Read Online The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier - Free Book Online

busy smoothing a line of ointment over a cut on Kimson Perry’s hand. The stormclouds have unfolded across most of the sky, and when Enid gazes out at the reservoir, she can see a thin blade of sunlight receding over the water. There is no rain, but listening closely she can hear a faint grumble of thunder, and she looks overhead, waiting for the first spark of lightning to flash. She sees a movement in the sky, swift and erratic, a sudden darting flicker of UFO gray, and feels a fishhook catch of excitement in her chest. But it is only a squirrel, high in the branches of an oak tree, swaying back and forth in the wind.

The Green Children
    —based on an account in the
Historia rerum Anglicarum,
written in 1196 by William of Newburgh—
    They say I was the first to touch them. When the reapers found the children in the wolf-pits—a boy and a girl, their skin the pale flat green of wilting grass—they shuddered and would not lay hands on them, prodding them across the fields with the handles of their scythes. I watched them approach from my stone on the bank of the river. The long, curving blades of the scythes sent up flashes of light that dazzled my eyes and made me doubt what I was seeing—a boy and a girl holding fast to each other’s garments, twisting them nervously between their green fingers, their green faces turned to the sun. The reapers nudged and jabbed at them until they came to a stop at my side, where the river’s green water lapped at their shoes. I allowed myself to stare.
    Alden took me by the shoulder and said, “We think that it must be the rotting disease. They were calling out when we found them, but none of us could make out the tongue. We’re taking them to the house of Richard de Calne.”
    I understand little of medicine, and in those days I understood even less, but I could see that, despite the coloring of their skin, the children were healthy. The veins beneath their arms were dark and prominent, the sharp green of clover or spinach leaves. Their breathing was regular and clear.
    “Will you carry them across the river?” Alden asked me, and I took my time before answering, cleaning the gristle from my teeth with the tapering edge of a twig. I know the rules of bargaining.
    “Two coins,” I said. “Two coins for each. And one for the rest of you.”
    The reapers fished the silver from their satchels.
    If I was not the first to touch the children, I was certainly the first to carry them.
    I lifted the boy onto my shoulders (one of the men had to rap the girl’s wrist with the butt of his scythe to make her let go of him) and was halfway across the river when Alden summoned me back. “Take some of us across first. If you leave the boy there alone, he’ll run away.” So I carried two of the men to the opposite shore, and then the boy, and then I returned for the girl, balancing her in the crook of my arm so that she straddled the hummock of muscle like a rider on a pony. This was years ago, when I could haul a full trough of water all the way from the river to the stables, or raise a calf over my head, or shore up the wall of a house while the sun dried the foundation. The water was as high as my waist when my foot fell on a patch of thick, jelly-like moss and shot into the current. The girl wrapped her arms around my neck and began to speak in a panic, a thread of shrill, gabbling syllables that I could not understand. “Wooramywoorismifath!”
    I regained my balance, throwing my arms out, and heard one of the reapers laughing at me from the riverbank. The girl was crying now, convulsive sobs that shook her entire body, and I took her chin in my fingers and turned her face toward mine. Her eyes were as brown as singed barley, as brown as my own. “I know these people,” I said to her. “Look at me. I know them. No one will hurt you.” A yellow slug of mucus was trailing from her nose, and I wiped it off with my finger and slung it into the water, where the fish began to nip at