Pan

It was a funny thing indeed. So small. So insignificant. And yet, I knew this would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time. The tiny creature in my palm looked like a flower. Not even a healthy flower, but more of a weak and wilted lilac. I had examined the specimen 20, 30, no 8,559 times. I knew that for fact. I had counted and documented each observance like a bio scientist. I was not a scientist. I was not even a respectable blue or white collar worker contributing to society. If you're expecting a story by the next Marie Curie, or Mother Theresa, I can assure you,you are very, very wrong. Let me take you back.

It's 1929. I am homeless. I'm told that a lot of respectable people are these days. I suppose that's supposed to chip off some of the shame. It doesn't. My home is a dump. Not a figurative or metaphorical dump. I've actually settled in Boulder, Colorado City Dump. The nights are frigid, but I have plenty of flea infested, discarded blankets to break the wind with. My children are gone. They were taken to live with their grandparents in Boise, Idaho. I do not even have an address to get letters from them. I spend most of my time going through the trash to try to find something worth pawning, or melting down. I use the money to buy groceries and whatever is left to make pay phone calls to my children. 

"No, Loren, I'm sorry the children can't come to the telephone right now. They're quite tired from their studies and their recreation with Grandpa pa in the park." Translation: You are an unfit mother and a drunk and Charlie and I would never dream of letting you speak to them.

I always hang up quite dejected after these little chats. As if the sting of my mother in law's voice could be any more excruciating than my own voice in my head, telling me how worthless and miserable I am. 

And so, day after day, here I find myself pillaging through the trash looking for gemstones in the rough. It's amazing the things that people throw away, even in a great depression. My theory is people panic when they have to leave their homes and scatter their belongings to the wind, hoping that one day they will return to a state of normalcy and perhaps they can return to the obscure place where they left their beloved cast iron skillet, the grand piano from Aunt Josephine, the wooden dog house, the chipped blue china.  

It was an ordinary morning when I made my discovery. The sky was a hazy London like overcast. The streets smelled of sulfur and cheap cigarettes. So far I'd found a corn cob pipe, a half rotted apple, and a pair of sewing scissors. I was most excited about the scissors. Sure I'd been making do with an old butter knife, but there was something awfully civilized about a working pair of shears. I could cut my hair, trim the lose threads on my clothes. I could look right presentable when I was done with them. A week ago I had found half a tin of coffee beans. It didn't seem like much but I had wept with joy, I had learned how to start a fire from one of the travelers who had shared my tent for a few nights that were particularly frigid. The learned skill more than made up for the small favor. Now I could boil water and coffee in my burnt kettle. 

And so it was, on this particularly smog infested morning, I sat idly sipping my coffee and picking through the newspaper, when a flash of color caught my gaze. I glanced up from the paper. It was a really dull piece anyway about muggers trying to pawn fake Tiffany's and stealing teeth from abandoned dentist offices to do heaven's knew what with. What was that flash of purple? There were many insects around my dump abode, but usually they ranged from brown to green to eight legs and tar black. This color had been a radiant almost magenta. Perhaps it was a butterfly I mused, but I didn't see anything winged flying about. I turned my attention back to the paper as one does dutifully to a school book. It was useless. A nagging feeling had begun to settle. I felt as if my spine was tingling. I scratched at my hair, my cheeks, my bum. I had an awful habit of scratching. Who cares what it was I tried to tell myself, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it had stirred in me-- a feeling of bliss, like when the first spring flowers peek through the snow, the aroma of chocolate chip cookies reaching caramelized perfection, the sensation of new love blooming on a hot red sunset with a glass of chardonnay. And then, I saw it again, the radiant purple. Peeking out between two heart shaped, arrow tipped leaves, was a glorious amalgamation of lilacs. The sun, absent until now, appeared to have woken from its slumber and was peeping out from a rain drunk storm cloud. It's curiosity illuminated the small shrub in a liquid gold spotlight, making the leaves look velveteen, and the petals a soft, voluptuous satin. 

There was something striking about the tree and I couldn't pinpoint what. Sure, it was an aesthetic wonder in a dilapidated kingdom, but there was more than that. For starters, I had never noticed the tree. There was a fence that ran along the periphery of the dump with a few sprawling virginia creepers and something that resembled poison oak. A handful of abandoned houses lay beyond, so rat infested I'd decided to take my chances here. This was a gardener's jewel, something more purposeful and thought out, and yet, I had never seen it before. It was as if it had sprung from magic beans like in the bedtime stories I'd whispered to my kids on many sleepless nights following multiple trips to the bathroom, and second and third request for waters. I held my pain in, at the memory. If felt like a knife twist to the gut. 

I mused on the miracle tree for some time, but despite myself and my hobo coffee, I grew tired. I slept and I dreamed fantastical dreams. I dreamed that I was in a forest. The trees were emerald green and they vanished upon touch. The floor was bedded in downy soft pine needles. No thorns, no bramble. I was running. I was running with the deer and the elk. I was fast and I felt no pain. I never had to catch my breath. I was sure I would run to the end of the universe and determine for myself if it was flat or round or neither of the kind. Exhilaration. That's what I felt. I felt as if I was in a state of bliss that would perpetuate so long as I did not stop, did not look back. I was the machine. I was the clock, and I would tick, tick, tick, and never know the pull of future or past. I would be something else.

Suddenly, something awoke me with a start. It tickled my nose. I sneezed a horrific eruption of sound and snot, and sat bolt upright. I wiped my slobbered lips, embarrassed despite my solitude. But I wasn't alone. I felt it, like a mother feels her children calling her in the middle of the night, like a woman feels it in an alley when a strangers eyes are near in the dark. Slowly, carefully, I turned my head one painful centimeter at a time, barely breathing. Behind me was a lilac, laying transfixed on the ground. The way someone might lay a flower on a corpse or at a graveside. 

"She's playing possum" -A voice. In my head?

What? Where did that come from. That didn't make any--

I felt a presence again, only this time it was behind my left shoulder. I turned, and what I saw should have made me scream, but the surprise was deeper than a moment of horrific surprise or emotional reflex to something human. What I saw was not human. The torso of a man and the body of a goat, with horns that spiraled from his temples and cascaded to the ground like gnarled finger nails or tree roots grown wrong and backwards. He spoke again.

"She isss playing possum young laaady."

I must still be dreaming. My forest dream had clearly slipped into a much more vivid nightmare...maybe the coffee had, had something toxic in it. I was hallucinating. 

"You are not insane." he purred, as if hearing my thoughts out loud. "Your eyes are simply more open."

I stared at him. My throat dry, unable to make so much as a murmur. 

"I'm here to make a deal with you. You give me that lilac, and I will give you your children," he said, rubbing his hooves in a way that sent shivers up my spine. The sound was like two saw blades  grinding. The mention of my children, made me brave.

"I don't know what you are, or what this is, but you stay far, far away from my children!"

He laughed; a long, cooridor echoing, sickening drawl from his belly. 

"I won't lay a fiiinger on them," he said, his voice as delicate as crystal. "Just give me what I assk."

"Why can't you just pick up it up yourself," I retorted. "Why do you need me?"

He smiled and his handsome dark man face, took on a reptilian gleam. "I cannot touch her because she isss hiding from me. Pursuuit is what she desires, and I am mooore than happy to oblige."

"What are you talking about? Why do you keep calling this flower a she?" I asked, picking up the bud, like one would draw a blade and brandishing it in front of him with what I hoped passed for menace.

He laughed again, that cruel, ancient, guttural growl. 

"My daft pet, that thiiing, as you call it, in your hand, is no flower, that is a nymph. Her name is Syringa and she has pledged her loyalty to Artemis," he said, not masking his disdain. "No matter, I forgive her. I know how Artemis can be. Charming, but an absolute nightmare in the light. I know she only needs a mere hour in my presence to be persuaded of that."

I looked at the flower in my hand. Five minutes ago, I would have dismissed his words as rubbish instantly, but the mere fact he existed caused me to waver. If he was a real beast or man beast, or whatever, then what else was real. Clearly everything I'd been told to trust by sight alone was rubbish. What could I believe? What could I not?

I stared again at my palm and the stem seemed to wiggle. The green shimmered to nude for just a blink, like a chameleon changing shades. Impossible. A tiny foot emerged, followed by a leg, a bodice clothed in ivy green, locks of straw gold hair falling elegantly over her bust and her tiny shoulders. I stared dumbstruck at a tiny feminine creature. Her skin the faint glow of lilac, her eyes a periwinkle brilliance, one petal rested in her hair like a beret. She opened her doll-like eyes and a wisp of a hand flew to her lips. She stretched and a squeak of a yawn snapped me back to my senses. So it was true. 

The goat man leaned toward me with a ferocious wolf-like eagerness that made me want to recoil and cover up the girl where he couldn't see her, smell her, or touch her. He lifted one hoof, cautiously. I shook my head.

"Leave her alone," I said, my maternal instinct rearing up again. 

"Caaareful," he purred. "You may not know who or whhhat you are messing with."

"I know enough."

He made a show of slowly and sardonically planting his hoof back on the ground. 

"Let's talk exchange," he said after a beat. "Your children for the nymph there."

I shook my head. "No, it's a trick. You can't give me what I want. Besides, even if I had them I cannot give them the home that they deserve."

He made a clicking sound in the back of his throat that made the nymph fold deeper into my hand and cover her face. 

"What if I told you I could give you the life back that you had, only better...richer, fuller? Name your price." He smiled serenely. 

I faltered at this. What was the tiny girl to me after all? Whatever she was, she wasn't human. And more importantly, wasn't my children. But still, it didn't feel right and I didn't trust this beast, whatever he was. Every instinct told me no.

"She's waaavering," the goat man observed, watching me shrewdly. 

"And what would happen to the girl if I give her up?" I asked. "What would happen to me?"

"Nothing at all," the creature said, as if placating a child. "Youuu get what you want, I get what I want and we never cross paths again."

"Somehow I doubt that," I said flatly, but still I chewed my bottom lip. Maybe there was a way I could double cross him.

The nymph had, had just enough of us. She sensed my fickleness, my weakness. Without warning, I felt a sharp jab in my palm like a syringe injection, and Syringa shot into the air. Simultaneously, Pan, for I would later learn his name, leaped to catch her. His hoof collided with her tiny frame and a strange thing happened. I almost thought for a moment she had disappeared entirely, but when I looked again, in her place was only a handful of lilacs, one splayed on the ground, the remainder not but a fistful of reeds, pressed to Pan's chest. 

The horrid creature burst into tears, a gut wrenching cry that I might have felt pity for, had I not seen his relentlessness and ambition just moments before. 

"It's over," he moaned. "I've lost her." And he went away to do what I would later learn is turn the reeds into pipes, which he would play on cool spring nights, a melancholy tune of what might have been.

Epilogue:

I no longer live in the shadows of the city, among the debris and decay. I am not rich, but I am not poor. I have a small apartment on the corner of 3rd and 8th. I no longer imbibe alcoholic beverages, though I have stayed fiercely loyal to my coffee addiction. How did I come to be here you might ask? I like to think I had a little help from a small nymph named Syringa. Seeing her flight, her bravery-her refusal to give into a force she did not want to dominate her, inspired a change in me. I kept my Syringa flower and took it to the Byenstien lab, where to this day they are still examining it. In addition to trying to crack what wondrous mystical qualities that flower has, they are examining the fossilized foot prints that Syringa left behind in the dust. So far, none of the data is being released and I am quite certain that half the staff think that I am absolutely loony. They can neither prove or disprove anything. A check comes every month that this goes on and money under the table from lost wagers. I've become something of a spectacle to talk about, a pop icon I'm told. I am an author now, and while this is not a respectable career of my day, it's at least passable enough that my children are allowed to visit again. Sometimes the memory seems so far away, I wonder if it all really happened, any of it. And then as I shut my eyes, I hear pan's tune lulling me into sleep. A lullaby of all that was and all that could still be.