The dryad refilled his glass without a word. She smelled like pine needles and woodsmoke. He had never really thought about what dryads smelled like before. He was slightly disturbed by the woodsmoke- was the tree her home or body? Either way it must be odd and sad to go around smelling like destruction. Perhaps he was being too poetic. But the air around her had a different quality- the air in the stuffy bar was heavy and humid, and around her it was cold, crisp mountain air.

The kind of air they had back when you were a kid, on father-son fishing trips, if you had the sort of family who did that. He didn’t. He didn’t think she did either. It was easy to imagine her as a young girl, running barefoot through the woods, slender limbs and tanned skin flashing in the sun. It was hard to imagine her with any parents, anybody controlling her. Even her boss didn’t seem to, only shouted orders that happened to coincide with her actions. She was a dryad, a mountain girl, displaced into this concrete, neon, and cigarette-butt city. She had long red-blonde hair that refused to be held back by her black hairclip, and a pretty, heavily freckled face. Her eyes were a soft sage green, and always ringed with heavy eyeliner, to mask her mountain soul from the world.

She refilled his glass without a word. With every sip he descended further into dysphoria, drinking methodically, trying not to forget anything but just to let go of the dismal ubiquity. Instead of the silliness and glow he experienced when drinking with friends, the world just got blurrier, the shadows blended with the cigarette haze. She was the only thing in the bar that wasn’t grey. Even in his peripheral vision (where he was constantly watching her) (where you’re not supposed to see in color) her hair glowed like autumn leaves. Faced with this biological impossibility, he had to draw the conclusion that it was dryad magic.

He wanted to take her away to the forests. He wanted to toss his box of cigarettes over his shoulder at the ‘Road Ends’ sign. He wanted to swim in clear mountain springs with her until they both smelled of creation and not destruction, to bask on warm rocks until they were dry, to lie naked and entwined on a bed of dry pine needles until they were both saturated with the tawny light. She would save him with her color, with her clarity, and he would ensure that she never had to disguise herself as a waitress in a bleak city again.

He grabbed her little callused hand as she passed. “Come to the mountains with me,” he pleaded.

She refilled his glass, and gave him a brief sunlight smile. “No thanks. I’m afraid of bears.”

Perhaps, he thought cynically, she just smelled like Pinesol and the cigarette smoke that filled the dingy bar. The mountains were grey, the springs scummy green, the bears shot full of tranquilizer darts and stewing in a heroin daze. He was an idiot (a drunk idiot at that) for thinking that there was some part of the world that was not dead, that there were still people alive who had had childhoods. He was doubly an idiot for looking for salvation in a waitress in a dive bar.

He paid his tab, lit a cigarette, and walked out into the muggy city night. Skyscrapers flanked him like glittering redwoods. The cigarette made esoteric swirls into the night sky, and a royal blue neon stag atop the building across the street surveyed the still scene. The moon was obscenely large overhead, and in its craters a dryad laughed softly.