The Green Lady
Day and night the Green Lady walks by my window blaring strange music out of her radio. Hurdy gurdy. Sitar. Shakulute. Kazoo. Glockenspiel.
The singer of the songs croons a language I can’t identify. At times it seems to be of Asian origin. At others, Middle Eastern. Always it sounds far away and subterranean, like someone singing from the depths of a cave.
When I hear the music I imagine this woman in the darkness, calling me down into the earthen depths. I see her vague form wrapped in shadow, waving me onward. I fall deeper and deeper into this hypnosis until I can smell her saffron perfume and almost feel the heat of her body.
At the last moment I snap myself out of it. Someday, I fear, I’ll not be able to resist.
The Green Lady always wears silver sunglasses, but I know she’s watching me from behind them. Sometimes I’ll lift up a slat of my Venetian blinds and look out and see her standing across the street, dancing on the sidewalk as cars and pedestrians flow by, watching me from behind her shades.
She dances as though in her own world, but I can feel her eyes on mine like two ends of a thread.
What she wants, I don’t know.
I think she’s always been here, before I moved to the city…before the city was even built and before I was even born. She was just always here, dancing, waiting for me.
I don’t know what she is. I don’t know if or why she chose me. I only know one thing with absolute, dread certainty…I know this the way I know that fire burns and every star must someday go cold…I know the Green Lady will be the end of me.
Someday I will fall into the singer’s earthen embrace. This death is my destiny.
