The Old Blog in the Desert

My brother Adam was seven when he started talking about his imaginary friend, the Green Man. He said the man was a magician and had a magic finger that could make things disappear.

When he told me this, I laughed it off. Imaginary friends weren’t unusual, except for the way Adam said his name. Not “my friend” or “my game.”

Always the Green Man, like he was talking about someone who already existed. One afternoon, he burst into my room, wild-eyed and shaking.

“I took his finger,” Adam said. “He’s really angry.”

I thought it was just another childish story, but he was so frightened, I let him sleep in my room for a few nights. He’d wake up sometimes in the dark, whispering, “He’s outside.”

I’d check the window, of course, but there was never anything there. Eventually, Adam stopped talking about it, and I thought maybe it was over.

Then, while I was doing dishes with our cousin Kathy, the least imaginative person I knew, she asked Adam, completely seriously, “Have you seen the Green Man lately?”

I froze.

Kathy went on to tell me, in the same flat tone she used when explaining math problems, that they’d both played with him. She said the Green Man could stretch his arms like smoke and slip through cracks in the walls.

My brother and cousin had been playing a game with him, and my brother had accidentally taken his finger. The way she said that made my skin crawl.

I asked how she could take it, and he just shrugged. “She found it,” she said. “He let her borrow it for a while.”

After that, Adam started drawing him. Hundreds of pictures.

Sometimes he looked human, wearing a long coat and hat, at other times he was just a shape, a red mist trailing into nothing. In some drawings, he had one hand held up, the other arm tapering off into blank space, as if she couldn’t finish it.

The last time he saw him or it, I suppose, was the night my parents brought in groceries. Adam and I were helping unload when he suddenly went still, his hand locking on my left forearm.

“He’s right there,” he whispered.

Across the street, under the big sycamore, stood something tall and still. The streetlight didn’t touch the thing, as the edges shimmered, like the thing in the movie ‘Predator.’ It was the color of rotting muscle, glistening and too bright against the night.

It didn’t move, but every instinct in my body screamed that it was watching us. Our parents didn’t see it.

They thought Adam was having a breakdown. They brought him to a priest.

The priest blessed the house, and after that, things quieted down. The drawings stopped, and Adam slept through the night again.

And life went on.

For years, I managed not to think about the Green Man. I convinced myself it was just a mix of childhood imagination and nerves.

But Adam came to visit once, bright, sarcastic, no longer afraid of the dark. We were sitting on the porch, the sun dipping low, when he said it.

“Do you think the Green Man still wants his finger back?”

I laughed, but he didn’t. Adam just stared out toward the trees, his expression unreadable. I wanted to tell him to stop joking, but then he said something else, almost under her breath, “He was trying to make a door.”

I asked her what he meant. Adam just shook his head.

“He said his finger could open it, but he needed a new one when it broke. That’s why he wanted mine.”

I told him to cut it out, but he didn’t smile. His eyes looked far away.

That night, after he went to bed, I went outside. The air felt thick, humid, and wrong. I caught myself looking at the treeline the way Adam had, expecting to see something between the branches.

And I did. Not the shape of a man, exactly, but a shimmer, like ooze seen through fractured glass.

For a moment, I thought I saw something else, too, the faint outline of a hand, reaching. I didn’t sleep much after that.

Two days later, I found one of Adam’s old drawings. It wasn’t one I recognized. The Green Man was standing next to a door made of crooked, interlocking fingers, and one of them was bright pink, like a child’s hand.

I called him to ask about it, but he didn’t pick up. His wife answered instead, his voice quiet.

“He’s been talking to him again,” she said. “He says he forgave him and just wants to finish the door.”

The line went dead before I could answer. I didn’t call back, and I wish I had because in January the following year, Adam died.

Now, sometimes at night, when the house settles and the air hums low, I think I hear something from the walls, a slow scraping sound, like someone trying to draw with a finger. I tell myself it’s just the pipes, but lately, I’ve been dreaming of red mist creeping through the cracks beneath the door.

And when I wake that morning, I usually find the faint imprint of a child’s right hand pressed into the wall, missing a pointer finger, that quickly fades.