The Little Girl Who Spoke to The Trees
By Arsia Victoria Elkin
Once upon a time in a large forest lived a little girl who spoke to the trees. Every day she wandered her forest to see how all the trees were doing. They never responded, of course, but that didn’t deter her because she loved the trees. She knew her little area of the forest so well she had even named many of the largest and most beautiful trees.
Every so often she’d pass by a person who was walking through the forest, but rarely did she ever talk with any of them. For a long time stayed in the small area of the forest with which she was very familiar. She could see that going further south in the forest looked dangerous. What she could see to the north more or less seemed normal, but she was unfamiliar with it. What was familiar was comfortable to her and what was unfamiliar was frightening.
As she grew a little older, she started to expand the area of the forest that she would wander. She went to the north as it didn’t look dangerous like the south. This led her to see many things that were new to her, many of them beautiful. She loved seeing all of the wonders of nature. Around the forest there were running creeks with fish swimming in them, deers, birds, flowers, all sorts of things she loved. She kept exploring deeper and deeper into the forest and eventually, she found a town at the forest’s edge.
She never knew that the forest ended. The town was strange and full of many of the people she’d seen in the forest. The town was new to her and she wanted to understand it. She started taking a trip to the town every week and trying to make sense of it. After a few times, she met a little boy. The little boy was nice to her and they would talk every time that she would come to the town.
The little boy told her of a magnificent meadow full of the most wondrous flowers to the south of the forest and recommended that she visit it. She told him that going south through the forest looked dangerous and she was scared but the little boy scoffed. He teased her for not being brave enough to go south through the forest. The little boy had good intentions. He just wanted to get the little girl to go see the beautiful meadow that she would surely love, but he was harsh in how he said it and said he was too busy to take her there himself. He wouldn’t even enter the forest. The two kept talking for some time but the little boy kept picking on the little girl about everything she was doing that he saw as wrong and this caused them to drift apart over time.
The little girl still visited the town regularly. One day, she met a little red-haired girl who talked to her because she looked sad. At first, the red-haired girl seemed very different to the little girl. But the two started talking and ended up getting along quite well. The red-haired girl knew the little boy but the two of them didn’t get along very well. The red-haired girl also knew about the meadow and even though she had never been through the southern forest, she volunteered to take the little girl there herself.
The little girl arrived at the town early the next day and met up with the red-haired girl to make the journey through the forest. The little boy saw them meeting and got angry when he found out that the red-haired girl was going to take the little girl through the forest. He was especially angry at the little girl, whom he told to never speak to him again. The two girls paid him no mind and went into the forest. The little girl didn’t understand why he was so angry. He had the chance to help her get through the forest first and refused.
As they went through the part of the forest the little girl was familiar with, she told the other girl all about the trees they were passing. The red-haired girl thoroughly enjoyed the stories the little girl had about the trees and learned all their names. The red-haired girl had never thought to name the trees, but very much liked the little girl’s imagination. After a while, they made it to the southern part of the forest that the little girl had never been through.
Things were easy enough at first. There were a few fallen trees along the path, but nothing too hard to get past. It wasn’t until they reached an old, beat-up looking bridge over a wide river that the little girl was truly scared. The red-haired girl comforted the little girl and took her hand to lead her across the bridge which was a lot more stable than it looked like. After crossing the bridge, the rest of the southern forest was beautiful and had many plants and animals that the little girl had never seen before. The two girls took turns naming the largest trees as they walked through the rest of the forest. The southern forest that looked so scary before ended up being quite a nice place.
Eventually, the two girls reached the meadow at the other end of the forest. It was the most amazing thing that the little girl had ever seen. There were all sorts of gorgeous flowers of every color in the spectrum and they seemed to go on and on forever. The two ran through the meadow, playing and having fun until they came to a patch of azaleas. They admired their beauty for a moment before they bent down and began talking to the flowers together.