Jenny of Green Shores

Victoria Lilly

“Never play in the bog,” Mother always said when Jenny was a child. “You could get lost. You could be snatched by someone, or something. You could miss a step and drown in the green mere.”

The dead do not rest easy in the dark water.

All these warnings and well-intentioned tales of horror amounted to nothing in the face of Jenny’s restless curiosity. They were, if anything, so much oil to the fire. Jenny was always a troublesome child.

When her mother died, shortly after her twelfth birthday, it seemed to her only natural to wander out of the house—noisy with the keening of mourners and thick with candle-smoke—into the dark and silent bog.

 The deeper she went past the boundary-stones, through the woods, betwixt pits and ponds, the less afraid Jenny grew of the wild. She was, she realised with some surprise, a little disappointed by how peaceful the bog was. What had she expected she would find in there? She did not know. A water-hag, perhaps? A herd of phantom horses, rising from the murky mire? Her own dead mother, not dead at all, but living still among the fairy folk across the water, on some far forgotten shore? She did not know.

It was early in the evening when Jenny left her father’s house and ran off into the bog; sunset gave way to dusk, which in turn gave way to an even thicker darkness the further from the village Jenny strayed. When at last her heavy limbs pulled her to the ground, the night was high upon her. Without a thought to the damp and the cold, she lay upon the soft turf on a large glade, eagle-splayed, and gave in to a deep and tearless sorrow, the kind only those innocent of the harshness of this world can feel, when first their innocence is taken from them.

Jenny was a troublesome child, always playing where and when she shouldn’t have, making a mess of her needlework when daydreams swept her away, fighting with her older brother Jack both in jest and in anger, but she loved her mother dearly. Though she had a sibling and a father still living, suddenly she felt all alone in the great wide world. She could not explain why this was. The dark bog and its nameless dangers were nothing, nothing at all, compared to the dread of this loss. And yet, Jenny did not weep. This disconcerted her. What sort of girl does not cry a single tear over the death of her own mother? Was she truly so selfish, so careless of others, as she had been accused many times by the elders? The thought worsened the ache inside Jenny’s breast, smarting and itching and stabbing and burning, until she thought she would go mad with the pain.

When the agony became too much to bear, Jenny sat up on the mossy ground, clawed at her breast, and let out a wild cry.

Sometime later—Jenny was not sure just how long it had been—having tired herself out, she blinked to soothe her dry eyes, once, twice, and looked around.

Scores of fireflies swarmed about the clearing. The girl could not tell where the starry lights of heaven ended, and the glittering candles of the tiny insects began. Athwart the glade they flew, over the wet turf, until she was amid their great complicated dance. She held out her arm, offered her hand; a member of the swarm descended on her outstretched forefinger, a little ember of a critter, warm and tickling against the girl’s cool skin. The firefly buzzed and hopped, spread its wings again, and Jenny rose to follow.

They danced through the woods and into the night, through the brush and the moss and the boughs, from the green glades to wide open leas, until Jenny was back to her village and folk. She was reluctant to part, but there was no helping it. The fireflies danced for her their one final number, then turned back to the shadows of the wood. Jenny watched until the very last one disappeared, quiet, unmoving, no longer heavy of heart. Her father and Jack were waiting for her, she knew. The bog lights were gone. The girl remained.

As Jenny had expected, her father gave her a dressing-down the next morning. He may not have shared his late wife’s deep fear of the mire, but he was well aware that dangers lurked aplenty in the wild wetland, especially at night. He was troubled enough as it was, grieving the premature death of his wife; he did not need a young girl’s foolishness adding to his sorrow, he said. Jenny grieved in her own way, different to that of her father or brother or other village-folk, but she quickly aborted her attempt to explain it in the face of her father’s confused looks and exasperated sighs.

“Never mind him,” Jack said when the two of them were alone, feeding the chickens. “The grownups never understand.”

Jenny wanted to point out that their father did not object to his son’s grief when it burst forth as shouting at Jenny for some trivial mistake or misunderstanding or complained when the boy thrashed around the yard at the news of his mother’s passing, while Jenny was told to mind herself and help clean and prepare the body for funeral rites. In the end, she decided against it.

The one person she knew would never chide her or lose patience with her, who never forced her to make herself smaller, was Nelly.

And Nelly was nothing like Jenny, mind you. Nelly was a good girl. Adults only ever had words of praise for her. More than once, Jenny heard them, when they thought she was not around, express their disbelief at why a girl as pretty, polite, and diligent as Nelly would ever be friends with a plain-looking, bad-mannered, immature lass like Jenny. She herself often wondered at that. Tall, lithe, with fair hair like gold and a smile sweeter than honey, Nelly was a beauty. Jenny, in stark contrast, was russet, short and freckled, and would have fain traded her green eyes for Nelly’s blue ones. They were an odd pair, to be sure. Nelly, on her part, never seemed to give a moment’s thought to the fact or doubt the appropriateness of their bond. For that, Jenny loved her friend all the more fiercely.

The next day the two girls ran off into the bog together.

Whatever hesitation Nelly might have had regarding her friend’s idea to elope for an adventure, the talk of a dance with fireflies warmed her imagination and persuaded her into the plot. Jenny thought it curious how quickly the straitlaced girl agreed to accompany her on all manner of mischief, and how spirited she was about their games. She treasured this knowledge of a secret side of Nelly, one revealed only to herself. She wanted to share the wonder of the green mire with her friend and was impatient to get away from the village and the odd looks of adults and children both, that plagued her every waking moment.

In the morning, Jenny braided her hair, put on good boots, wrapped bits of food in a handkerchief, and made for the boundary-stones to meet with Nelly.

She was not half a dozen yards past the wicket when her brother came after her.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” Jenny grumbled, not meeting her brother’s eye. “Leave me alone.”

Much to her dismay, Jack followed her down the road and across the fields, keeping a few paces’ distance and ducking every time Jenny took a swing at him with her bundle of food. Father had forbidden her from going into the bog again, and Jenny knew her brother would use this against her.

“Leave me alone!” she cried at last when they were nearly at the appointed place, where Nelly was already waiting.

“I’ll cut you a deal,” Jack said with a grin. “Let me join you, and I promise I won’t tell Father.”

Jenny wanted to fight him, tell him off and damn the consequences; she had invited Nelly alone to share in on the magic of the bog. To have Jack there would spoil everything.

“Oh, never you mind him,” Nelly said, however, when Jenny put the situation to her. “Let him come along if he is so eager. It ain’t like we can stop him anyway.”

Jenny bit her tongue. It was not worth the trouble fighting Jack now that he was there. So, she nodded and beckoned to her brother, and led them into the wild.

The place was transformed in the light of day, no longer serene. Now myriad critters buzzed and rushed about, between the boughs above the children’s heads and in the tall grasses under their feet. The place was swarming with life. Jenny watched and listened with her heart open wide. Not all of them found the experience pleasant however.

“Are there vipers in the bog?” Nelly asked, trying and failing to contain her anxiety at the rustling of rushes and sedges all around her.

“I don’t know,” Jenny said flatly. Her brother was more expressive.

“It ain’t the vipers we should worry about. Don’t you know there’s hags around here? Keep clear of the water or a grindylow will drag you down and eat you for his supper.”

“Jack, shut up,” Jenny said.

“What, you don’t believe in the grindylows?” her brother prodded. “Mother always used to say there’s dangers in the bog.”

“I ain’t scared of fairies or water-hags,” Nelly protested. “Those are stories for children. I ain’t a child.”

The girl and the boy continued to trade jabs and parries, but Jenny was growing increasingly deaf to their conversation. Her ears were ringing with the buzz of dragonflies and damselflies, and the crescendo of bullfrogs, hundreds of which roared louder and louder the deeper the children advanced. It was sultry in the bog. Green mats covering the ponds to their left and right stank. The noise was dreadful. She wanted the peaceful quiet of the night, not this, not this. She had to get away.

Somewhere behind Jenny came a muffled splash of water.

She realised she had separated from Nelly and Jack; tall sedges and the brush made the path opaque, and she could not see them. She rushed back, towards more splashes and Nelly’s apprehensive cries.

“Get me out of here!”

Coming into a clearing, Jenny found her friend waist-deep in slimy green water. Nelly’s hair clung to her damp brow and cheeks. She was shaking, wild-eyed. Jack stood by the pond, its edges hidden by rushes, with hands in his pockets and a sly grin on his face.

“Told you the quag is dangerous. Ain’t no need for a hag if you’re so careless you fall in like a dolt.”

Jenny paid no mind to her stupid brother; she leapt to Nelly’s side and helped her out of the mire.

“I am sorry,” she mouthed while Nelly braced her foot on the solid ground and heaved herself up using Jenny’s outstretched hand.

“It ain’t your fault.”

“Are you alright?”

“I think so, I—”

Nelly turned around to glance at the water. A patch had been cleared of pondweed by her falling and splashing about; in this patch, something rose from the depths. Something leathery and black. A trophy won by Death.

When a frog jumped from its split-open head right at them, Nelly and Jenny both cried out at once. The girls quivered for an excruciatingly long, suffocating moment, watching the corpse—gods know how old—float on the surface. Behind them, Jack cackled and sneered at their fright.

Then the laughter was cut short.

The boy strutted backwards, tripped over a rock, tried to regain his balance; but the dirt beneath his feet was so slick and soft, he fell into the water on the other side of the ridge. In his surprise, he barely even muttered a curse.

His fall and flailing about disturbed the green mat on the surface of the pond. From the bottom, it summoned yet another corpse. An animal one, this time, but no less menacing or unearthly in its oily black garb.

“So much for being careful,” Nelly said wryly as Jack yelped and scrambled for purchase on the causeway. He cussed.

“Oh, sod off, you, I—”

“Both of you, shut up!”

Jenny’s low but icy voice snapped her two companions to full attention. For a moment they looked about in confusion, trying to spot some demonic beast or another in the treeline: then they noticed it.

The quiet.

Where mere moments ago there had been a deafening roar of life of all manner and size, of both creatures of the sky and the water, now there was nothing. Not a creak, not a groan, not a flap of wings. Nothing.

Nelly turned to her friend with mute dread in her eyes. “What’s going on?”

“There,” Jenny mouthed, and pointed at the tops of tall dark trees on the far edge of the clearing.

  A great number of black birds had gathered in the topmost branches, and sat there unmoving and quiet. Dozens, hundreds of eyes were riveted on the three intruders.

First came a solitary ‘caw!’, then another one, then flapping of wings, a rolling and unstoppable crescendo of rage, until mere cries and flaps could sate it no longer, and a thousand darklings descended upon the children.

They stared for a moment, seized with terror. Then they ran.

In the swirl of feather, beak, and claw, the three completely lost their bearings and failed to retrace their steps to the open ground. Bullfrogs resumed their hollering, adding to the cries of humans and caws of birds. Jenny could not stand it. To make things worse, as they turned round the shore and deeper into the mire, she found her sight occluded by a rising damp vapour. For all that the sun was high and the sky cloudless, the bog found a way to cover itself with a shroud of fog.

Jenny thought little of her friend or brother at that moment. She moved into the thick downy birches surrounding the watery flats. She slipped. She bruised her palms and knees on knotted roots that had spread across the path. At least she thought it was a path. It had been flat and clear just a few paces back. Was she still on the trail? How could she have lost all her senses of sight and bearing in so short a time?

With the birds no longer pecking her, and the air less sultry under the boughs, Jenny grasped at the opportunity to gather her wits. She was, she realised with dismay, alone.

She moved about, shouted, whistled, shouted again, to no response. Nor did she catch a glimpse of Jack or Nelly, even after she peeked round a tree and at the clearing. The frenzied birds were gone; the heavy, oppressive air remained. This was no place for humans. They should never have come there.

Orienting herself by the placement of the Sun, and trusting her own inner compass and wits, Jenny looked for a way out.

She found it more easily than she had expected. Exactly how long it took was impossible to say, but she was sure-footed and calm of heart, and the bog guided her steps back to the human world. Jenny briefly wondered what had befallen Nelly, and Jack as well. She did not have to wait long for the answer.

When she entered her father’s house, Jack was in the middle of receiving a scolding of his own, an even worse one, perhaps, even than Jenny’s from the day before. Though she expected to partake of Jack’s reprimand, the shouts never came. Instead of anger, her father’s eyes were filled with fear.

“What’s going on?” she stuttered. She turned to Jack, who looked away and would not meet her eye. Before he said it, Jenny already knew the answer to her question.

Nelly was still missing.

All the men and boys were roused from their homes and fields to go into the bog and find the girl. Nelly’s mother was beside herself with fright. Her father and brothers threw scornful looks Jenny’s way as she saw the men off at the boundary-stones; she herself was, naturally, not allowed to participate in the search.

“But I want to help!” she cried after her father and Jack, but they said nothing, only shook their heads.

The menfolk set out in the early hours of the afternoon; Jenny watched the treeline closely from her seat atop a knoll, her back against the cool, lichen-ravaged stone, and counted the tolls of the parish church’s bell-tower. They rang the same as they always did, heedless of the urgency, indifferent to human troubles. The bells kept their own time. The bog seemed to do the same, Jenny mused, setting aside the time for dancing and the time for running. What kind of time, she wondered, was passing for the men and boys treading upon the ancient wilds? As the sun went down, a mist gradually spread throughout the canopy of the woods, rising from its watery resting-place during daylight hours to rule the night. It would not be gone until the dawn. Would the men find Nelly in time? Jenny looked into the mist and saw lights lighting up here and there: torches and lamps, she realised, of Nelly’s would-be rescuers. They swarmed about the expanse of the mire much like the previous night’s fireflies. They danced their way into the dark, through the woods and the glades and the ponds.

But they did not find Nelly.

Jenny watched them return from the woods in pairs and groups, haggard, dirty, and tired. Without even having the strength left to curse her, they only cast ugly glances Jenny’s way as they passed by. She paid them no heed, perhaps for the first time in her life, and kept observing the mist as it sank back into the thick of the trees and the green ponds beyond. She waited for her friend.

Jack was the last to stagger out of the bog, just as the dawn cracked across the inky skies. His was, perhaps, the wildest look of them all. Jenny hoped that he, at least, would stop and talk to her. He did not. He briefly looked her way much like the others returning from the search had done. A small curve of his mouth, or perhaps only a shadow dancing across his face, betrayed the guilt inside.

Her brother came and went, yet Jenny remained right where she was, never mind the damp and the cold of her uncomfortable seat beneath the boundary-stone. As soon as the Sun was up and the mist had all cleared, she resolved, she would march into the wild and find her friend. When the first true light of day spilled over the yonder hills, the golden deluge briefly blinding Jenny, Nelly appeared.

Overjoyed at the sight of her, Jenny dashed down the knoll and nearly swept Nelly off her feet with the force of their embrace. Her joy all drained away, however, when she stepped back and put her hands on Nelly’s shoulders and looked into her face.

Golden hair had come loose of the carefully braided plaits and somewhat stuck out like wild grass, somewhat clung damply to Nelly’s brow and cheeks. Countless small cuts marred her face and neck. Her lip was red and swollen in one corner, where she must have bit it too hard in a fall. Jenny took Nelly’s hands in hers and took a second, longer and closer look at her friend. Her arms, calves, and neck were all covered in bruises, some small and dark, others larger and lighter. So sorry was the state of Nelly’s clothes that Jenny wondered how they were still clinging to her back. But beyond the messy hair and the stained, tattered dress, the strangest thing of all was Nelly herself.

All light had faded from her eyes.

Throughout that day, Nelly said nothing and acted strange. Her mother embraced her tearfully; her brothers and sisters did too, but neither by a word or a look, a smile, gesture—something—did Nelly show gladness to be back home safe. She scarcely even seemed to recognise her family, or Jenny for that matter. She moved slowly and queerly, like a person sleepwalking.

While some were perturbed by Nelly’s changed demeanour, others thought little of it at first. It was to be expected, the latter said, after suffering god knows what hardship in the bog. But there were yet others, who whispered far away from the ears of Nelly and her family of her being changed by the wilderness, in some deep and unspeakable way. Jenny looked into her beloved friend’s dark eyes, and could not read them.

Days passed, then weeks, with little improvement in Nelly’s condition. She regained her speech after a few days but spoke seldom. She continued to move in an odd way: either strolling about languidly or fretting at the slightest rustling of grass under someone’s foot, nervous as a sparrow. Gone was the carefree, bright girl everyone had known. It did not take long for people to lose patience for Nelly’s strange new ways. Jenny observed them look at Nelly behind her back in much the same way they used to look at herself and continued to do so. Now the two of them were both targets of whispers and taunting cackles. It was as though in their eyes Nelly had ceased to be a person.

The exasperation of Nelly’s parents with her aloof, erratic demeanour pushed Nelly away from her family; her other girlfriends too, thought her fey. The longer Nelly failed to get better, the farther they kept their distance. Jenny thought it only natural for Nelly to seek out her company more often than before. While she never regained anything close to her former cheer, Nelly seemed a little more at ease when she was alone with Jenny. There was a strange sort of tenderness growing between them in those long quiet moments when they were left on their own.

Jenny, for her part, did not think her friend strange or troublesome or a burden—certainly not the way everyone else seemed to treat her. To be sure, she was concerned for Nelly’s well-being, and well aware the blame lay with herself for bringing Nelly into the bog and causing this change. For all that Jenny enjoyed the softness of the air between them when the pair sat on a drywall or under a tree, or on the knoll looking out towards the bog, she also hated it. She knew, deep down, that the wild had, indeed, transformed Nelly in a profound, irreversible way. A part of Jenny wished that Nelly would smile like she used to before. She wished for Nelly to be happy, and free of care, and unharmed.

What Nelly herself wished; Jenny did not know. She asked, naturally, many times, about what had happened in the bog after the three of them split up, and about her thoughts and feelings now that she was a stranger among her own kin, an outcast worse even than Jenny herself. Nelly only ever smiled, shook her head, and spoke soft sad words. Jenny never pushed her to say more. The few vague clues she received were enough. And if this was to be the new Nelly, she would be her friend the same as she had been to the old one.

She would hold Nelly’s hand and clasp it tighter and warmer than ever before. Nelly, who was of late wont to stare into the distance, would turn to her friend, and smile a troubled smile.

After about a month had passed, Jenny resolved to do something more than offer sweet words and warm embraces to her friend. She approached Jack, who had been different ever since that day in his own way, with an idea.

“Someone or something did this to Nelly,” she said. “Whoever or whatever it is, maybe it can change her back, make her better, something. Maybe we can make the guilty pay.”

Jack stared in disbelief.

“Are you touched?” he said. “Go back into the wild? We nearly got killed the first time and look at Nell! You want us to get snatched by the bog the way it happened to her?”

“We led her there. It’s our responsibility.”

“Our?” Jack drawled with a mocking expression. “Was you who took her on that little trip, not me. Why should I risk my neck for nothing, just ‘cause you’ve gone mad?”

“You decided to come along. You were by her side when the bog split us. You’re just as responsible as me,” Jenny was resolute. Then she shrugged. “Well, never mind. I mean to go back tomorrow with or without you. I’ll find out what happened to Nelly, and I’ll make things right. If you’re too scared to come with, by all means stay here among the chickens.”

Jenny had aimed her attack well. His pride injured, Jack turned sullen and mulled things over; he caught up with her the next morning at the wicket. Nelly, to whom Jenny had confided her plan, said her goodbyes to Jenny at the boundary-stones. She was not coming with them.

The mire was the same that day as it had been the previous time: loud and sultry. Yet as the two trekked deeper and deeper into the wild, the hot summer day gradually changed the scenery around them. Jenny kept her eyes on the treeline and the top branches; no black birds were to be seen or heard today, which was worrying in its own right. The longer she looked left and right, the more she noticed vapour rising from the green surface of the water, obscuring her gaze, hiding the far shores behind an even thicker veil.

Having noticed the encroaching haze himself, Jack muttered, “We should go back.”

“We haven’t found anything yet,” Jenny replied coldly. “We can’t leave at first sign of trouble.”

“I’d much rather find nothing and keep my head on my shoulders, thank you very much. Maybe you’ve a death-wish, but I don’t.”

“Suit yourself,” was all Jenny said.

Despite his protests, Jack did not go back, though he did groan and complain as the fog grew thicker and its ethereal fingers reached and grasped at them.

Then lights appeared, in wisps far to their left and right, then behind them; but Jenny knew better than to follow those. The fog had by then crept its way to a yard or so around them, so all she could do was keep her eyes on the ground before her feet, gauge its firmness, and take one step at the time into the unseen. The haze was thick, and colder than she thought it would be, for the day was so hot. It hummed, like an insect’s wings. It called to her. There was something soothing and familiar about the fog, something she could not name. The nearest thing to it was the feeling during those soft solitary moments with Nelly. The bog was not an enemy, not to her. She didn’t need to have any fear of it. She would make things right.

A cry erupted in the distance.

Jenny turned, and Jack was not by her side.

She rushed the way she had come, not gauging her steps now, not thinking of the treacherous damp ground and the pungent waters or what might be lurking in their depths. More cries came, each gruffer and wetter than the previous one. Then the sounds dwindled, as though the crier had been submerged under water. Or, perhaps, it was Jenny who had plunged beneath the slick mat of pondweed, maybe that was why her hearing had altered all of a sudden? She did not know.

At length the haze began to part, the air around her growing warmer and the sounds clearer. Jenny stumbled into a corpse of gnarled ancient pines by the water, their trunks and boughs promising a haven from the fog and the roar of critters.

Sitting between the roots near the water’s surface, was Jack.

He was not quite sitting but was rather slanting backwards with his shoulders against the trunk at an awkward, uncomfortable angle. Not that this would have bothered Jack, though, for Jenny at once noticed another thing. His head was smashed in.

She crouched at the corpse’s side in silence, and examined the gaping mess of bone, blood, and brain that had once been her brother. His were not the kind of wounds a human being could have inflicted, surely. Jack’s right leg lay twisted and crushed, fabric of his trousers nearly dissolved by blood, shredded by the jutting shinbone. His head had been bashed in as though with a great and sharp rock; but though she turned left and right, observing smaller patches of blood among the trees that revealed Jack had already been injured before he finally fell here, Jenny saw no such weapon. The biggest stone she glimpsed was no larger than a fist. What sort of strength did it take to lift a boulder, anyway? Yet more troubling, the wounds were fresh: she put her fingers to the red pulp of tissue that used to be Jack’s face, and his blood was warm and quick to the touch. Flies and other creatures had not taken a taste so far, but they were bound to soon enough.

She ought to run to her father and tell him what happened, Jenny knew. They ought to carry away Jack’s body, as the job was too much for her alone. All of that; Jenny knew, but did not act. She only stared, deaf and dumb, at the tattered remnants of her brother; she did not weep for him.

 When at length she returned home, shortly before nightfall, Jenny could not bring herself to tell her father the truth. Nor did she remember where exactly Jack’s remains lay, so she thought it better not to say anything other than why the two of them had gone into the bog again. She was not sure whether her father believed her or not, but she did not care. She did not care what anyone thought anymore, or how people would look at her after they learned of her brother’s fate. Her only interest and worry now was Nelly, and how she might react once Jenny told her the news.

When she did, Nelly was as impassive as ever. She listened to Jenny’s story about the fog and the cries, and Jack’s mangled body beneath the Tanglewood trees, with a distant look in her eyes. Once Jenny was finished, Nelly sat quiet for a moment, then nodded. She took Jenny’s hand. That was all she did.

On the morn, ere the sun rose, the two girls once more ventured into the wild. It seemed only natural to do so. Besides, what did they have to fear, now?

The bog was different than Jenny had ever seen it before. Warmer and clearer than on that first night, when she danced with the fireflies; quieter, fresher and more peaceful than on the two dreadful days they intruded upon the mire. The wilderness was neither trying to scare them away, nor hunt them down, nor show them the way home. This was something new.

“Was it like this that time? Before you returned to me?” Jenny asked.

Nelly shook her head. “No, not quite. I was dazed and overcome. Back then, I ain’t sure I wanted anything, not even to find my way home. It all felt rather like a dream,” she said softly. “I saw someone in that dream. First, I thought that was you, then I thought it was Jack. It made a change in me. It…Ah, none of that matters now. I knew I couldn’t stay, but I didn’t know where to go. So, I looked for you.”

Jenny squeezed her fingers around Nelly’s.

“I got lost that day,” she muttered. “I couldn’t be by your side, I couldn’t protect you. They wouldn’t let me. I am sorry.”

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for.”

“No harm will come to you again. I swear it.”

“I know,” Nelly said gently. “I know.”

Jenny opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came through the parted lips. What words could one speak, of the hideous wounds coiled in their hearts? What words for such loss, such wonder? Whatever their pain, better it bled in secret and silence. Jenny much preferred touches to words anyway and held her friend’s hand as they walked on in comfortable quiet through the shadows.

The girls made their way past the woods and to the ponds, which lay green and still and peaceful, resplendent. Faint sunlight cast dancing flickers and thin shadows across their surface. The two stood at the boundary, sedges and rushes reaching up to their knees. They gazed at the waters, and the far shores beyond.

“Ah,” Nelly sighed, closing her eyes and lifting her face to the sky. “How weary I’ve grown! Would I were at rest.”

Jenny did not raise her eyes as her friend did. Instead, she looked upon the grubs and larvae squirming among petals of purple flowers at her feet. They would be moths and butterflies come autumn, she knew, but in the meantime…

She muttered, “We can’t stay.”

“I know,” Nelly said. Not turning her face away from the sky, eyes closed still, she shrugged and bit her lip. “I know.”

“It will be all right.”

At that, Nelly turned at last. Her arms, which before she held crossed firmly against her chest, now rested freely at her sides. Light flickered across her face, and she smiled at Jenny the way she used to in the old days.

Jenny stepped forward and put her arm around Nelly’s shoulders, held her closer and more tenderly than ever before. Their embrace stretched on for one heavy, dark, eternal moment.

Then Nelly stepped back, still with that smile on her lips. Lashes fluttered before her bright eyes, flesh slid wetly against iron, a drop of blood on the blooming marshlocks at her side. Nelly fell into the mere, and the last thing she saw as she went under, before the waters delivered her, were the soft green eyes of her most beloved friend.

Jenny watched in silence as the pondweed broke, swelled, stilled again. She let the bloodied blade fall into the rushes, but did not otherwise stir. Sunrise warmed her brow, the air in the bog was fresh. Everything was at peace.

Somewhere in the trees far away, a nightingale sang.