She walked naked, even on those rare occasions when people watched her, for she owed modesty to no one, and she refused to trouble herself to remedy such a natural condition as nudity. Brown and thick as saddle-leather, her feet were just as bare as the rest of her, for no thorn would ever have a care to pierce them.

This person had once answered to a name, or so my Grandmother tells me, but everyone has forgotten it by now. "What point is there to remembering a person's name, when that person has herself forgotten it?" Grandmother says whenever I ask her about it. Sometimes, though, I think the sky must remember that person's name, because soft breezes seem to whisper it on summer afternoons when the Sun is so bright it seems dark.

The nameless, naked person lived alone, it seemed, in the wood where she wandered. Every so often people saw her sitting straight-backed in the true center of neighboring cornfields or beanfields, seeming from behind to be one of the pillars that hold up the sky. She never, ever went into town, not to buy food or to seek friendship. She never had any need for those things. The forest that housed her told her secrets in her dreams. It shared its memories with her. It taught her where to find food, how to commune with the spirits of the plants so she would never be without companionship.

All my life, people had talked about her as though she was Boo Radley:

"I heard her parents beat her so hard she never talked to anyone again."

"My dad told me she's crazy and to stay away from her. If you see her, don't even scream. Just turn around and run."

"She's a witch. She's gotta be. You can't even tell if she's a kid or a grownup. If that ain't witchcraft, nothing is."

"You wonder where Matt's dog went when it ran away? She ate it. Cooked it right up. I swear."

As the speaker's mood changed, so did the wild person. She was a healer or cannibal, mystic or serial killer, hallucination or misunderstood hermit. When she was mentioned in idle conversation, people widened their eyes and hushed their voices, as though she was in that very room with them and could hear.

The mere idea of her turned people into living sacks of doubt. That she was magical, though, there was no doubt. By high school most people thought she was a nature spirit or something, like out of old Native American beliefs. I thought that… actually, I don't know what I thought. I guess I just didn't think about it all that much. You don't go about questioning what a tree really is or what its motives are. You just accept that it is a tree, and that it is there. The wild person just was what she was.

I lived about a quarter-mile from the edge of her wood. My self-dubbed "friends" often had dared me to walk there on Full-Moon Nights, as if it would have been some amazing feat to stand between trees and wave my arms like an idiot. "I'm here, guys! I made it! I'm standing in the crazy girl's woods!" Huzzah.

If they had known, they would have begun to whisper about me the way they whispered about her. Some Nights, usually in July, I slid out of my house in sandals and walked to that selfsame forest edge, the brink, the boundary. Then I stood with my hands slack at my sides and peered into the empty spaces between the leaves, trying to find out where I'd been born. If I stopped thinking, I could hear bells and harpsong floating by like memories, afterthoughts, the P.S. at the end of a letter.

In the whole world, in the whole web of time, there was only one month of September during which I was 17 years old. I was, and still am, an opportunist for the most part. So, a week after school started (senior year!), on the first Saturday we had, I stole from my house during the dusty daybreak and walked. The balminess and the mosquitoes told me that it was still August, but who listens to mosquitoes? The nervous cheeping of crickets and the first aggressive twitters of birds suppressed all the logical thoughts and practical ideas I might have had. The song they wove tightened like threads in a tapestry about my mind and reminded me of a dream that I'd had once, either just that Night or when I was about four years old.

I reached out with a muted, despairing cry, and tried to catch hold of the dream the way I used to catch hold of lightning-bugs. It fluttered away--always just beyond my reach--enticing me onward in my bare feet. (I'd forgotten about my sandals.) If people saw me as I glided blindly away from town like a sleepwalker, they have never made mention of it to me. Which is just as well. I did not--and I do not--care a squirrel's droppings about their gossip.

The crickets faded and the birds took over the song, and the Sun pierced through the trees and telephone poles like a yellow nail, and I still was not sure where I was. I chased the memory of my dream, even as it faded to emptiness.

I came to my senses at last, and it was at least 9:00, judging by the excited morning Sun. Before me stood the wood of the crazy, naked wild person who was either very old or very young. My stomach wanted breakfast, my heart wanted a dead dream, my mind wanted to die, and I… actually, I don't know what I wanted. But the forest was there, and the leaves right then were at the fullest and greenest they ever could be before turning brown and dropping away. I couldn't hear the harps or bells, but the birds were still singing, and I saw a heavy black crow pass overhead, so I went in.

There was a whirl of scents between the trees that seemed to be waiting for my nose. Honeysuckle, dewy moss, damp soil, deer droppings, warm tree bark: all rushed to greet me. The floor was springy and more thickly-padded than any carpet, being covered with luxurious moss and feathery ferns. I was glad I had forgotten my sandals. The last of the summer flowers were brown about the edges. A gossamer web shimmered just to my left, with its fat-bodied, yellow, white-striped creatrix perched proudly in the center. She lifted one of her crooked legs and pointed with it toward the heart of the forest, then was still.

Bowing, I thanked the spider for her guidance and followed her subtle indication. The trees seemed to open up before me and whoosh back into place behind me as if I were walking through sand or water. The forest breezes were so surprised to see a stranger that they forgot to blow. This was all there was.

For a moment I forgot my name, just for a moment. It came back to me, but when it did, I found that I had no desire to speak it. It was foreign.

Then I saw her, in a manner of speaking. That is, I didn't really see her so much until the last second. The wild person. She was nothing more than a shadow drifting swiftly through the empty spaces, weaving in and out of the trees. She was a dream, or a specter, half-seen only out of the corner of the human eye. If you see her, you might blink and rub your eyes and look again; but be warned, for the harder you look, the less you'll see of her.

She approached me along the ground, drew up to tower overhead, regarded me with eyes that I knew were there but I couldn't find. I knew they ought to be somewhere in the face…

There was a hand poised before me at throat-level, palm up. It was hers. It was a left hand, textured like beech bark. Without thinking, I put my own hand into it, and she began to lead me swiftly, gliding and bounding like a deer-scented shadow. I followed likewise, just a little bewildered by how smoothly I kept pace and how gracefully I flew just behind her. Soon I could recognize her formless shadow-body as the dark outline of a slim, muscular human, and then I began to capture glimpses of two glowing, white-yellow almond-shaped orbs: her eyes. I still could not look at them, not really. She moved so swiftly I had to concentrate if I wanted to see her legs running beneath her.

As we flew, flesh began slowly to replace the nondescript human-shaped shadow that was her body. There flashed a forearm here, a shoulder blade there. Her knee, the back of her strong neck, her mane of walnut-tree hair flapping in the wind like a bird's wing, all of this materialized.

At once, she stopped so swiftly and completely it was unnatural. Stock-still, arrow-straight, alive in all dimensions, she became like a tree. Despite that, she looked quite human then, with the smooth bare skin of a girl no older than I at the time, the well-trained muscles of a middle-aged athlete, and the distinct atmosphere of a very, very old woman. She was strength all over, naked as birth, but her eyes were still more naked--and because of that, stronger than anything. I could tell that they were as yellow as a hawk's, as a wolf's. But I still could not discern what they were thinking, because I was afraid I'd accidentally kill them--or myself--if I looked.

We were standing at the edge of a road; the blacktop looked blue in the morning light. There were no cars, but she stood watching the place where the road arced away behind the trees, to our left. She hardly inhaled. The road radiated silence, the millions of leaves on the trees watched us anxiously, and I had not one clue as to why.

I was still clutching her hand; it was the only thing left that made any sense at all. She and I looked at each other in the same moment, and the silence was so thick that for half a second I finally saw into her eyes.

I only remember that the rest of her and the rest of me fell apart, as if someone had sliced it all away with a scalpel. Then only she and I were left, and as I watched her, a sense of ancient familiarity uncoiled in the back of my consciousness. I made a tiny, tiny gasp: just the smallest breath of air that forced its way through my chest, if only to remind me that my lungs still worked.

Off to the left, the wind seemed to stir, and rise, and growl. Then it became an engine, and around the curve of the road cruised a boxy white car. The Sun threw splotches of light across its shining roof in that beautiful splotchy pattern of leaf-shadows. It slowed, stopped only a foot or two away from us. The passenger-side window glided down, revealing my sister's face. I could see my mother in the driver's seat.

"Clothes-shopping," said my sister. "Mom's paying. Wanna come?"

Clothes? What are clothes? I looked at the wild girl. She was stiff, her expression indifferent. She hesitated, then her grip on my hand loosened and she took a step away from the car. "I will still be here," she whispered. Her voice was like a soft breeze on a summer afternoon, when the Sun is so bright, it is dark.

I did not want to remember how to speak. I opened the car door and sat down inside, awkwardly, because the seats felt alien and the roof over my head was almost unbearable. I put down the window and hung my head outside in the sylvan wind as the car pulled away.

"I can't believe you actually touched that psycho," my sister whispered.

"I don't want you hanging out in the woods with that girl," my mother added in a distracted sort of voice. "You don't really know her, and besides, there are snakes and things out there…"

"You gay or something?" my sister accused.

I did not bother remembering how to speak. It was not worth the effort. I let the wind toss my hair and I watched the naked person shrink and fade on the road. If I squinted, she looked exactly like me.

Her eyes were still there. They looked exactly like mine.

Remember, "Indulgence of Memory" Copyright © 2002 Marybeth "Background" Barton. All rights reserved.

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