The Green Goblin

It was a cold winter morning when Janesz saw the body beneath the ice. It had been snowing all night, and he couldn't wait to go down into the forest and squash the untouched white pillows that cascaded between tree trunks. He practically inhaled his breakfast, and put on his rugged winter coat, the one he wore when he wasn't going to school, to church, or to visit his cousins in the village over. This coat, as well as the blue boots that his brother's feet had grown way too big for, was for playing in the snow. His mother kept nagging about the wild animals in the forests, but Janesz knew she was making it all up – all the scary animals are in Winterschlaf – she just didn’t want him to have fun. What a bitch! He learned from his brother that’s what you call a woman you disagree with.

He descended down into the village, passing by a group of teenagers smoking. He pretended not to see them; he did however, take a deep breath in, filling his lungs with smoke and cold winter air. Only six years old, he couldn’t wait to be tall enough to start smoking. His father once gave him a piece of tobacco to chew on, but he didn’t like the bitter taste, it reminded him of orange peels – way better in theory than in practice. When he grows a beard, his taste buds will evolve and he’ll be able to smoke cigarettes, drink mean old spirits and read the papers. The teenagers barely acknowledged him too, and Janesz was slowly making his way to the forest edge.

He will come to know this path very well; going up and down exactly seventeen times in the next three days. Years later, he will take a girl on this path and slip his hand under her skirt. She will awkwardly chuckle and wish she hadn’t come when he told her to go „check something with me in the forest.“ She knew what it meant, she just wasn’t ready. He wasn’t either. When he is seventy-six, he will unknowingly go down the path for the final time, searching for something he lost when he was six years old.

He turned left into the trees and after a stretch of thick immergrün bushes and dirty slush, there it was. Bright white pillows rolling around, sparkling silver under the white winter sun. He didn’t stop to look at their beauty, he headed straight in, started bashing around. He reveled in the squeaks under his boots, his light body pressing the snowflakes into one another as if he was a hundred kilos heavy. The snow melted on his red face and got under his shirt and down his neck, but he didn’t care. He was so happy he got there first to bash his feet in, even though no one else was coming.

On his way back to the forest path, he noticed a large sheet of clean snow on the bottom of what seemed to be a small sinkhole. Upon launching straight into it, expecting a cushion of thick snow but being met with cold, hard ice, he realized it was, in fact, a lake. Well, he thought it was a lake. He will even describe it to his mother as a lake. When she says „there are no lakes where we live“, he will insist it is one, and she will quietly accept that her son is too young to comprehend the difference between the scale of a lake and a pond.

He took a moment to check that all of his limbs were in one place, and after the comfort of realizing he got off with only a lump on his forehead, he proceeded to bash and throw all the snow around. When he was done, the shape of this lake started to appear. It was a nice oval, and Janesz was feeling very accomplished. In this still aftermath, he heard soft scratching coming from under the ice. Curious, he scraped away the little snow left and was met with a huge round face staring blankly into the sky above him. Its nose was squashed under its own buoyancy, and the skin was a freakishly pale green color. Looking through the splattered bubbles of the dead man’s silver breath trapped in the ice, the poor kid concluded this must’ve been a warty forest goblin. The one his Oma keeps telling stories about.

It will take two years for Janesz to realize that what he saw wasn’t a goblin and double the years what it means to die. At twelve, his Oma will pass away and he will be too scared to look at her casket fearing he’ll be met with those murky goblin eyes and warty face. At twenty-two, he will realize he can’t remember her face and regret that decision. When he tries to kill himself at forty-three, he’ll wonder if he’ll end up looking like a green goblin, and then decide to not do it. In the meantime, he will visit Erlkönig's grave three days in a row to make sure it didn't wake up.

Upon his return home, Janesz passed the same group of teenagers. This time they asked him where he’d been, the little guy. He kept his eyes forward and didn’t respond, not inhaling the smoke-rich air. He barely breathed the whole way home. When his mother asked where he’d been and what he had been doing, he said it was better she didn’t know; that he found the grave of a goblin king and how it’s his job now to guard it. She knew she was right about her mother-in-law telling too many fairy tales.

The next day at the grave, Janesz saw the goblin had drifted a little to the left. He was scared Erlkönig was waking up, and he ran all the way back to the village to ask his father for a few bricks. His father dismissed his reasoning and told him to take the chipped ones he couldn't use for anything anyway. He spent the morning going up and down carrying chipped bricks and placing them on the ice on top of the dead body. It took him fifteen trips total, and by noon he felt safe enough to have his first meal of the day. From that day on, Janesz could never eat while he was stressed. At night, he begged Oma to repeat the story about the goblin king for the hundredth time, and he listened carefully to every word, hoping that this time he will notice something he hadn't before. He later learned repetition does not equate resolution.

On his second visit to the grave, Janesz saw the body drift even more to the left. The goblin was trying to escape his brick defense. But he was all out of bricks. While other kids were rolling balls of snow to make their snowmen, Janesz was rolling boulders down onto the ice, and with every boulder flying toward it, he clenched his teeth hoping it wasn't heavy enough to crack the ice. On the third day, when there were no boulders left, he used branches and logs.

On the fourth day, when the police arrive, they will first look in confusion at how a small kid managed to amass so many heavy objects on his own, and spend the whole day just removing the bricks, stones, wood and other twigs thrown onto the frozen pond. The night before, Janesz will have what he later learned was his first panic attack. They were announcing a storm so strong his father said it could „blow even stones and trees away“, and his little heart felt like it was about to rip through his shirt. All of his work, swept away, and the goblin king free to wake from its slumber. He thought how it was going to remember his face and that he, little Janesz, was the one locking it inside the lake, and that it's going to come for him and his Oma and his family, and then everyone else in the village. His breathing became so rapid until it stopped, his little face turning red, and he didn't calm down for forty-two minutes, not until his father promised him he will go check on Erlkönig first thing in the morning.

On his last trip down to the lake, Janesz will have no idea his heart is about to rip through his shirt. His wife, the girl he felt up all those years ago, will be waiting with lunch at home, wondering what's taking him so long. He will sit by his lake, and be grateful that he never lost the instinct to guard the people he loved from great evil. He'll remember the drifter from all those years ago that died alone and was alone for so long the water over him froze. He will also be sad that his brother left him last year, but this time he wasn't scared to look at his murky eyes and pale skin. He'll think to himself „hell, we all become ugly green goblins at the end“, and then, on the way home, collapse to the ground and become exactly that.