EMERALD CHARMS

A sideways, alien look at Faith...

The Green goddess scowled at Timmy and waved her wand.

Time to punish the little fool, she thought, and her thoughts assumed resonance and echoed round his head until every synapse throbbed.

Timmy, in her eyes, had been a very naughty boy. Not only had he used a bad word, the worst of all words, the “S” word, but he had slung it at her as if she didn't count for anything. But she did. She was a goddess, the Green goddess, and that made her both creator and destroyer of worlds.

Timmy felt her anger, and cringed.

So this is what it's like facing up to a creator, he thought as the pain struck him. But I'm glad that I did … she can't be allowed to get away with this for ever... putting dreams into the minds of simple men and expecting to be believed...

Dickie had told him about the dream, or vision as he preferred to call it, though what the difference between dreams and visions might be he hadn't said. But he'd been asleep one night, tucked up in his bed and all warm and cosy, and the world had suddenly opened up in his head and he'd seen Malcolm, their neighbour and mostly despised because they suspected he might be cruel to animals, being led down a garden path by the Green Goddess herself, all hand-in-hand and romantically, like young lovers or very naughty teenagers.

“I could tell it was her,” whispered Dickie, “she had a green aura, like an emerald mist about her, and when she spoke it was with a quiet authority in her voice. And when she looked at Malcolm she smiled that warm smile that goddesses have and then, believe it or not, she kissed him! The mist was thick about her, but I saw the way her tongue touched his... I felt sick, but couldn't tear my eyes away... I hate Malcolm, and yet here was the great Green Goddess smooching with him! And it was a vision, I tell you, a vision of truth and holiness...”

“I believe in the Green Goddess...” sighed Timmy, “but I don't like to think of her actually kissing Malcolm...”

“French kissing,” sighed Dickie. “It was horrible.”

“I'm going to the Great Hall of the Gods,” Timmy said, “and I'm going to have it out with her. Kissing is for sissies, we all know that, but tongues... it's absolutely disgusting...”

And that was how he found himself in the Great Hall of the Gods being punished by the Green Goddess.

It had started with him challenging what looked to be no more than a deserted, open space. There were pews in polished wooden rows where supplicants might come and offer prayers and tithes to the panoply of deities that shared this mighty hall, there was a great altar at the front, stained with the blood of the virgins who had been sacrificed over the years, holy blood, noble blood, precious blood.

Why is it always virgins? he asked himself, poor creatures, innocent and yet bound for the hereafter before they've had a proper chance to live the here and now!

So he had stood in that open space with the faded aroma of blood clinging to the air the way the smell of blood can, and he addressed the emptiness around him.

“Green Goddess!” he proclaimed, “why have you done it..?” And then he used the word, the forbidden word, the one that would bring her wrath upon him. “Why have you smooched?”

The air became gently green, with the soft opacity of an unripe grape or the loveliness of dew on a summer meadow. He could sense it rather than see it, but he knew it was there all right.

Then the voice came to him.

It reminded him of the voice of his old aunt Griselda, the one who growled when she spoke because, as his mum had put it before she died, of all the cigarettes she smoked. Griselda had sounded so much like a man when she spoke he sometimes thought it was a man when the old woman was on the phone.

But here, in this hall, he knew who it was. It was, and he had to take a sharpish intake of breath when he thought the words, the Green Goddess.

“I will smooch whomsoever I want to smooch,” it said, and he was shocked!

That word, from the mouth of the Goddess, the Creator, she who had been there at the beginning and would be there at the end, she who guarded the Great Hereafter and only permitted the righteous and goodly and believers into her nest when they passed from the land of the living. She who banished all the rest to another, lower, place where the air was thick with fumes and, he was sure, granddad must be.

He didn't quite see her as she waved that wand of hers and afterwards, if questioned, he wouldn't even have been able to confirm that she had one, everything was a kind of indistinct blur. But he felt it, all right. Across his back like a whip, cutting into his skin, forcing his blood to ooze out. He could feel its wetness as he squirmed in pain.

The Green Goddess smirked to herself.

Serve the little devil right, she thought, and for good measure she smote him again. Then, without giving him and his agony, his innocence or his guilt, a second thought, she drifted off like an emerald cloud to another place, maybe another world, maybe her nest, anywhere but there, leaving a bleeding child lying prostrate on the stone floor of that Great Hall of the Gods.

“They'll sacrifice you,” suggested Dickie, who had followed him in.

“It hurts,” he cried.

“What does?”

“My back, where she flogged me...”

Dickie looked. He pulled Timmy's shirt up and peered at his back.

“There's nothing there,” he said, “nothing at all.”

“But the Green Goddess … she came … I heard her speaking at me with her fifty-ciggies-a-day voice, and I felt her wand, it thrashed me for asking her...”
“Asking her what?” asked Dickie.

Timmy thought for a moment and then hook his head. “I'm not saying,” he said, determinedly. “It was all your fault, for dreaming,” he added.

Then Dickie knew, and smiled secretly to himself.

Timmy was so easy to wind up, and it was such fun!

Such fun!