“Does everyone here get married so young?”
“No. no. A lot of women have children and raise them alone. The father might live nearby, but not in the same home.”
“We’ve tried that in the U.S.,” I said.
“And what did you find?”
“The boys all grow up to be crybabies.”
She laughed. “How boring that must be for the women!”
The bus arrived out front. A few passengers disembarked. Still I stayed at the desk with the girl. I realized there was something I wanted from her. Not sex. Maybe corroboration. I wanted to tell her about the troll, but it seemed too silly to say out loud. And yet this was a magical land. That’s what all the tourists were told.
“Do your people really believe in elves and all that?” I asked.
I wondered if I sounded desperate. If she’d laugh, or scold me for being a gullible foreigner. Instead she only sighed.
“If you ever see one then you will have faith. If you never do then you won’t. It is the same here like it is anywhere. And both sides will never accept each other.”
A fine point, really. One I would’ve been willing to accept at any other time in my life, but right then I wanted a direct answer.
“But what do you believe?” I said. “Have you ever seen one?”
Just then the bus driver grumbled into the lobby. He asked if there were any passengers getting on the bus. The girl patted my hand lightly then nodded at the driver.
“There are two,” she said.
* * *
—
The ride from Djupivigor to Skaftafell was three hours. I tried to write one more postcard to my ex, but there was an unsteadiness to the roads that showed up in my penmanship. Earlier I wanted to write asking for help, tell her about Gorroon. This time I was trying to write an apology. But the pen wouldn’t stay steady on the card. If I’d mailed it to her she wouldn’t be able to understand a word.
We moved from the mountainous surroundings that I’d taken for granted into these ongoing fields of long-cooled lava. Evidence, on either side of the national highway, of an eruption that took place six hundred forty years earlier. Old things here. The fields weren’t barren, but grown bright green, mossy puffy tufts.
We stopped at the lake called Jokulsarlon where the farthest end of a great glacier crumbled into colored hunks of ice. Even these fragments were three and four stories tall. Sonic blue, others white. This glacier had been moving, incrementally, for centuries, dragging across the land. The ice was packed with brown and black earth in varied zigzag patterns. Our bus parked for pictures. I was one of the first shooting from the shoreline. There was so much I never imagined I’d see in my life. How lucky I felt, just then, to witness this.
Meanwhile Gorroon stayed near the bus.
I wondered if he was afraid of the cold or getting too close to the glacier. How do you defeat a troll? Sunlight was supposed to be one method, but there was Gorroon smoking a cigarette by the bus, standing in direct sunlight. Should I put salt on his tongue? Make him say his name backward? If I knew a trick I would have used it.
Instead I just watched him. Gorroon didn’t even stare back at me now. He didn’t have to. We were past threats. His aggression was a promise. I understood he was going to grab me. A free-floating dread. Women know the feeling I’m talking about.
Back on the bus we rode for another forty minutes until we reached a tiny white sign welcoming us to Skaftafell National Park. There wasn’t much to it. One building, a parking lot, campgrounds, and a mountain. We parked, I disembarked, rented a tent and made camp. There were lots of folks doing the same, more of those aging European couples as well as some Icelandic families. Too crowded a place for Gorroon to get me. I could sit out my time down there and stay safe, or I could go up the mountain and see what came.
* * *
—
With the sun up twenty hours a day there was still a lot of time to climb. I started moving at 4 P.M. Rain stopped, daylight was vivid. Foreign languages, heard as I passed a handful of tents, sounded profound around me.
At the far end of the campground there was a well-established path that slipped onto the mountain, and once I was on it the land, the people behind me, dissolved. Buses in the parking lot, children calling to parents. Instantly there was only me.
This trail wasn’t steep, it just went on for so long. I took pictures of waterfalls until I was sick of waterfalls. Soon the ground lost most of its grass. Just dirt and stones. Mostly stones. Walking on them made my ankles hurt. Another forty minutes and the pain had reached my knees.
When I turned back I could see, far below me—even beyond the campgrounds a hundred little streams, runoff, faint melt from the glacier behind this mountain bleeding out to sea. They crossed each other playfully. I was watching them so closely that it took a few moments before I noticed the troll walking up the path. He was using a cane.
His beard had grown in. Down to his collarbone. His red scarf was tied below it. He didn’t wear a hat. The stick was small, but store-bought, redwood. He waved to me. He didn’t hurry. I turned toward the peak and went up that way. If I could have run I would have run, but my legs were aching.
* * *
—
I didn’t come to Iceland for anything. Iceland came to me in a dream.
And not one of my paranoid racism dreams that, me being black, occur at least once every twenty-eight days.
I dreamt I was in the future. It didn’t look all that different from now, I just knew it was a later date. I was in New York. By the Gowanus Canal. Around me thousands of other black people wore yellow rain slickers because the day was overcast. We had boats. Or rather boats were docked. Catamarans. Those cruiser types used for whale-watching tours. A hundred of them taxied up against the docks in Red Hook.
Black people climbed on the catamarans to capacity. Once full, the boats went out to New York Harbor and from there the sea. Those of us on the shore cheered and those on the ships excitedly waved back. No one carried suitcases but I knew we were leaving America. Not being deported. Forget that. Choosing to go.
And where were we off to? Iceland.
All the black folks in the United States were moving to Iceland because no one lived there anyway. This was a dream, remember, so forget the gaps in logic. Finally I got on a catamaran. I stayed out on deck even though it began to rain. It was okay because suddenly I was wearing a yellow slicker just like the others. The engine was so powerful I felt the vibration up through my shoes, strong enough to shake me.
The drawbridges along the canal had been lifted not so much for clearance, but to wave good-bye. As our boat pulled off we passed the garbage transfer stations and old warehouses that had yet to be refurbished. They were slagged apart, walls falling, broke down and decrepit. I could see into each one as we went by. As we moved I was overjoyed. We all were. Imagine that, a happy story about black people.
As we sought larger bodies of water our boat passed a warehouse as ramshackle as the last ten. But this one was full of gold. Not just gold. Honey.
Honey in jars and bowls. Two hundred clear containers. Honey spread sticky across the wooden floorboards. Yellow candles were lit and flickering. I heard the wind against the side of my face. Rain slapped my temples but I felt warm.
Gold coins were gathered into piles two feet high and just as far across. Yellow fabric was strung up on the walls, tied into enormous bows. It was a majestic and reassuring sight. As if we were being told—by who I don’t know—that we were doing the right thing. Not running away, but running toward something. A fate we couldn’t imagine. I understood, in that moment, that this dream was meant for me. A message.
Go.
When I woke up I booked my ticket.
* * *
—
Almost at the top of this mountain Gorroon fell farther and farther back
. Maybe he was heavier than he looked. My own thighs were boiling from the exertion. I was nearly jogging to the top. On the path I passed no one. A ribbon of clouds descended over me. A gray mist came down from the gray sky until it touched the highest peak of the mountain. Then it descended farther, consuming the earth quietly until the trail behind me was obscured. There was still the trail ahead. Around the next curve of the mountain path I finally came to view the great glacier. Skaftafellsjokull.
I still wasn’t anywhere near it. The ice sat miles away from the mountain, but I saw it clearly. Sunlight reflected against ice particles in the air surrounding the distant glacier with pixie dust. This was the place where I’d meet my fate. Nowhere could be better. Once I understood this I calmed. Even took out my camera and took pictures of the world while I waited for Gorroon.
When he arrived I saw that his beard had grown since I’d last seen him an hour ago. Now it was at his navel. He stooped deeply as he walked, resembled the old Chinese women at the Canal Street train station. I always wanted to protect their fragile looking spines from injury, scoop them up in my hands and carry them to a room full of cushions. For an instant I felt the same affection toward the troll.
Our breathing was different. His was much louder.
“Not used to the climbs?” I asked. I actually taunted the thing. I snapped his picture with my camera.
His cane had a blue stone embedded in the handle, which he rubbed with his fat, yellowed thumb. “I’m having a hard time with this part.” he admitted. “I really didn’t expect you to go all the way up.”
I smiled about it, even laughed at him.
But once he’d recovered his breath the troll stopped seeming like a fool. As soon as he could stand straight he was next to me. I didn’t even feel the movement, like water trickles through a closed hand. From ten feet away he’d seemed like an old man without the sauce to catch a cab. Now I could see his mouth quite clearly, he was that close. His teeth were tiny. Splintered bone fragments. Hellish, hideous.
“Hello again,” he said.
He bent down, almost like a bow. Instead he grabbed my left leg and pulled it from under me so that I fell backward, landing in the stones and snow. My camera went tumbling along the path.
Wow. He had small hands, but a strong grip. One hand on my left ankle, one on my left knee. I struggled, but it was a cursory movement. Just to say I tried. He pulled my knee toward him and pushed my ankle the other way. The pressure was instant, amazing.
I looked down thinking, Will my knee pop out of the skin? Will my ankle turn to splinters? Gorroon patiently insisted that my lower leg snap.
Then my left hand moved into his long hair.
I hadn’t meant to do it. I wasn’t thinking, just suddenly fighting.
The stuff on his head rivaled his beard for length. It wasn’t as greasy as it looked. It crackled in my hands, like straw. I grasped closer to the scalp until I found a patch that wasn’t brittle. My leg began bleeding down into my left shoe.
Once I had a tight grip I leaned back so all my weight was pulling at his skull. His skin tore away from his scalp. He started panting.
Had I hurt him?
The mountain, the glacier, they seemed to be waiting for an answer. Which of these two do we get?
“You can’t have it,” I told Gorroon, but he wasn’t listening. I don’t think I even understood what I meant. There was blood on my shoe, yes, but there was blood in my left hand as well. His blood.
My right hand went for his beard and the left was doing so well that I decided not to intervene. My body knew what it was doing. You might even call my determination happiness. He’d take my leg, but I would steal his face.
As my right hand came near his whiskers Gorroon opened his mouth. I thought I was far enough away that he couldn’t bite, but he had a jaw like a shark’s and the teeth popped past the lips to reach me. The outer edge of my hand was there for him to rip so he tore into the flesh and then pulled backward, peeling the skin and taking some meat. My right pinky curled down on itself and wouldn’t straighten. I still had feeling in the rest of that hand.
I thought maybe I should just roll and take us both over the precipice, but the point wasn’t to kill him anymore. I’d begun to doubt that such a thing was possible. Kill a myth? I’d watched enough horror movies to know that an unwatched monster always returns. So instead the point was that I should live. I refused to die. If I had to stay here with him, on our backs, for fifty thousand years then that’s how it would be. Think of all the travelers, men and women, who would be spared Gorroon’s attacks if I did. Wouldn’t that count as something good? We’d be here, locked in battle until our bodies calcified, until we became another landmark on the mountain, one more folktale.
My leg wouldn’t break. It was obvious from the troll’s frustration. He might have liked to scare me by appearing triumphant, but when he attempted to laugh it made his shoulders buckle. It seemed like he was stifling a sob.
Meanwhile my grip had locked onto his scalp, all nine of my usable fingers pulling there. Who knew I was such a wonderful stubborn bastard? In my experience there seemed to be only two kinds of men—brooders and brats. I’d come all this way hoping to discover a third option. I’d never cared if I turned out to be rich, or brilliant, more than anything I just wanted to prove to myself that I could be brave. That, unlike when I left that good woman behind, I wouldn’t run from the hard tasks of life. I’d messed up before, but I wouldn’t do the same this time. I would persevere. My fatigued brain was commanding my hands to release, relent, surrender but they refused.
I refused.
* * *
—
My camera was found by a pair of Belgian kids out hiking two days later. They uploaded the pictures to the Internet, even the last few where Gorroon’s face was captured. Our thrashing bodies, with the glacier in the distance, was the last clear shot the camera snapped. Generally, the pictures were dismissed as mere online hoax. Most commenters on the page said they could create better images without leaving their homes, right on their laptops.
But if you’re one of the few who felt compelled, somehow lured to Iceland, maybe by those photos or even by a dream, well then follow the journey I’ve laid out here. When you reach the top of the mountain and see the glacier in full view there’s a short tongue of land that juts forward. It’ll seem a little dangerous to walk out there, but step onto it anyway. At its edge you’ll see an enormous boulder. It’s as big as two men. Come close. Press your ear to the cold stone. Forget the doubts of non-believers. Quiet your breathing. Listen. Yes.
I am whispering in your ear.
Sheree Renée Thomas (1972– ) is a writer, editor, and teacher based in Memphis, Tennessee. Her groundbreaking anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) each won World Fantasy Awards for Best Anthology in their respective years. Her poetry and stories have been collected in Shotgun Lullabies (2011) and Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (2016), which she described in an interview as “a collection of work that is in conversation with ancient deities and new conjurers, history and mythology, urban and rural, the South and the spaces beyond.” Her story here, “The Grassdreaming Tree,” first appeared in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (2004), and was included in Shotgun Lullabies.
THE GRASSDREAMING TREE
Sheree Renée Thomas
THAT WOMAN WAS ALWAYS in shadow; no memory saved her from the dark. True, her star was not Sun but some other place. Nor did she come from this country call life. Maybe that’s why she always lived with her shoulders turned back, walked with the caution of strangers—outside woman trying to sweep her way in. The grasshopper peddler, witchdoctor seller, didn’t even have no name, no name. So folks didn’t know where to place her. For all they know, s
he didn’t even have no navel string, just them green humming things, look like dancing blades of grass. They look at her, with her no-name self, and they call her grasswoman.
Every morning she would pass through the black folks’ land, carrying her enormous baskets. These she made herself, ’cause nobody else remembered. And they were made from grass so flimsy, they didn’t even look like baskets, more like brown bubbles ’bout to pop. What they looked like were dying leaves dangling from her limbs, great curled wings that might flutter away, kicked up by a soft wind. Inside the baskets, the grasshoppers fluttered around and pranced, blue-green winged, long-legged things. The click-clack, tap-tap of the hoppers’ limbs announced her arrival. A tattoo of drumbeats followed the grasswoman wherever she went, drumbeats so loud they rattled the windows and flung back shades:
Mama, the children cried, Mama, look! Grasswoman comin’!
And the hoppers would flood the streets. Their joy exchanged: the grasshoppers shouted and the children jumped, one heartbeat at a time. The woman would pull out her mouth harp and put the song to melody. The whole world was filled with their music.
But behind curtains drawn shut in frustration, the settlers suck-teethed dissatisfaction. They took the grasswoman’s seeds and tried to crush them with suspicion, replacing the grasswoman’s music with their own dark song—who did that white gal think she was? Where she come from and who in the world was her mama? Who told her she could come shuffling down their street, barefooted and grubby-toed, selling bugs and asking folk for food? The white ought to go on back to her proper place. But the bugs are so sweet, the children insisted. The parents shut their ears and stiffened their necks: No, no, and no again.
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy Page 148