Hitomi Kelsey Ko
word count: 543
TITLE: The Green Girl
My name is Roxxi. Roxxi like Roxana. Roxxi with an R, E D like my hair. That is the only thing about me that I like about myself right now. My skin has turned green, yellowed and soured like a rotting fruit, glowing like a poisonous flame that won’t fizzle out. It didn’t used to be like this – most axolotls have paler, whiter skin, at least in my lineage. How I wished it would go away, time and again, but it shines and glows, bright and green, even in the depths of my misery, like a party going past its time, in a club where the bass bangs with the pounding of my head, and I’m locked in the bathroom to drown it out with my tears.
The memories won’t fade, like the green of my skin. Green like the fog that pervaded my village. It carried with it horrible brown chunks, flakes that swirled up overhead through our waters, the way the currents in the land would carry autumn leaves through a wind. I thought they were the turtle folk just crossing their way through like they do every year, but there were no turtles.
Bodies decayed and blood was spilled, and they dropped like flies.
Nobody knew what the cause of it was, but all I know now is that the green haze was no ordinary fog, and the chunks were the rot of the fallen bodies, decayed and being digested by the intangible monster that carried it.
I should’ve realized the night before everything ended, what I fell asleep to was not the rumble of the thunder above our heads, but a moaning and groaning of something dark and treacherous, lurking beneath the earth.
The houses crumbled as I ran through the kelp forest, my eyes ran wild around the maze of green. So much green. Seeping through the little pebble huts and into the red rock roofs, it silenced the babies, crying for their mothers, their souls lost to the sky.
How I wish I could’ve saved them but I realized, I too am lost.
For days and days, I wandered through the kelp forest. It didn’t keep all of the noxious fumes out, but it kept me alive. I wandered through hundreds and hundreds of kelp, never knowing when it would end. There was so much green behind and ahead of me, I thought I had started to go insane when my skin started to turn its shade.
It all became too much. I had to get out.
Where is my mother? Where is my father? My brothers, one three, one four, and the little twins my mother would never take her eyes off.
I was only seven. Just seven.
I will never forget the relief I felt when my gills finally caught a gasp of unpolluted water after days of wandering through endless green – a color I’d always thought of as home. The walls that protected us from the outside world, that contained the magic of my people that made us so powerful. I had been stuck so long I had started to wonder if my tears too had turned green – and found that it hadn’t when I broke down in that same relief.
PROGRESS LOG:
The freewriting approach I took was extremely refreshing, after ages and ages of careful planning just to come up dry. It’s no surprise that the ideas all come out the way the character was birthed in the first place – by impulse. I learned a very important ingredient in editing/refining an original work of fiction – it’s not just a mix of sticking to what you know (about rhythm, grammar, structure, devices) but also a mix of improvisation when you feel like something’s not enough. I was surprised how much darker my character Roxxi and her story turned out to be – I don’t even know where all of this came from. I just realized half way that it started to feel right, writing the things I wrote. It’s as though trusting myself to speak for her put me even further in her voice. She just started out as a pretty fish girl I wanted to draw one day, which I built a little rough story around. I just knew she had mint green skin, was gifted with a colorful appearance, and held incredibly unique and mysterious powers like most of the sea critters you find on Blue Planet, but i had no idea that she would have essentially spent weeks or months wandering through a marine jungle just to survive, eating the foliage around her and any creatures she stumbles upon to avoid starving/malnutrition. I find it interesting how much depth my character actually had without me even knowing it until i just trusted my instincts to speak for me – makes me see the point that Annie Lamott was trying to make about ‘shitty first drafts’. Most of the time I don’t get anywhere when i’m planning stuff out in detail from the get go, because i’m not giving myself anything to build off of. It does help to just get stuff down, to make a downdraft. The first draft is the downdraft.
