Existential

“Why am I not green?”

The mother sits alone with the child, in the home they made of a hollowed-out stump ages ago. A candle burns low as a makeshift fireplace. The dull flame flickers over the duller glass picture frames, over the knitting needles in her hand, bent and twisted with age. She rocks slowly back and forth in her chair, while the child sits at her feet. He looks like her husband.

“Why am I not green?” he repeats.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re green, and dad’s green, and my friends, and everyone else I’ve ever met before. So why aren’t I?”

The mother pauses in her rocking. Shadows dance across her face, across the half-finished blanket in her lap. The silence is only broken by the pop of a small bubble of candle wax.

“Because you are special.”

“I don’t want to be special. I want to be green, like everyone else.”

“Go to bed. Maybe you’ll be green when you wake up.”

The mother and father lie in bed that evening, on top of the covers, letting the cool air seeping through the cracks and crannies of the hollow stump wash over them. Outside, crickets chirp, calling out to the full moon above.

“Your son asked why he isn’t green today,” the mother says softly. “I couldn’t think of a good explanation.”

The father just grunts, eyes half closed, staring up at a tiny spider that has started weaving a web on the ceiling.

The mother watches him watching the spider. She soon stands, hobbling out to the kitchen for a glass of water. She brings the glass to her mouth, but doesn’t really drink it, just letting the water slosh in a sort of purgatory between the glass and the back of her throat. The crickets pause in their song, possibly silenced by a passing owl. Her eyes become glazed over with the fog of thought.

When she returns to the bed, the father seems asleep. But then he hums and rolls over to face her as the bed dips slightly under her weight.

“So, why isn’t he green?” he mumbles.

“I’m not sure. I never thought about it too much.”

“Why not?”

“It never seemed important.”

The two lie there, facing each other. In the dark of their bedroom, neither of them can see the green hue of their own lumpy skin. Just shadows in the dim, dark shapes engulfed in more darkness, like two seeds in the bottom of a clay jar.