Free Viridian Tears by Rachel Green

The area had become a tourist attraction although the reason for the odd growth pattern–and indeed the method–had been lost for years.
    Meinwen knew. She’d explained it in her book Wood and Stone: The Curious Desire to Affect Nature due out in the new year and decided the entry merited a drawing. Not that she was a very good artist. She could make a fair facsimile of what she saw in front of her but she’d be the first to admit her work lacked passion. The trees had been bent deliberately in the nineteen thirties by placing boulders from the nearby river Laver on their developing trunks, then removed again a few years later to allow the saplings to develop the natural curves they now portrayed. The boulders were still visible in the walls of the nineteen forty-six Provincial Insurance building in King Street.
    She’d found the original plans for the Masonic Grand Hall when she’d been researching the whereabouts of the seven missing ring stones. The trees were bent to make the timbers for a bow roof; the theory being that the naturally curved pines would produce a vaulted ceiling without the need for bracing struts. Unfortunately the outbreak of the war prevented frivolous construction and the plans had been lost with the death of the architect, leaving the curiosity of the crooked forest as a legacy for generations to come.
    Washes of ink from a shaggy ink cap mushroom brought a sense of menace to the drawing. She had precious few tubes in her little art box and she’d forgotten water, so her travel box of pigment pans was all but useless. She’d let it dry and ink over the drawing at home. It was too light as it was and wouldn’t scan well enough for her to embed it in the document otherwise. The cluster of mushrooms on the edge of the track had been a lucky find. Two to eat and one already gone to ink.
    She packed up her art supplies and headed back into town. She paused to cut a chunk of honey fungus from the fork of a sycamore at the edge of the wood, inhaling the sweet scent it gave off under her touch. There was a good base meal here. If she could find a few more edible mushrooms she could partake of a veritable feast of nature.
    The gloaming was already deepening into twilight when she left the main path and took the smaller track that led to the edge of the wood about a mile north of Laverstone manor. As familiar with them as she was, she had no desire to be in the woods alone after dark. She’d seen too many things that couldn’t be easily explained. Besides, she believed in the spirits of wood and water, the naiads and dryads and the old forest creatures. Just because she’d never seen them with her own eyes didn’t mean they weren’t real.
    The track led past the old quarry. Chalk used to be dug from the stone here until the last war when the quarry fell short of able-bodied men and closed. It had become economically impractical after that and had been abandoned, though despite the signs warning of unstable cliffs people still came her to look for fossils.
    A small fire sputtered in a ring of stones and she detoured to see who’d lit it. The figure working by its light sat on a tree trunk, using a small blade to chip away pieces of chalk from a fist-sized lump. A short distance away a tarpaulin was rigged up over sticks and branches. A makeshift tent for when the weather got too bad.
    He looked up as Meinwen approached, his eyes glinting from a face so full of whiskers he could have been a badger in an army greatcoat, though to be fair a badger would have smelled a lot better. “Miss Jones, is it? I thought you’d be along here today.”
    “You did no such thing, Joseph.” She held her hands over the flames to warm them. “You just want me to think you did.”
    “I did though.”
    “And now you’re going to ask me for sixpence.”
    “Sixpence? Aye. A sixpence wouldn’t go amiss, though a pound or two would be equally welcome.” He grinned at her, his teeth flashing in the light of the