The Green Lady

There is a Lesser Entity in my garden, but I must not tell anyone, or the shaman will come along and banish her.

She is very pretty. I don’t want her to go. She looks like a little lady made of leaves, with bright pink eyes the color of spring flowers. She likes to dance with me when Mommy isn’t looking.

Mommy has told me lots of stories about the Entities. She makes them sound scary and mean. She says they like to hurt people in sneaky ways. In the stories, they pretend to be nice at first, but their niceness is just a way for them to hurt you more when you expect them to keep being nice.

I don’t think this Entity is that way. She’s never asked me for anything. All she wants is for me to play with her. She says she gets lonely, sometimes, because there are no others like her around. I like playing with her, so I don’t mind. She is a good dancer, and she’s very good at hiding. I can never find her unless she lets me know where she is.

Mommy thinks that she is very good at tending her garden. Her plants grow big and strong, and she always has more vegetables than we can eat. Mommy doesn’t know that she’s not good at gardening at all. The lady in the garden makes everything grow.

Also, one day when we were playing, she said she had a gift for me. I asked what she wanted in return, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Entities aren’t supposed to give anything away for free. She must be different. She said she didn’t want anything. She just liked me and wanted me to have something.

She put a little green light inside me. It’s warm and fluttery. It feels like the smell of flowers on a hot summer day. I can breathe it out onto plants that are dying, and it makes them grow again. The lady said that, if I felt like I needed to give her something, all she would want would be for me to use the green light.

After she put the light in me, it became easier to find her when she hides from me. I used to just wander around and sort of hope I would stumble across her. Now I can walk right up to just about where she is, and she’ll pop her face out of the leaves and smile. “You found me!”

If Mommy is nearby, all I’ll see of the little lady is an eye. She likes to wink at me. It makes me feel special, because we have a secret together. I don’t keep secrets with anyone else. This is my only secret. I know it’s an important one, because I’ll get in trouble if anyone knows about it. Mommy might get in trouble, too, but the worst part would be that the little green lady would have to leave.

Mommy likes to sell the extra vegetables at the market. The little green lady makes her happy, and Mommy doesn’t even know about it. Sometimes I want to tell Mommy about her, even though I know that it’s bad. I don’t really like lying. I’m not really lying about the lady, because Mommy hasn’t asked, but I feel a little bit scared every time Mommy tells someone she’s a good gardener, because Mommy is lying without knowing that she is.

Mommy says lying is always bad, even if you think it’s a good lie. She also says that talking to Entities makes you a bad person, even if you don’t know it yet. I asked the green lady about that. She says that Mommy is wrong, and that not all of the Entities are bad. She also said that Mommy is right a little bit, because there are Entities out there that want to hurt people. She said that’s no different from people, though. Some people are nice. Others are mean. The worst ones, she said, act nice so that they can be mean to you, just like bad Entities.

The green lady has only done good things for me. I like her. I think she’s nice and good. I’m going to keep dancing with her, even though it might be bad, because I don’t want to be one of the mean people that acts nice. I want to be a real nice person.