in a forest, a girl kneels. obliviousness lends her radiance and youth. “be careful,” the living things whisper. “do not be too happy.” they warn her by name- yah-ell… yah-ell….
cw
(this background features human decomposition, child death, suicidal ideation, and minor references toward animal injury and animal death.)
story
On an April day, a child is born to Eben and Miriam Mandelbaum. They made a humble home for their child in the Canadian mountainside, presenting a world of snow and pines for their swaddled bundle to learn from.
Though they care for her, they cannot find the time to have her with them around the clock. They have a forest to tend to, and so they ask the eldest in the house— an aging Petra Mandelbaum— to keep an eye on their child. Petra Mandelbaum is everything one might expect of a senior sitting on a cabin porch; all crows feet and deep wells of wisdom.
She teaches this child, Yael Mandelbaum, what to fear. What not to fear. What is natural and what is not. She ties the hair of her grandchild back and kisses her delicate forehead like Mother Nature has always intended for parents to do. In due time, Petra Mandelbaum will lose herself to old age and sickness, but by then, Yael will have already learned that death was not something to mourn. It was simply part of a larger cycle, and guaranteed peace after the long road ahead.
Without Petra there to care for her, Eben and Miriam had no knowledge of what their child got up to during their work days. Behind their backs, Yael partakes in all the wonders Nature offers her, sneaking out of doors and open windows. She listens to birds sing from their nests. They collect pine seeds and make flower crowns out of brittle leaves for themselves. As a child, their imagination is vast, but occasionally tilts into dangerous waters.
Once, twice, but never more, Yael wonders what her parents might think if she never came home. If these woods took her and delivered her into the arms of her long gone grandmother, would the world keep spinning? Would the birds keep singing?
This question is not one the world answers just yet. She’ll need to wait a few years to see for herself, albeit through the eyes of someone else.
Until then, Yael continues to live without care. She does not pay attention to the school children who skirt away and wrinkle their noses at her mud stained shoes. She does not look at her mother, who weeps before an empty cradle. She does not think of anything else except for the snow and the injured animals it spits out to her.
Nature is a cycle with a meticulous plan. This, Yael knows. They only begin to question the perfection in it when the animals she finds are choking around plastic, when tire marks decorate shattered limbs. Nature is a cycle, but surely the things causing these injuries aren't natural.
Thus begins the process of her rehabilitation. They resolve to help these animals find a more fitting end. She will help them live a proper life, just as nature would’ve wanted them to.
At eight years old, things change.
The change doesn’t come in melting ice or summer showers. Instead, it is a body in the woods, one which Yael happened upon by pure chance.
The sight of it makes a strange feeling rise in Yael’s stomach, that is until she pushes it down. Together, two children stare at each other. One breathes out breaths of warm vapor, a deer in the headlights stare meeting a much duller pair. The body is all twisted limbs and crimson stains. It is a body— of a girl her age— once named Birdie Clarkson.
Birdie, a girl who Yael saw in the schoolyard. A girl who had just been one of the many children that never dared to approach her— a girl who had only stared at Yael from afar (with something other than disgust in her eyes, though Yael would never know.)
Yael has saved many living things from death before, but she finds herself at a loss for what to do with Birdie Clarkson, already gray-eyed and lightless. Most importantly, Yael Mandelbaum was only an eight year old child— a child who knew death well, but not well enough to know how to tell an adult about it. (What can one say, in order to be believed? “Yes, father, mother, the missing girl the men in the blue coats told you about is just beyond those trees. I swear I’m not lying.”)
At eight years old, Yael makes a choice that she feels is right. It isn’t. But she doesn’t know any better— she only knows that Birdie’s broken like the animals on the roadside, and the only thing Yael knows is how to try and fix what’s broken.
Treating Birdie like any other animal in her care, Yael carries blankets from her home over to Birdie’s corpse. Carefully, they swaddle unresponsive limbs into fabric folds. They sing to her. One day, Yael goes as far as to close those wide-set eyes to make it look like Birdie was only asleep. But Birdie won’t ever wake up. Yael knows she won’t. Eventually, eight years of age transitions into nine years, then ten— but Birdie stays eight, and she stays cold.
Yael’s parents don’t know any better, because nothing about Yael’s behavior changed. Nothing chances, because Yael is the one who gets to go home; Yael is the one who gets to grow up. She’s the one who gets to keep singing with the birds, the one who gets to fly free.
Birdie is the one who changes: She grows a garden out of her chest. She goes into the same ground where Petra Mandelbaum went decades before. Though even after Birdie’s reduced to bones and dirt, Yael still finds herself bound to her. A sense of responsibility resides in Yael, responsibility for this girl who Yael never knew in life. Death was the one who brought them both so close— the cycle of nature tells Yael that it’s nothing strange. It’s natural. It’s natural. Petra Mandelbaum even said that natural things were never the wrong things.
(Right? Right?)
Yael looks after her because they think that if they were the one who got lost in these woods... they’d want someone to look after them too.
(It’s not wrong, is it? Is it?)
“It is.”
That’s what her fathers tells her in a trembling, horrified voice. When Eben Mandelbaum finds his baby girl leaning over the corpse of someone else’s baby, the worst comes to his mind— he never imagined his daughter to be a killer. He begs Yael to stop touching that body, he tells her that a human body decaying in nature is not something that happens anymore.
At least, it’s not something that happens without consequences.
This is the part where officials would get called. Should get called; but Yael’s father, terrified of what might happen to Yael, hesitates. And Yael’s mother worries about what might happen to him. After all, Yael is only ten. She's too young to be held responsible by law, and it's past the time when they wouldn't fall under suspicion if they spoke up. Whatever Yael’s done is now on her parents’ hands.
The trees sway, ice thaws for spring, and the birds continue to sing their sugar-sweet songs. Some fly free, but Birdie Clarkson will forever be part of the ground.
Eben helps Yael bury Birdie properly among the corpses of other woodland fauna near their humble home. A graveyard meant for failed rehabilitations suddenly becomes the resting place of Yael’s biggest failure of all.
Hands cupping her daughter’s mouth, Miriam tells Yael that this will be a secret all three of them must keep. For forever. Until the end.
Nobody else can ever know, except for the ears in the Earth.
