Hello from Maryland. Today is the first of a two-part story that will wrap up on Monday. If you read the first story in this series, “Heartwood,” you’ll recognize this one as continuing my exploration of voices other than human.1 In this one, Cleone, a homicidal water spirit with an authority problem, defies orders not to meddle with Undine, a teenage girl hiking with her father, Hank.
With great humility and trepidation, I submit this story as part of Tara Penry’s Virtual Memorial for Alice Munro, the great short-story writer and Nobel Laureate who passed away recently at age 92.2 I’m happy to participate in another of Tara’s engaging community projects and make no claims to be anywhere near Munro’s universe.
The stories in this collection are set in the Marcellus shale fracking region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Originally the home of the Lenni-Lenape, the Munsee Lenape and the Susquehannock, whose descendants live there still.3 I’m interested in how we, trapped and complicit in destructive systems we hate, might find a way forward. Holding wonder, humility, and awe in the same trembling hands as our grief, fear, and anger—with love and compassion.
Part 1: Initiation
When I arrive at the pond, a sudden storm swallows me. The summer air chills into a white-gray blur of rain. Fists of water, solid soaking swill. Drumbeat on stone, on branch, on leaf. Thunder thumps my chest. Elation zings my neck.
The storm rolls on to uncork the same sun that witnessed the violence and the takings of centuries: outsiders claiming land, claiming homes and daughters and sons. Glitter scatters over the same fretting water that sustained generations in peace. Swift benediction.
My hair steams. I inhale fresh glacial-tasting air, mineral smell of sodden soil.
A fat beaver waddles ashore into a smear of sunlight and tips back on tail and haunches to groom herself. With elfin forepaws, she scratches scratches scratches her torso, hips, face. Pleasure slits her eyes.
“Hello, sister beaver,” I say.
The beaver blinks. Scratch. Scratch. Blink.
My skin tingles.
I’m nervous, okay? I admit it. I haven’t seen my sister Ornea since the Cuyahoga River fire and the heroics that earned her a top position with the Oversight Council. Show-off. I’m still mystified how she turned such a shitty assignment into undeserved advancement, while I was left paralyzed with grief for all the friends I lost.
I’ve managed to avoid her ever since. Before this, I was assigned to the Lenapewihittuk. The water defenders I served with insisted on using the river’s map-name, Delaware. They did it to piss me off. I know for a fact that the Baron De La Warr, whoever the fuck he was, never once set foot there. The invaders renamed every place after themselves and their patrons. Fat stupid greedy narcissists.
“Cleone,” an officious voice calls a wary welcome. “We expected you tomorrow.”
“Yet, here I am. And here you are, Ornea the Kind. That’s what they call you now, right? How’s that empathy working out for you?”
Ornea’s gold eyes narrow over a forced smile. She’s as beautiful as ever: long and slender as a pickerel, skin sun-dappled glossy olive, reedy hair sleek. “Well, sister Cleone. All is well.”
“Not what I heard.” I submerge amid the floating tickle of elodea plants. The water bathes my shoulders with the glorious grunge of beaver musk, limey aquatic plants and murky decay. I surface, spout water from pursed lips and grin. “What’s up?”
Ornea blinks, twists a long strand of hair shiny as pondweed. “With all these resettlements, we’re stretched. The other protectors are off on assignments. It’s lucky you’re here today.”
“What? No time to catch up?”
“A maiden and her father are headed this way, now. Think you can handle that?” Scorn and mistrust shade her features. “Observe only.”
Ha, what’s she think, yeah, she thinks it’s the old days, the old ways, stroking my innocent awe, she was always on me: I’m out of control, she’d say, I’m a wild beast, it’s what she thinks, even now, after all this time, after everything’s in ruins, she lives a fantasy, she can’t even see we’re not passive protectors but active defenders now.
I return to shore, pushing through a thick clump of hydrilla far from her African home. More outsiders. “Only two?” I’m no stranger to hard labor. I’m willing to remove freckles of girls bold enough to swim in my waters—though it’s been a long, long time since any have. All I ask is the occasional coupling with a sport fisherman or lost hiker. These days, so few can hear me, let alone see or feel me. Takes all the fun out of it. Still, a working girl has needs.
Ornea looms over me, reaches out long fingers to pinch my bare shoulder. “You understand the terms of your probation.” Not a question.
“Ow.” I wrench away, roll my eyes and match her patronizing tone. “Observe. Neither interact nor interfere. No exceptions. Last chance.” Idiots. How can I defend anything with passive watching, maidens or watersheds?
Ornea poses, hands on slim hips. “We’re well aware of your authority problems. Do not blow this, or—”
“Or what?”
She glares.
“That’s what I thought.” They’ve cracked down on everything lately—even banned drownings, no matter how justified. What’s the world of water coming to when you can’t hold a rapist’s head under till he inhales a sweet lungful of river? Or yank a pipeline surveyor’s ankles to savor the sick crunch of a skull splitting on rock?
The edict is no joke, but they don’t have to worry about me. I have no intention of being banished to a lousy fountain. The Trevi in Rome isn’t good enough for me, let alone the pathetic mechanized trickle at the King of Prussia Mall the Council threatened me with.
When I was much younger, our work wasn’t so dire. Sure, there was death—of mortal beings, not us. But when people forgot their belonging, they began to do horrible things to us. It’s galling how tightly bound our very existence is to theirs. We must now rely on their aid, not only their devotion.
Back in the day, I protected maidens, carried water, healed, whispered prophecies, all the usual. I was content to swim with shad and yellow perch, to praise the dawn and dance with moonlight. So I lured a few to many lustful men to watery deaths. Mine has been a good life. A life of purpose.
I sit on a branch beside Ornea. “Fear not, great leader.”
Together, we cast our imaginations through the forest. Ah, there she is. A maiden standing silent between two poplars at the edge of a field of orchard grass.
“That’s the girl,” says Ornea.
“No shit, I see.”
As people became more destructive, naiads adapted our ability to read not only their body language, smell and emotion. Now we can see them at distances and read their thoughts, fat lot of good it does. Their minds are as disconnected from their hearts as their bodies are from the lands they occupy. Half the time, they have no idea who they are affecting, or how. Many are so deadened by greed, they can’t even care.
Bored, expecting little, I unspool a song-word of greeting to the girl at the edge of the forest.
The girl lifts her head, tilts it, eyelids heavy in concentration, lips parted. She’s listening. Wonder twitches in my fingers. “Oh! This one . . . can hear?”
Ornea yanks a lock of my wet hair. “No interactions. Of. Any. Kind. No exceptions. Final warning.”
I slap her hand away. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
People, dim as they are, never thought to abuse the very essence of life on which they depended. Then they quit the family to worship the false gods of greed and entitlement. Now, streams choke with chemicals. Lakes bake, rivers ooze. So I haven’t quite found my footing among these gruesome changes. Who can blame me?
More and more of our sisters are dying. Like sweet simple Glaucia, who relocated from her fouled stream to a promising-looking fountain at the State Archives in Harrisburg (named for one Mr. Harris, no doubt). Foolish choice. Men drained it while she slept off a night of debauchery. She hasn’t been seen since.
This young woman, though, at the forest edge. Nervous. Hopeful. Hesitant. Fourteen trips round the sun, give or take. A Little Hen on the cusp. Oh, do I have a soft spot for that jumbled, questing energy. And the man? There he is, wading through the field, slathered in tokens of his worship. Slaughtered calf, ore torn from rock, strands secreted from captive worms, false fibers spun from dinosaur wine. Calls himself Hank. Sounds like a goose sneezing.
Look at him, appalled by the shit-ooze on his suede shoe. Hoping it’s mud. “Slow down, Daphne,” he calls.
“It’s Undine, and you know that,” she flings back.
The man’s resentment trails off him like smoke. He wants to remind her that Daphne was his own mother’s name. He shoves a memory away before I can grasp it. But he seems to value this matrilineal connection. Surprising.
The girl strokes the rough bark and balances a palm-sized origami crane in a shoulder-high notch. Paper printed with feathery ferns, folded by her fine fingers. Her skin breathes thank you and she steps through the two trees, head bowed. Please let me see them again, she whispers.
Delighted, I scroll through the clear sky of her mind. And there it is. An encounter with two of the naiads patrolling the Raritan River near where the girl lives with her mother. A woman who wisely quit this Hank a year ago. Interesting. This one is sensitive. No stranger to water. And if I’m not mistaken . . . Aha, I knew it! One of those sisters is called Undine.
While my own sister, the bossy Ornea, is distracted by Dragonflies mating, I easily give her the slip. She never could multi-task.
I waft through the forest singing. Here, Little Hen, I’m here.
But the girl is distracted by the man, who plunges into the forest after her, oblivious and blinking in the dim green light hostile with shadows. “It’s late, Hon. We’ll do this hike another time.”
I feel his anxiety, his certainty that this was a mistake.
They’ve traveled to these rolling, glacial hills, fields and forests from a vast city to meet with another man to review that one’s treatise, a Hydrological Analysis of the Marcellus Shale Region. Hank invited his daughter along to reward her for, in his words, acing a killer math test. I shiver. The profanity of coopting Gaia’s mysterious order for competition and plunder disgusts me. Mathematics are sacred, not to be coopted for a killer anything.
After that meeting, the girl had said, “Let’s go for a hike.”
“We have to get back,” he replied, head full of numbers.
“You’re afraid because you’re so out of shape.”
“I work out. I can bench—”
“We came all this way. I want to hike.” Did she stamp her foot? Girl’s got spirit.
Hank has spent precious little time with his daughter of late. “Okay,” he said. “Care to make it interesting?”
“Dad. Hiking is interesting.”
“I mean, a little wager?”
The girl had sighed, rolled her lovely blue-green eyes.
“Thought so. You know I’ll win.”
“You can’t win at hiking, Dad, geez.”
He’d driven them to the State Game Lands adjacent to where his company operates. Whatever that means. He imagines this forest as endless, assumes he can keep her on a trail, well away from all that. (All what? I dig around in his mind, but any impressions of company operations are murky, off limits.) All I get from him is that she’s been so volatile lately, no telling how she might react if she saw it.
I stop obsessing over his pathetic mind and indulge a private laugh. I know this girl better than he does after mere minutes. She’s in charge, not him.
And here she is, bounding through thick leaf litter, darting among trees like Artemis herself.
“You’re supposed to stay on the trail,” Hank calls. “There should be a blue blaze somewhere around here.”
I hover ahead between two oaks, lured by the acrid stench of Hank’s fear. Here, Little Hen.
“It’s fine,” she says to him, striding on. “We don’t need that.”
But he demands attention. “You’ll get lost—” and he lurches right into an orb weaver’s masterpiece, clumsy oaf. He curses, flails his arms, scrawls his face.
“Are you okay?” Undine calls.
“No. I am not okay. Spiders just attacked me.”
“Looks the other way around from here.” The girl’s voice is tight with mirth.
He glares at her smirk and scrabbles fingers through sandy hair. “Not funny.”
“It is, Dad. You should see yourself.” She approaches him, palm out. “Here, stay close. Follow me.”
This man doesn’t strike me as the following sort. Especially not of women, even his own daughter. But such is his fear that he accepts her hand.
Undine hums with desire to find a stream, any stream, to test her ability to see us. To prove to herself that she really saw naiads at her home river. She mistakenly told her father about it and of course he mocked her. Now she’s determined to convince him that we’re real. Ambitious? Misguided? Absolutely, and I love it. Girl wants a show? Oh, she will get a show.
“What about snakes?” he asks. I can feel his throat pressing on the oh-so-casual words.
“Let me know if you see any,” Undine says.
No fear, this one. Like me at her age, three or four thousand years ago. Years being another tool invented by people to measure their puny lives.
“Poisonous?” he asks in a shaky voice.
I smile. They always ask that.
“Depends on the snake.”
In my enchantment with the daughter, I bump into the man. Oops.
He spins around, heart revving for a fight. “What was that?”
“Ow.” Undine yanks her hand free of his crushing grip. She moves on, but he grabs her arm.
“That . . . rustling. Shhhhh.”
In the quiet, a male tanager chirrups his hurry burry call. A female chirp-burrs in response. Elm and maple leaves drift down with soft sighs.
“There.” He wheels, frantic to see in the gloom. “Something’s following us. A bear?” His voice is high and reedy.
“Dad. It’s a forest. Where animals live. Could be squirrels. Or chipmunks. Or deer. Trust me, they’re all more afraid of you than you are of them.”
Before he can deny his panic, she’s off. Panic, there’s a word. When Lord Pan danced with me and my fellow naiad sisters back in the day, his frenzy earned the name, Pan-like, Pan-ic. Off his head, fucking everyone in sight—with consent, of course. Oh, it was a splendid time. Who demoted panic from ecstasy to brute fear?
This way, Little Hen. That’s it.
Deeper in, the light dims, the shadows lengthen.
“Do you even know where we’re going?”
“Think so.” She bounces up a steep slope, offers a hand. “Here, take hold.”
“We’re lost, aren’t we.”
She groans, tosses her glorious hair, liquid moonlight. “Dad, you’re ruining it. Can’t you just enjoy a nice hike?”
“I enjoy a good Cabernet. I enjoy a rousing symphony. Broadway theater. My car—”
“If you enjoy so much, why are you cranky all the time?” She crosses her arms, face fierce.
Here he conjures the woman who dumped him and tells himself this attack is pure Caitlin badmouthing him to their children. He thinks, All the hell she put me through, I never once stooped that low. No, my man, you just fucked her PhD advisee. Oooo, and her TA? Naughty boy. And a random undergrad leaving office hours? My goodness, I’ve underestimated you.
“I’m not,” he says. “I’m happy.” His defensiveness betrays him.
Undine huffs, turns and stalks on.
“Nothing good happens in places like this,” he mutters.
They reach a steep ravine with my new stream at the bottom. Undine’s limbs vibrate with anticipation.
“It was in a place like this where I first saw them,” Undine says. My breath catches.
“Saw who? Your mermaids? Oh, come on, you’re too old for that.”
Undine’s expression drips pity and scorn. “They’re not mermaids, Dad, geez.”
“Remember how much you loved those Disney princesses and—”
Undine covers his mouth with her hand. “Stop.”
Disney defiled the last shreds of people’s natural wonder with their plastic, monetized magic. They had the audacity to claim the sacred role of storytellers, well, I’ve got stories. Real stories. Apollo’s sex kinks. All those kings I consorted with, whispering in their ears at climax fertility charms for their subjects, their lands. Of course, they loved to take credit for my ideas, and I let them. The arrangement worked for millennia. It still could.
Undine scrambles down the hill, sliding on loose leaves, catching slender ash saplings to balance. Hank picks his way with stiff care, testing every step before committing.
At the stream’s edge, Undine places another origami crane and a fat clump of rosemary tied with a green ribbon. In the old days, people worshipped me with offerings of honey, olive oil, milk, but it’s been too long. I’ll take anything now. The girl tickles the rosemary, touches fingertips to her nose and whispers “Thank you.” I blink tear gems and step closer. It’s all I can do to resist touching her hand. Thank you, Little Hen, I whisper.
The girl gazes right through me. That won’t do. I tingle her skin and tickle her ears with a slender thread of song. Undine blinks once, twice, a third time and stares at me. She shakes her head. Blinks again. Rubs her arms as if cold. Ah, my dear Little Hen, don’t try so hard. Relax. My hand is as close to hers as a dragonfly’s wingbeat.
Her father blusters along, damn him.
Look here, Little Hen. Here.
The girl turns away to crouch at the water’s edge and point. “Look at that weird bubbling.”
“Water flowing over rocks.”
“No, it’s fizzy. Like soda.” She leans close to the stream. “Ewwww. Stinks. . . like rotten meat.”
“Maybe one of your mermaids farted.”
She huffs. “Not funny. This can’t be right.”
Dark energy trickles from him, but his mind is still in lockdown. I go cold. This will not do. He’s up to something that needs stopping, that much I can tell. Good thing I excel at improvisation. Between the two of us, I know we can get him to spill.
I float to the middle of the stream and call out loudly. Here Little Hen. Be still. Listen.
Undine settles on a log and tucks her long legs in like an insect. “I need to tune in.”
Her posture carries an authority Hank cannot cross. He finds a flat rock and sits. Damp chill seeps through his slacks. He thinks of his dry-cleaning bill. His legs grow numb. He thinks of checking his phone. He checks his phone.
Undine’s breathing is ocean surf in my ears. I stir a song of longing, of moonlight riffles and sun-gorged pools. Burbles burnish rocks, dragonflies dart, skimmers shadow sandy shallows. Rain freshens, snow blankets, ice rimes edges. I pour my hopes, my heart into Undine’s light-crowned torso.
The girl startles. Hank flinches. One hand to her mouth, sharp in-breath, she points. “Look.”
Hank’s skin is clammy currents. He squints into the gloom. “What? Where? A bear?” His relief of talking is dulled by oceanic fear.
The forest draws a breath. The stream quiets. The long moment drips at the end of Undine’s outstretched finger. A finger aimed
directly
at
me—
“There,” Undine stands. “Right. There.” Her tone chills Hank’s guts.
The reverent awe in the girl’s voice draws me up to my full, streaming height. I drink in the thrill of being seen. Come to me, my dear Little Hen.
My body hums with the old, old feeling. My birth purpose. My gift. An ally to initiate. Streams to defend. Attention and devotions to follow.
Undine gestures upstream. “Here?” The word a silver drop of wonder. The first human to address me in well over a century.
While Hank stamps life back into his feet, the girl darts off along the bank, head cocked to listen.
The water is suffering, I whisper-sing.
“This water is suffering,” Undine calls over her shoulder.
We need your help.
“She needs our help,” Undine says.
“She? Hey, where are you going now?” He’s thinking, she should’ve outgrown this phase by now. He’s annoyed. Sure, he had his own childish fantasies, is what he calls them. Peter Pan, Robinson Crusoe, idle hours in the woods near his house. But then he became a Responsible Adult. To her retreating back, he calls, “Oh, grow up and face reality.”
He has no clue what reality really is, the ignorant lump.
“Enough’s enough,” he calls.
Truer words were never spoken, Mr. Goose-Sneeze. Just in the past five years, one in twenty of my sister naiads have died. Not relocated. Died. Gone. No one knows where. My sister Callirrhoe disappeared when her once-lush Colorado River delta dried and cracked and caked to desert. The gossips say she’s a frozen speck now, a permanent part of the stratosphere. Drifting in the endless emptiness of lost memories.
Undine bushwhacks upstream along the bank thick with chokeberry, laurel, and elderberry—all menaced by that bully outsider, multiflora rose.
Hank minces a dainty shoe along the steep hillside. “You have no idea where this creek—”
“Stream.”
“Whatever. Where it goes.”
Undine squats to peer into the water. “Look, it bubbles here, too.” She lowers her lovely face close and recoils. “Same stink.”
“It’s called nature, Daphne—”
“Undine.” Her voice cuts like ice.
“Right. Something died in there. Back off, the water’s contaminated.”
No shit, Goose-phlegm, wonder how that happened?
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Undine says.
“You’re too young to worry,” he says. “You’re just a kid.”
“A kid who has to live in this world that corporations are destroying.”
“Every kid in every generation says that. And look, we’re fine.” He sweeps his arms wide.
Time was, a maiden on the cusp of womanhood would come to a place like this, shed her tunic and dance in the moonlight with Lord Pan. Or in the dappled sun. Or the rain. Anytime, really.
Form a circle and dance with her sisters, each fresh body ripe with life-creating power. Fertile. Clean. Untouched. A scene immortalized by artists countless times. My dear dotty friend William Blake painted sweet manic Pan playing his flute for the dancers. But the incorrigible Henri Matisse was my favorite. He fucked me with the fervor of a midlife crisis. I posed for him with Asterope, Cyrene, Sinope and Maera circle-dancing beside the Seine. That’s me on the left, back turned, swelling hint of breasts. Their full glory reserved for the artist alone and oh how he worshipped my breasts. His first version of La Danse was the best—round weave of bare limbs, the perfect luminosity of skin. The second version was red with lust, not that there’s anything wrong with lust. Asterope’s vulva out-bulged us all. Matisse took liberties. They all took liberties. And we loved it.
Instead of dancing in moonlight, this dear Little Hen gapes nightly at a blue screen, absorbing atrocities against land, against water, against air. She burns with righteous despair over forests and mountains levelled, streams and aquifers fouled. Mesmerized by moving pictures of men and machines that dig, thrust, extract, transport, discharge. They buy and sell, they bribe and threaten. They celebrate hard and sleep in soft blindness.
Men used to revere us. They all wanted to be like Lord Pan himself. And now look at him, hiding out in the Alaskan wilderness with a bounty on his head.
Now, they want only to own and control. They wage war everywhere they go. Well, if it’s war they want, then war is what they’ll get. Starting with this one.
What did you think?
How was this for you? What do you think will happen next? I sincerely appreciate your reading and value your thoughts, notes, and feedback.
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Coming soon
On Thursday, 20 June, I’ll publish the Summer Solstice debut double-issue4 of NatureStack, a monthly journal of shared wonder—nature writing, photography, art, music, and story—gleaned from Substack and beyond. I’ve long been enthralled by the quality of the work here. It’s been a joy to gather these gems and I can’t wait to share them with all of you.
The nature writer interview series5 will debut on Thursday, 27 June and run weekly for five weeks. After that, it’ll be a regular feature (frequency TBD). I’m so inspired by the depth and sensitivity of the responses and I know you will be, too. If you’re interested in answering the 6 questions, DM me.
I wrote about fiction that decenters humans in this recent post.
A mouthful! Extra long name = extra special
In search of a name; nominations are open
Totally immersive! Reads/Feels like a true story…
Wow 😮 “Disney defiled the last shreds of people’s natural wonder with their plastic, monetized magic. They had the audacity to claim the sacred role of storytellers…”
Oooh, Julie! I loved this. I especially love the supernatural elements! On to part 2....