(Part 1 of the novella “Green Leaf, Brown Leaf”)



You may not remember when you first dined on the flavor of color, but your first few years were one long empirical taste-test of pigments, shoving anything into your mouth if it spoke in tints or shined like the reflection of rainbows. ‘This flower is red. It must be delicious,’ you thought. It wasn’t but you chewed on it anyway, blissful and ignorant and trying to find that tasty center. ‘This brown mud looks divine! It must be devoured.’ It was neither divine nor tasty, but you wore a dirt beard on your young face until one of the big people came to clean you and attacked your chubby cheeks with a cloth wet from spittle and lip juice. Balking at their attempts, you’d try to pull your face away as you pushed at the offensive hands of giants. They would always win, holding your face in place while scrubbing and scrubbing in the hopes that you wouldn’t remain stained forever.

Your fat, l’il smokey fingers clutched at everything since they were born to explore and examine. If it moved, whistled, hooted, clanged, popped, whizzed, kerplunked, or simply tickled your ear, your mouth would own it quickly and without much thought. You were invincible, but your curious mind and exploratory ways would get you in trouble eventually.

You constantly searched out comfort, curling up in the crooks of strange elbows or flat against mama’s chest with your head in the soft, fleshy curve of her neck. It was no womb, of course, but you could still hear her heartbeat thumping away beneath the skin against your tiny body. At some point, the sound of your own heart would match hers, two metronomes working in tandem to keep the bond between mother and child complete while forcing your eyes into soft slumber. Months-old synapses weren’t ready to hold this kind of moment in your little forever, so you would never remember, but mama could never forget. She would flip back through her mental photo albums several times a year and recall your naps against her bosom while marveling at your growth into a man-cub.

You would never know your father through childhood, always assuming mama was the sun of your universe with everyone else just hanging out in her proximity. He would appear in loud bangings and garbled Babel languages behind closed doors, crib confinement, and later on, in dark fairy tale mythologies whispered by grandmother when mama wasn’t around. He was the dark stranger that snaked into your dreams some nights with his fingers curled as if to thief you from your crib and place you in another life that was not yours. You would awaken with fists clenched red and a silent scream that seemed to stretch on for minutes before your lungs could catch up to your terror. More often than not, you were hungry, but there were a few times your fierce, house-filling howling was a plea to be ripped away from the image of the walking shadow of the man who kept appearing.

Mama was giver and taker alike by calming the same cries she would sometimes ignore while brushing you off as ‘a fussy child.’ You would play in the thick grass of the front yard for hours, a small thing enamored by a smaller world of even smaller things. They flitted about in hazy daydream circles near the bright orange globe above and lose themselves out of your restless gaze. Grass tasted green to you, and while you didn’t understand what that meant, you ate as if you were born to imbibe the earth one leafy blade at a time. Or simply shoving a tiny fistful into your mouth all at once.

The man that smelled of fists and bitter had come back earlier that day to see you and you alone. He didn’t say anything to mama, just walked in as if he still belonged here. Had mama not been in the kitchen or had the water running or had stepped outside for just a minute to take the trash out, she wouldn’t have seen him, wouldn’t have heard him. She found him standing over your tiny prison-bed, his eyes sizing you up as you took your afternoon trip into nap-dreams. He watched your tiny chest rise and fall with every shallow breath. His hands gripped the bars on the crib that kept him out. His breath caught in his throat, a giant felled by the smallness of a thing he himself never remembered being. Angry whispers floated above your slumber as mama threatened him with legal action and his legs betrayed him, leaving your side and striding out to his waiting car. More words were exchanged, and yet you slept…

There was the dim chandelier of sound and light that hung above your bed, spinning slowly and dizzying up your dreams with lullaby-ed images that kept your infant brain working long through the night. They cast long, vivid shadows on the wall as if dancing around a fire in the middle of the room and your short arms would reach out for that warmth, hoping to grab hold of it, shove it past your tongue, and savor it the way you did with the rest of the world. Your life was wonder while mama’s was protector. She may as well have sat outside with shotgun in hand for all the worry the night would bring her, only putting it down to feed you or coo you back to slumber.

She would cradle you, tears streaking through dirty cheeks as she rocked gently, the rain outside just starting to fall on the rooftop. Thunder from miles out warned her that a storm would come soon and the pillowy white clouds were quickly devoured by the gray ones sweeping through. The neighborhood outside was empty, everyone having smelled the future rain before it ever touched down, waiting patiently for Nature to dot the earth in dampening waves of pointillism as she used terra firma for her canvas. Grandmother would tell you later in a hushed, conspiratorial way, that thunder was the handclap of God hunting for flies in Heaven. You just liked the way it scared you with its delayed, rolling explosion across the world. It reminded you of an invisible boulder picking up speed and rolling into the next county.

Trees swayed in the wind as their leafy hands tried to catch each fat drop that kamikazed its way towards the dirt. Mama would hum a lullaby as she sat and watched the storm. Your tears slowed with your breathing as your head nestled against her breasts. She would coddle you as you clutched your tattered blanket between tiny fingers. The rain tapped out a rhythm on the windows that mimicked the slow, ocean-like movement of the old rocking chair and ultimately sent you to slumber despite the thunder outside as you sucked on your thumb quietly.

She’d get up carefully and place you in the crib. ‘Almost too big for it now,’ she’d think while leaving the room on hushed footfalls. Mama would shuffle slowly to the front door and lock both the deadbolt and the slip-clasp. With steady hands, she’d maneuver the dresser in front of the door, followed by the heavy recliner the loud man had bought so long ago, before you came between them. Mama didn’t want him back, but he never seemed to get it. Slow discussions and reason never cut through the liquor breath he used to wear home most evenings and tonight would be the end, she hoped. A stockpile of food and diapers meant she wouldn’t have to leave the house for awhile. By then, maybe he’d sober up enough to realize what he’d done through irrational fists and unremembered words. And through all this, you continued to sleep, unabashed, unabated, unmolested…

He was gone now, the loud man, and he hadn’t returned for awhile. You remember him as the color of violence and black with a smell that never left your nostrils. You smelled him weeks later, but could never put a face to him as he didn’t come to your crib this time. You waited, chewing silently on rubber toy and blanket, but his visage never appeared and when the smell dissipated, so did your wakefulness and you slept.

Mama watched as you grew into a toddler, all clumsy limbs and anxious body. Reaching, prying, fingering, toying, clutching, stretching, tip-toeing on unsure feet to a mother waiting with open arms, she was jubilant to see your first hundred attempts at walking culminate into a three foot stretch of success. You were pleased with yourself as well, but more for the fun of doing something new. Crawling had become a bore and you could see more of the world standing up on your own two feet.

These two pillars beneath you, unsteady and trustworthy at the same time as they were a part of you, stood shakily while you held on to coffee tables and pant legs, sofa arms and the giant hands of big people helping you to another side of the room. The diaper crinkled around your thighs with every step and irritated young, innocent skin, but you didn’t care. You were mobile and no longer confined to the slow motion of four limbs. Two limbs got you there faster and faster until you couldn’t help but run to mama when you saw her, burying your face in her dirty apron. This was your first taste of grease and flour, but you wouldn’t remember since your tastebuds were still too immature to differentiate between food and color or taste and smell. As long your belly was full and you fell asleep after, taste was secondary.

Soon after, mama started disappearing during the day and the old one started coming around more often, placing herself directly in your line of sight. You used to call her ‘gammaw.’ Blimp-like and curvy, she had wrinkly, twinkling eyes and smelled like the earth you used to chew on. She almost had mama’s face, but her body was unlike mama’s: wavy, water-like and moved to take your shape when she pressed you against her bosom. The rolls below her chin were blankets you got lost in (unlike the firm pillow of mama’s fine, contoured neckline) and your fingers disappeared between them constantly as you wondered where they had gone. She would hold you high above her head some days and it would be your first glimpse at the earth below as she spun you around. So far, so far, you thought, not knowing what that meant as you scream-giggled in fear and excitement at the danger of plummeting. The old one wouldn’t let you, though. Neither would mama if she could help it.

You grew, legs becoming ever-steady and reliable at all times. Grandmother would let you help her make the cookies mama would nibble on when she got home from work before putting you to your bed and slumping into her own. Bone weary, mama would be fast asleep while grandmother shuffled around the house in the furry slippers that reminded you of cartoon rabbits, but never talked back when you questioned them. You could hear the soft plastic slif-slif-slif-slif of her feet across the wooden floor, moving from oven to table, to chair, and back to oven until you finally fell asleep yourself to the rhythm of grandmother’s slow insomnia.

Some nights you would sleep all the way through, long past the need for the dulcet songs of the spinning mobile once perched above your crib. A single night-light would enliven the room and fill it with dancing shadows that you had to prove to yourself were just that, shadows. A long dark figure rose up along the wall each night as your door shut slowly and stayed permanently frozen on the wall as if it were a prisoner set within a cell of drywall. One frightened look from beneath your sheets told you it was the back of the rocking chair and nothing more, nothing as sinister as your young but vast imagination could conjure up between sheets and night-dreams.

Other nights would find you wide awake and alert from a true physical terror that you never saw, but that you heard and never forgot, but would never recall until you were an older man. It always started with the drunken boots, clip-clopping their way up the porch and waking you up faster than the smell of grandmother’s cooking on Sunday morning. They were the heavy boots of determination and willful disregard for mama. They were the two footed army sounds of a twilit invasion that the women were never fully prepared for, but never surprised by. It is a good thing that you don’t completely remember. It is also good that you would never fully become him later in life.

Grandmother became a moving statue within the house; always there but never stationary for long. In the morning, she would dance slow waltzes in the kitchen with the mop until the floor shined brighter than the sun-reflected windows. The too-sweet smell of fake pine would lift up off the vinyl flooring and fill the house until she moved on, opening up the windows as she shuffled through the house in those same bunny slippers, worn out and mute from her constant shuffle. The smell of real trees and real leaves, dead or in the process of dying, felt right. You were five years old and didn’t play with the neighborhood children yet. Too young to go outside on your own and grandmother was too old to chase after you. If you were patient, she’d let you help her cook the dinner that mother would eat quickly before giving you a bath and finding her own hour of the day to not be employee, mom, or the person on whom someone else relied. Some nights, mama fell asleep on the couch while you were still awake. She was run-down from trying to make magic from tragedy within the household, so grandmother would happily cover her in a quilt and sit with you out in the backyard.

Grandmother used to tell you stories about the birth of music, how the world’s animals had their own symphony, eventually mimicked by primitive man. The caw of a bird became the horn. The drone of a cicada gave way to the rattle. The sound of a hoofed army stampeding across the plains became the drum. The thump of excited heartbeats from the hunted became the bongo, so on and so on until you could trace back the genealogy of the stringed instruments through second cousins cross-continentally during man’s evolution into upright musician.

She would whisper these stories as you sat on the porch during the summers when your ears were completely open and somewhat understanding. You would curl up in her lap as you both stared into the star-suffocating blackness of country night sky. She would sit on the porch swing after dinner and not say a word until the sun had completely set. She said this was to help facilitate the natural rhythm of the animals, this quiet focus on the sound surrounding you. “Let the rhythm come to you, child,” she would say. “Relax your ears and you’ll hear every animal add itself to the earth song in waves.”

You would smell the cheap perfume still clinging to her skin from that morning’s church service and inhale deeply before she would start these tales in her quiet, raspy voice. She would disappear behind her eyes and swim between the crevices of stories etched so many years ago within her mind and you would try to connect the star-dots into pictures of the animals in the stories. You body would relax into the steady sway of the porch swing as the moon played hide and seek with the roof above.

“Even before he found the magic fire, man had sound to keep him warm on those cold lonely nights in the wilderness. To keep his fingers from freezing, he would try to imitate the sound of the herd fleeing across the open fields, banging his hand against anything that produced a sound, anything that smacked the life back into his digits. He found a way to warm his arms and fingers.” Grandma would stop here for a moment, as if replaying the image in her mind as she made it appear inside your own.

“But that would only warm his hands and arms. He noticed his breath, raspy and aching for heat, hushed out in a strange tempo which he would turn into monotone singing. He didn’t know words, for there was no language yet, but he would startle the hunting owl with all his noise and commotion and began to experiment with his own savage hoots.” At this point, Grandma would give her own soft hoot at the moon and you’d sometimes hear a response from the trees off the property line. “Every night after sunset, the savage would bang his hands in unison with nature and his voice would undulate until finding the note that sated his appetite. Then his throat and head were warm.”

Grandma would clap her hands quietly, humming strange bars of music. You could feel more than hear the sounds, vibrating through her thigh turned pillow. A frog croaked near the porch like a metronome. “Days of hunting left him weary and the savage lay in his cave, head poking out to keep watch for predators and danger. He was overtaken by fever and lay sick for a week, watching the natural order of things pass before his eyes. Snarls from feral cats deep within the forest kept him awake until eventually he fell into to a deep sleep and when he awoke, he was rested and less hungry. He attributed this to some unnamed God above and danced his way through the forest, singing his own hunting mantra until he claimed his first kill.”

“Wouldn’t that scare the animals?” you asked in a tiny, tired voice.

“Maybe it would now,” she replied, running her bony fingers through your hair, “but the animals thought they were the only makers of music then. They didn’t realize that savage man had figured it out. After he found his dinner, he sang and danced around the carcass, thanking the gods above.”

“For what? That he was able to eat?” you would ask.

“No, child…that he was able to live. We make music now so that we can dance and sing. We dance and sing because it is an affirmation of our lives. Without the song, we simply eat and sleep with no dreams in between and dreams are what keep us moving forward. They make us who we are.”

And she would rock the porch swing slowly, drinking in the night as you slept…




The shadowed stranger, the loud one, had arrived quietly and without fanfare in a car bigger than you had ever seen before. He offered you lunch and a boat ride while you played in the front yard. Grandmother had come to trust you to play on your own now. You laid your toys down hesitantly and looked back at the house to find grandmother, but she was inside and most likely dancing with the mop again. The shadowed stranger called you by name and you, in your naïve way, believed him to be a part of your life since he knew what to call you. You put one of the small cars in your overall pants pocket and climbed into the car, smelling leather and cigarette smoke as the hot seat heated up the back of your thighs. The car’s tires squealed as your head turned just in time to see grandmother come running out of the house, waving her arms. ‘It’s okay,’ you thought. ‘I’m having lunch with him today.’ You simply waved back as if nothing was wrong while he stole you quickly.

He rolled down your window so you could stick your arm out into the wind, letting your hand dance on the breeze. He talked and talked, never really letting you answer the questions he asked and he kept looking up into his mirror as sweat both rolled down the side of his face and pooled up beneath his arms. His hands were jittery and you hoped he was okay. He looked sick, but he promised you lunch, so you trusted him.

The highway was home and the sky beyond the windshield shone a bright blue as you hid your eyes from the sun. The stranger played music from the dash and hummed along occasionally, sometimes getting the words wrong, but turning to you and smiling as if to get a laugh, to share the joke with you. Several hours passed this way. The sun had gone home and turned the sky an orangey purple and there was still no sign of lunch. You said you were hungry and he said you would stop soon. He was hungry too, he just wanted to make sure it was a good place, you know? Something special. Then he tousled your hair and lit another cigarette as the car seemed to drive faster and faster into the waning nighttime. You trusted him and you slept…

You awoke in a bed larger than mama’s and it sat next to another one of the same size. You breathed in the room, heavy with smoke and old age and walls that needed new paint. The shadowed stranger sat in a chair near the window and watched the muted television, periodically peeking out through the curtains while inhaling long and slow on his cigarette. When he noticed you were awake, he asked if you were still hungry and you nodded, wiping the sleep out of your eyes with your balled up fist. He got up, changed the channel to some cartoons you had never seen before and left, locking the door behind him. You sat on the edge of the bed, legs nowhere near touching the floor and waited.

You explored the room while he was gone, ignoring the cartoons. The beds were uncomfortable to sleep on, but perfect for jumping on, and you relished each hop as you jumped the gap between them over and over, giggling because you knew mama would never allow this in her house. You were pure child and no one could tell you any different.

He came back shortly after, carrying a brown bag filled to the top with mysterious things, but handed you a hot dog. No ketchup, no mustard, and a bun that was stiff and crunchy. You joined him at the little table near the curtain-pulled window and took the hot dog from the bun, eating it slowly and feeling its juices run down your clumsy fingers.

‘Is it good?’ he asked and you nodded, trying to be polite. ‘Good,’ he said, pulling back the curtain with a finger and looking out the window again. ‘Hey pal, we’ll have to drive at night if that’s okay with you. Is that okay with you?”

You nodded again, not understanding. Lunch was over now and you wanted to see mama. And grandmother. And the boat.You asked him for a story and he said he had none but if you gave him enough time, he’d come up with something good. ‘Maybe tomorrow I’ll take you to the place that fairy tales were born,’ he said. You fell asleep not long after eating and dreamt of a place where castles stretched high into the clouds beyond sight and monsters of unusual size were easily slayed by your young, heroic hands.

You awoke in the car. The bright white of the sky’s solitary moon-eye shone down through your window and you began a staring contest, enraptured by the vivid grey spots across its surface. If he had not been hanging up there alone, you realized, the night would have been an impenetrable black, a scary blanket of nothing. The country fields outside your window had a way of soaking up the light and swallowing it whole. Tonight, however, the sky was a dark, delicious blue and you instinctively tried to reach your hand out to grab it and take a bite. The dark stranger smiled as he saw your lust for the view. ‘Beautiful, ain’t it?’ he asked in a soft whisper, as if he spoke any louder he would splinter the moment.

The drive felt like days to you, but it was only a few molasses-slow hours. The man fumbled with the machine between you both, trying to find music that didn’t sound scratchy or fuzzy. You watched the road, seeing each white and yellow line blur into one long stretch of paint beneath the car. The wheels rumbled beneath you in a rhythm that reminded you of previous thundered slumbers. Thun-thun-thun-thuk, thun-thun-thun-thuk, the sound of exploration and the promise of the unknown ahead as you got to stay up past your bedtime while the dark stranger didn’t seem to mind.

A new hotel crested down the highway. A short, squat place of abandonment that seemed dirty and ugly to you. (add description here…neon, one light out, dampening the parking lot) The dark stranger pulled in, rubbing his eyes and yawning, explaining to you that ‘we’ll stay here for a bit and continue driving later.’ You just nodded and yawned as well, clutching your toy car and running it along the contours of the interior. He parked the car beneath the bright glare of arc lights near the entrance and you both walked in. A quick exchange of voices passed through your tired ears as you leaned your head against his leg. He looked down, surprised and comforted at the same time before picking you up and cradling you against his chest.

He was firmer than mama, his arms bigger and more secure. His neck was rough with hair and his breath was fiery hot as the motel clerk stared at you both before passing the key to the dark stranger. ‘Better hurry,’ the clerk had said. ‘Storm’s on its way.’ The stranger thanked him and nodded, carrying you outside to that night’s sleeping place. Only one bed this time, but he tucked you in and turned on the television for you. Your eyes didn’t seem to want to close, despite your body feeling otherwise. The dark stranger disrobed and locked the door before strutting his way to the bathroom. The water rumbled through the pipes in the walls as he started his shower and you noticed your face on the television. Maybe not you, you thought, but another that looked like you. Then you saw mama. Then grandmother behind her. You didn’t understand why they would be there in the television or why you would be either, but eventually you fell asleep before the dark stranger finished his shower, your tiny face planted in a pillow at the foot of the bed waiting for your dreams to grow.

You dreamt of mama and grandmother. You dreamt of them both dancing with their own mops in the kitchen and wearing the same slippers, dancing in tandem as they sang to each other, with each other, filling up the house with the sounds they learned from the animals. Their smiles shone brighter than the linoleum floor they danced upon and their voices became sweet like sirens, beckoning you. Sweet, sweet…

Sirens woke you from your hibernation and the stranger seemed afraid. You remember his face pulled into a permanent look of fright as if he had just awakened from a night terror. His underarms were wet the way they had been that first day, the one that seemed so long ago. He ran around the room, clutching at his hair and mumbling to himself as sweat dripped down from his brow and down his long nose. He didn’t seem to notice as it rolled right off the edge and fell to the floor far below. You pulled the sheets up around you, curling up beneath them as your eyes peeked out, watching his erratic movements in the small room. He was a tornado, sucking up anything in his path and throwing it off into wherever. You didn’t realize it then, but you were afraid the way mama was afraid. You understood fear now and how it wrapped its bony hands around everything inside you and squeezed until it had drank up every last drop of hope.

The sirens got louder as lights flashed through the window. First red, then blue, the red, then blue. The carousel of color on the wall spun faster and faster, moving along the stranger’s face as he walked into its path. Your tiny mind saw his face contort into something that kept the fear lodged deep inside you and you pulled the covers tighter around you, assuming that if no part of your body was exposed, he’d forget you were there. Your breath was hot under the cover as you pretended to still be asleep. Had he been paying closer attention, he would’ve noticed the shaking sheets and known better.

Thunderous knocks and voices louder and deeper than God’s hammered against the hotel door as the stranger kept mumbling to himself, fumbling over himself and wondering what to do. You shook and prayed, shook and prayed and hummed the song grandmother would to sing to you on the porch. The door crunched against the weight of something heavy and angry as the stranger came to your bed and grabbed your shoulders. He looked you in the eyes, but you were afraid to return the favor. The army behind the door was louder than he and his voice got shouted down by the sirens screaming louder now that the door had been splintered and knocked inward. The night air rushed in as the stranger turned around and stood up quickly, facing down the invading army.

Men in black suits, padding and masks carried large guns, larger than the ones you saw briefly on television. They screamed and surrounded the stranger, who fell to his knees quietly, as a man without a mask came in to scoop you up. His face was friendly and soft. He whispered to you that you were okay and cradled your head, pressing you against his chest. He smelled like the end of the day, you thought, for whatever that seemed to mean in your tired mind. You shut your eyes to the night scene as the reds and blues blinded you quickly. He ran across the parking lot where more men in blue uniforms knelt behind the cars that flashed so brightly they shuttered out the light of the moon.

He carried you to a red and white truck. No blues on this one, you noticed, as they put you in the back and wrapped you up in a thick grey blanket and asked if you were okay. You just nodded, tired, and looked back towards the splintered door so far way, still hanging open like the mouth of a hungry animal. The stranger was being led across the parking lot and wore shiny bracelets on his wrists as the black-suited men held his upper arms. He stared at the pavement as his feet stumbled beneath him. They shoved him into a car, one with reds and blues, and eventually the car passed you. His face seemed wet and you wondered why as you watched the car speed off into the black unlit hills of the countryside. You were led to another car where you were told you were going home, back to mama and grandmother, who were worried sick about you. You just nodded and muttered your approval as they led you to another car, where you jumped in with the same man who carried you from the hotel room, the one who smelled like the end of a day, for whatever that meant, and you drove off into those same black hills in silence. No sirens, no lights, just the soundtrack of relieved sighs from the other passengers and the quiet rolling storm of homecoming beneath your seat as you imagined the stars out your window into the shapes of animals. Thun-thun-thun-thuk, thun-thun-thun-thuk.

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