I had been maybe sixteen. But we had all been also friends. In the summers we had come here to swim and in the winters to skate on the ice. In the springs we had gotten ourselves into trouble venturing onto the too thin ice and falling through over and over, never learning from experience. In autumn we never came. It was too rainy. Then we had gathered at Moth's grandparents' house that had later become the pub.

And then I had went to study in Breasinghae.

I took another gulp, sighed and reached into the basket.

I should have never gone away. Or, at least I should have taken Lily with me.

I held in my hands two books. One was a small poetry booklet and the other an old diary bound in simple covers and held closed with a violet ribbon.

I untied the knot, searching for a specific marking. The date was today, years and years back. I had been 21. It had been a beautiful summer's day. The day Lily had been buried by her father.

The old man said it was by the lake where he left her. He told me later, because Lily had asked. He had left her by the lake.

I see her golden hair mingled with the moss and think of a poem written by Frederico Garcia Lorca which I found just yesterday. The protagonist dreams of a green girl, and would trade his current life for her company.

But my girl is dead. The ship sailed far in the ocean. And there is no elven magic to bring her back. But I would trade all my party nights here in the Capital for one calm evening with Lily. All these futile words, for one night with my green girl.

I looked over at the lake. I had stayed in the Capital that summer. I hadn't come up here to mourn. I had worked in a small bookshop to pay off some of my student debt. I hadn't danced with the elves that summer or taken any mapa for years, for decades. Not before Daisy had come. Then, some fifteen years ago, she and Rose had convinced me back to the old vice that had killed Lily.

I took another gulp and opened the other book on a spread that had its corner folded in.

"Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the mountain.

With the shade around her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

all things are watching her

and she cannot see them"

I stopped. These had been words. Written by a Spanish poet, dead decades before I was born. They had little meaning. But the next paragraph was the magical one.

A gust of wind caught my hair and blew a gray strand to my face. I read it every time. And I never needed to go further than the second paragraph. The spell ended and started on the second. I knew it by heart.

"Green, how I want you green," I whispered.

No birds were singing. Just the wind-bent reeds encouraged me on.

"Big hoarfrost stars /come with the fish of shadow / that opens the road of dawn."

I saw now the spirits around me dancing, listening as I continued the one spell. I closed my eyes to them, to all reasoning. I didn't need to see the words, I knew them. I knew my magic spell.

"The Fig tree rubs its wind /with the sandpaper of its branches, / and the Forest, cunning cat, / bristles its brittle fibers."

And here I was, the old Fig, with brittle skin and fragile bones. Talking to the Forest. Calling to it. Summoning an apparition from its fibers.

"But who will come? And from where?"

There was the lightest sound of someone rustling the water reeds. Sloshing steps.

"She is still on her balcony /green flesh, her hair green, / dreaming in the bitter sea."

But I opened my eyes. And she wasn't on her balcony, or in her father's garden of my memories. Though her hair was green, whereas in my memories it was golden. Her skin was the color of deep moss. Her eyes were green too, immense emeralds close to my own face.

Lily put her hand gently to my cheek and bent to kiss me on the lips.

Oh! How difficult it was to be twenty one and in love!

"I should have stayed in Breasinghae," I told Lily who was already standing naked, waiting for me to join her.

"I should have stayed and worked. I almost took a job at a bookshop that a friend's father owns."

Lily shrugged.

"But you came to me instead. Come, Fig, let's swim. Let's not think of the City. Let's go swimming. Come with me."

But I was crying now.

"I don't want to go to the City!" I cried. "I want to stay here with you."

Lily took me into her delicate arms as I flung myself at her. She stroked my back, whispering soothing words to my ear.

"Then stay with me, Fig. Let's stay here forever. Play in the Forest forever. Haven't you already lived? Come with me to the great halls of Oori, the great Hider. Here. I brought some for you."

I felt her opening my hand and pressing into it something cool.

"Come with me. Come with us. Trade yourself for the Forest. Come with me, Fig, and let's be one."

She lifted my hand and opened my fist, very gently with her delicate green fingers. I was holding a berry on my palm, no bigger than the nail of my thumb, a blueberry. But a vividly violet blueberry that caught the light.

"You know it as I do. You can come with me."

She kissed the hand, closed my fist over the berry and was gone.