Looking at the moon outside the open lattice, Michaela feels her spirit drown in the sea of calm as the night air envelopes her like a cool second skin. The air’s delicious weight sedated her senses more effective than anything Gale promises to his gullible guests in his apothecary.
‘Speaking of sedatives…I still don’t know why Gale got into medicine. I gather that Octavia and his mother was a midwife, but I still wonder.’
“Are you sure you don’t want to take off your petticoat?”
Octavia asked, but Michaela shook her head, wearing her dark green checkered shawl over her shoulders. The other hulders were wearing absolutely nothing not even slippers or a cape as they all planned their nocturnal dance outside under the full moon. The blue light cast across the dark mansion illuminated their naked bodies, especially drawing attention to the exquisite naval region and sculpted chest.
However, when they turned their backs, their aching beauty becomes an illusion. Markers of their alienness being a voluminous red fox tail and a tree bark covered back and shoulder blades.
Feeling her eyes trailing down her back, Ulda smirked “But you’ve only been human for a several months now! Surely you must miss not wearing clothes outdoors.”
The three women walked down the empty dark hallways, the only light being the moonshine looking blue on the walls.
“Yes, but I am still getting used to the idea of ‘shedding clothes.'”
Michaela hitched up her petticoat to go down the stairs, which the nude forest spirits leaped across with the ease of a wafting maple leaf. In contrast with Michaela who just looked like she was carefully treading her steps in fear of detection, they looked like garden statues with willowy bodies and minx faces that come to life to play pranks every night.
Not going to waste their time in idle chit chat outside trapped in the suffocating walls, they all crept to the maroon blue painted back oak door with a jiggling door knob. The door opened immediately, and a gush of sudden midnight breeze made the girls’ hair raise in the most satisfying way possible, as they entered a hole framed by winding trees that crooked into spirals of leaves. Moonlight entered through the cracks of the forest canopy, and the women’s naked bodies looked eerie as the resulting shadows attracted to their skins like scales. Like a petal, a spot of light that pierced through the vines landed softly on Michaela’s cheek. The sides of the little path to the deep crevice of the forest were decorated with mossy black stones alternating with limestones, an artificial touch done by Octavia herself.
“I wanted to save venturing into the forest for this moment. So I didn’t get too far, but now we will roam.”
The hulders giggled excitedly and the three held hands, Octavia in the middle.
Only then Michaela remembered how much she missed treading on nature’s debris with no barrier between the soles of her bare feet and the soil.
They were surrounded by the chirping cries of crickets and beetles, and Michaela couldn’t keep her eyes away from the crack of the dark blue sky, stars dispersed between the dark canopy uplifted by silver bark trees. Somewhere she also felt that she heard the sound of a bubbling brook, flowing at ease in the dark. Theodore would have loved playing by the brook, she thought with a tinge of regret.
The further they went down the path, slowly they began to see the forest widening like an opening silk fan, until they reached a wide enough plot of wild grass where they can lie down. Octavia laid on her stomach, dangling her feet around, not minding whether the grass or any minuscule creeters try to climb their way to her legs, casually moving sideways and brush them off if they reach her nether regions. Ulda decided to climb up a bright green ginko tree and lie perched on a sturdy branch, and her curly abundant cornsilk hair illuminated in the dark, making her look like a giant silver peacock.
Michaela just sat herself on the grass, her knees gathered to her chest as she stared at the moon. Her dark eyes locked gaze with the moon which shone on her light beige face with a brilliancy of a sun. Octavia joked that she might get “moon-burnt,” so she stated that no matter how much she avoids the sun or moon, “porcelain skin” was out of the question. As various questions made their way into Octavia’s turquoise eyes, Michaela just stretched her back sideways, marveling at how at her every turn, the Milky Way shifted. It was a glorious night.
The forest was still very dense around them, the dark revealing its truest colors among the sparse gaps between tall trees. If they so desire, they can maneuver their way between the gaps and perhaps find more hidden lay down spots.
“So what do you want to know about my brother?”
Octavia mewled her question as she was pleased by the sensation of her unrestrained chest under the dark canopy of trees with only the stars peeking.
“Does Gale do this too?”
“Go on night walks?”
“Roaming around without clothes?”
“Hulders are fine with nudity.”
Then there was the infamous pause that Gale used to complain about in his earlier letters.
Octavia began to understand her brother’s past uneasiness, ‘You just can’t fathom her thoughts. Is she silently judging us or just taking it in as a fact?’
Finally, Michaela said “When the night air presses on me, I feel so calm.”
After trying to search for bird nests around the tree, Ulda snapped her gaze to Michaela as soon as she said that. And then with eyes shining in the moon lit forest, she exclaims,
“Let me have your shawl if I find a man.”
Octavia skeptically raised her eyebrows, rolling on her belly on the grass.
“Ulda, just an hour ago, you said she should have left her shawl and clothes.”
Looking incredibly bored by her lack of success in finding eggs and men, Ulda yawned,
“Human men have incredibly weak knees. They can hardly stand on their own against two things: rough winds and a woman’s mystery. If it were like old times, I would just take them home with me, where they wait for their death or my blessing.”
Visibly wincing at the mention of ‘old times,’ Octavia lowered her voice almost as in an anxious whisper.
“Ulda…don’t say that. Men are dangerous, and we know that times are different.”
Suddenly aware of how she just hit a nerve, Ulda looked a bit stung by her old friend’s refusal to join along her nostalgic musings and hastily said “Just wishful thinking,” before sucking her teeth.
Then Ulda’s eyes opened wide as if she just saw something far away. Her colorless lips curled in glee, “I have a conquest to make.”
Leaping to the ground from the ginko, she faced Michaela who handed in her dark green shawl as the weather wasn’t as chilly as she expected.
“Why don’t you save this adventure for some other time? Anyone could be here. A lost shepherd, a trained militia, or a runaway slave. Groups of bandits.”
“Which is precisely why I am doing this, Octavia.”
“You could do this after we get a sense of this place.”
“Then it might be too late.”
With a sweep of her arms, Ulda covered her long naked body, asking them “How do I look” as she gracefully moved side to side. Octavia refused to say anything flattering as she felt sisterly sassiness towards Ulda who kept ignoring her warnings and even minded suggestions. Ulda simply looked at Michaela for validation.
After locking her gaze with her for a while, Michaela shook her head in the way whenever Theodore asks for too much fruit and answered succinctly, “Too pretty for your own good.” Her tone was neither flattering nor condemning, but her words culminated in a breathy sigh that could be mistaken as the breeze.
“Then how about this, Madame Rabbit?” Ulda covered her curly voluminous cornsilk hair with the shawl like a hood.
Thinking ‘what can go wrong,’ Octavia relented and gave her a honest remark. “Finally. Gives the poor man something to expect but be surprised by. The fabric accentuates the violent of your eyes.”
Satisfied, Ulda completely shrouded herself in the shawl except for her face and disappeared into the grove. Michaela’s hand made an almost indiscernible reach as if she was about to call out but Octavia just shook her head, her eyes warily communicating that she cannot believe Ulda’s foolishness. And in that she had to agree. She didn’t think Ulda’s plan for a good night was a wise idea either. She has lived in Fullgreens all her life, so the topography and location of this forest were alien to her. But even she can tell that anyone can make their ingress into this area that is closer to the international ports like Delaware and New York.
Wanting to take her mind off of Ulda, Octavia suddenly grabbed Michaela’s right shoulder and said, “Now I have my questions. What was Gale doing when you first met him?”
A little surprised by her forwardness but being understanding of her sisterly concern, she placed her left hand on hers, “He treated my son.”
“Was he running his drug store then?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Damn him…I always have told him to give up on that job.”
“Why?”
Gale always had eye-opening talent and mental dexterity when it comes to prescribing drugs and making money, she remembered.
After some silence deep in thought, Octavia sat her naked body on the grass with her elbows as support, looking at some green glowing fireflies. There were only one or two fireflies in this tranquil, shy forest that signals its energy through the babbling of the brook, chirps of the crickets, and the strangely alive darkness.
“I don’t like him as a druggist.” Octavia petulantly swapped her lily white hand against a patch of particularly long grass. “I hate his choice to help people with all my heart. I don’t understand why he chose this path of life.”
“I believe he does it because of his desire to help people.” Michaela wondered if she said it somewhat defensively.
“I have something to tell you. About my past and a piece of my only brother’s past. But I am only telling you because the only way I could get a sense of Gale’s mind seems to be through you. He is too guarded about that subject when I venture into that territory. I don’t trust you but for now I will make you my chess piece. You are indebted to me. Never forget that.” As Octavia narrowed her large eyes like a cat, her eyes seemed to be like a passing thunderous glint across a deep green lake. Michaela swallowed a bit and licked her lips.
Seeing that she understood her tacit threat against gossip, Octavia laid herself back on the ground, the marbles of her knees jutting forward toward the sky, and her red brown hair snaking between the grass glades.
“Gale and I belong to one of the oldest families of the hulders who lived near the Nordic river groups in Finland, Norway, and Sweden where we lived. There are a select few of us who have red fox tails in Sweden and Romania, but we lost contact with each other. We had a happy life in a very secluded woodland region by Lake Vattern. It was beautiful.”
She drew what seemed to be a small map in the air with her index finger before laying her hand on her bare stomach. Her gaze softened as if the sweet scent of the forest and rain transported her back home.
“As humans are attracted to water like all land creatures, it is impossible to avoid being too close to them anyway so we chose our desires over security” her eyes squinted and then relaxed. “To mortal men, the women of my age old family gave broken hearts or disemboweled stomachs. My male ancestors appeared out of nowhere to seduce girls who knew better but scurried to them like rabbits at night…Oh, I’m sorry. As a result, there happen to be human children with “unusual gifts.” It is not common but it happens.
Some said we were part of an upcoming Ragnorak and others avoided us or at least tried to, by charms, pretty words, or bedtime stories to children. But we were merely fulfilling our desires, as that is the sole purpose of our existence–to materialize our desires.”
Her voice that took on a new fervor when she talked about the hulders’ pleasures and then resumed its relaxed cadence.
“But our ancient family were very peculiar, even amongst hulders. The women of my family, including my mother, were worshipped as patron saints by the local female herb hunters and midwives. When a human mother gave birth due to our guidance and knowledge, she has to bury the ashes of her first new born baby’s umbilical cord in the soil of the forest. To pay homage to the truth that we gave her offspring life. To thank us that we transferred the fate of cremation into something else than her child.”
“Throughout generations of our family, our interactions with humans were peaceful. Then, the people outside the world understood that if we give life, we will also take them. They were reasonable. But…new groups of people settled near Lake Vattern. And the fear and new ideas that these groups brought with them caused the women of our family had doors slam shut to our faces although we came to give ill forebodings and help. As expected of those who ignore our warnings, the children of the human families that lived there throughout centuries died out before they were given a chance. The women who finally opened their eyes would come to the groves, pleading us with their arms cradling fresh death, but our tie was already broken. A score of men purposely wandered in the forest to offer themselves freely without restraint, but our hearts have already left them. We still felt desire. Those pleasures are wired in us, and we could never change them. But we chose to leave them to be, neither giving life nor death as we used to, and that was our greatest mistake.”
Her chiseled jaw clenched a bit as she felt a tempest of emotions brewing in the pit of her stomach. Michaela saw a very familiar emotion grace her features that were both enchanting and darkly handsome–remorse.
“We should’ve continued our lives, instead of holding on to our stupid pride that the mountains and the people who lived there encouraged us to have. We said amongst ourselves, we are “Tallemajas,” divine Pine tree Marys who dwelled since the dawn of time. Nobody rejects us and walks away unscathed. This will teach humanity a lesson or two. And yes, once those people were either exterminated by our neglect and leaving by their own accord, we had new settlers. Those who didn’t know us. They knew what hulders were, obviously. But they didn’t know ‘us.'”
When she finally broke from the spell of her past, she noticed how her fist was clenched close to her tight chest. Realizing how she was holding her breath time to time, Octavia gently rubbed the temples of her head with her other hand. She wasn’t sure if her speech was being more of a self-reflection or an informative talk to her brother’s apprentice. Then her light airy voice took on a more ominous tone, and the forest air stilled to her story.
“New people, strangers, took their place. Then came what the entire hulder race to this day call, in your language,” her lips trembled, and her voice was barely a whisper, “and a lot of us do not even want to say the day’s name out loud.” Unexpectedly, a tear ran down her downy cheek as she stared into what must have been a ghost of a dream or a mirage created by the forest goblins, and she hushed. It took a moment or two for her trembling lips to bear the day’s name, “The Betid-”
KYAAAAAAHHHH_AHHHHHHHHH
The anxious wings of the birds that were deep in their slumber soared to the sky at the sound of a harrowing, stretched out scream: its high pitched note in its most blood-curdling affect: as if the shock of the pain overwhelms what the scream signals–a lone woman’s desperate adieu to the world that has gave up on her. The world that is killing her.
Octavia raised her body up, her wide eyes piercing toward the source of the scream and cried the name Michaela was too paralyzed to even utter, “Ulda!”
Hulder Tales 