Cedric and Anna Maria

Anna Maria liked dead things. She liked the stillness of them, the pristine, unnatural lack of movement. It wasn't like sleep where you could see a chest rise or perhaps a finger or paw twitch. Death was mesmerizing. Her mother had a large garden, during the warm seasons she expected Anna Maria to help out. Anna Maria tended to her areas; pulling weeds, pruned leaves, and sowed seeds. It was tedious and boring. The same repetitive tasks day in, day out, week after week, until finally, you could harvest, only to prep the soil again for the next year. The soil was always slightly damp and sticky, pushing itself under her fingertips and no amount of scrubbing or cleaning ever cleared up the dark half-moons of dirt lying beneath her nails. Anna Maria's seasons were fall and winter, when the leaves and foliage started desiccating, turning yellow and brown. The ground under her feet would get crunchy and loud. She liked to walk through the forest as the days turned colder and the nights came earlier and earlier. She waited until the leaves dried out and then picked handfuls, crumbling them in her hands and watching the small pieces fall to the forest floor. The forest became calmer, quieter in the cold months -no incessant chatter of birds or rustling of woodland creatures which always assaulted her ears. The trees were more beautiful in the winter when they were bare and stark. Their twisted limbs stretched out unencumbered without leaves or mossy growths clinging desperately to them. Brown, grey, white and black, they reached up to the barren grey sky.

The autumn she turned thirteen, she was out in the forest, watching her breath as it left her body in the cold air. The plume of her exhale was visible as it flowed past her lips and the dissipated into the sky, unseen and forgotten. It was when she looked down at the ground that she saw it. The remains of some animal - twisted, furry, broken and bloody. She felt a longing deep and solid in the pit of her stomach. She moved forward without thinking, wanting to be closer. Large birds perched on the corpse, pecking at it, breaking through the fuzzy pelt into the soft tissue beneath. They squawked in surprise and possible fear as she moved closer, flying off into the crisp air. The beat of their wings loud and sharp in the cold air, drowning out the sound of her heart in her ears. Anna Maria wasn't afraid or disgusted by the small corpse. She felt a sense of almost homesickness as she drew closer. It had been a rabbit, patches of its brown summertime coat still showing, not enough time for white to bloom over its tiny body before its life was cut short. She wondered how it had died and, thinking back on it, she realized she hadn't seen many rabbits around over summer and early fall. Perhaps it died of loneliness. She touched the fur, petting the cold softness. She pulled her hand back, seeing dark red patches on her fingertips. Blood. She rubbed her fingers together taking note of the sticky-thick texture. She sniffed it almost delicately, cataloging its sweet iron scent. She sat down on the ground, cross-legged, ignoring the cold and waited. She wanted to see what would happen when the birds came back. After that, it became something of a hunk to walk through the forest and find things that had died. She found small birds, more rabbits, some squirrels, and once, in all its glory, a stag that had been pulled down by a pack of wolves and had been gutted to the bone. It was stunning. Long-limbed and stark, its sightless eyes glassy and dark. They were open and wide in a way she had never seen. She liked to watch the animals gnaw and tear at the flesh, foraging for small bits of nutrients. She loved that the stag would visit its corpse often until other small scavengers pulled and tore at it, breaking it apart until there was nothing left.

Spring started violently pushing through the solid, frozen ground. The sowing and prepping season were upon them far too soon for her liking. Starting at dawn, Anna Maria went to the garden with her mother and followed the same instructions as every year. Dig, turn, till, sow. She filled buckets of water from the well, lugging them to the seemingly endless rows upon rows of seedlings. Even there home was not left alone. Small pots littered the entire abode, so many that Anna Maria thought she would fall over them and break her neck, with her mother only bemoaning the broken leaves and stems of her precious blooms and not her daughter. Anna Maria spent as much time as she could in the forest now, knowing that there were always things to find lying dead, hidden under rocks or buried under foliage, she found she could more tolerate the endless tedium of the growing season. As long as she had her time in the forest.