Green Beard

Written with my Thursday night group

Prompts:  none of us do, he had a beard twice as long, once you know that, possible flaw, remember the accident, so many lies, something wrong with his eyes

She called him Green Beard, and once you know that it tells you all you need to know.  Sometimes she’d say he came up out of the river, dripping wet with green leaves plastered to his cheeks and jaw, and his long black hair covering his forehead and neck.  Other times she’d say he had a spongy brown beard, all curls and tangles that’d been invaded with ivy and clover when he slept in the bushes.  In that fantasy his beard was twice as long as her imagination.  All she knew was when she remembered the accident, she’d remember him, appearing out of nowhere with a linty wool blanket and a sleeve of soda crackers.  He shared them with her as he carried her up the hill.  He was blurry, not her memory of him, but his actual self.  He was made of gauze or fog or powdery marshmallows.  There was something wrong with his eyes.  They were as solid as marble and as wet as compassion.  She wanted to live inside them for they were pastel sky in the sunlight and lapis blue in shadow.  When she woke up in the hospital they told her she’d arrived alone, but she couldn’t remember.

“None of us do,” the water glass told her, and the bent plastic straw echoed its denial.

“There’s a possible flaw,” the doctor told her, “a possible flaw in the region of your brain where the mountains melt into the sea.”  And she wondered if she could live with that.  In a country of so many lies.