Telli Maple was not like the other children. See, other children liked playing in the fields and telling embarrassing stories about their friends. Telli, on the other hand, liked to pop newts’ eyeballs between her fingers. It was always so satisfying when the retinas spurted out. One time, she got some of it on her lips by accident and found she could speak newt for the next hour. It was only an hour because her mother made her clean it off.

It tasted pretty gross, so she didn’t do that again if she could help it. Newts don’t really have much to tell about anyway. Just the consistency of mud and the need to mate and the occasional rumors of the thing beyond sight that makes the water ripple.

Other children didn’t like popping newts‘ eyeballs, and that was all that was wrong with the world, if you asked Telli, which no one ever did for some reason. She always felt that the world’s problems would be quickly resolved if everyone just agreed that squishing eyeballs was the best pastime one could ask for. If everyone popped at least one newt eye per day, they’d be happier and wouldn’t feel the need to gossip about people, whether those people were Telli or someone else.

Each newt has two eyes too, so you only have to catch them every other day.

Telli preferred to pry their eyes out with a stick. Had to be careful, though. Can’t pop them prematurely. And you don’t want to kill the newt either, because it makes an unpleasant crunching noise when you do. And there’s no need for newts to die, really. They’re quite nice, if a little boring. Telli knew this, because she spoke newt once when she accidently squirted newt retina onto her lower lip. Quite the adventure, though not particularly interesting since all they talk about is mud and the water and the thing beyond sight that shakes the leaves at night.

Of course, popping eyes wasn’t the only thing Telli liked. She often sat in the shade and imagined what the trees were saying. Trees, being the things you make books out of, naturally speak through imagination, so in order to hear them, you have to imagine hearing them. Telli learned quite a lot about the world from the trees by the river. She learned about how squirrels lose the acorns they bury, how the winter makes trees feel sleepy, how the streams that you see are not all the streams there are, that there are some streams beneath the soil and that that’s what the trees drink, and that the water in normal streams is often too much water for trees, which is why they don’t grow in rivers, just alongside them.

The trees told her to watch out for the thing in the woods that makes the fungus quiver in fear. And if something can make fungus quiver, then you know it’s frightening.

Telli tried asking what the thing looked like since she’d never seen it before, and the trees laughed at her. It didn’t occur to them that she couldn’t see it. She tried telling them that the newts couldn’t see it either, but the trees just told her that that was because she went around prying their eyeballs out.

That made sense, so Telli had dropped the subject.

Trees were boring anyway, so she preferred to pry eyeballs out of newt skulls. The way the newts wriggled was immensely satisfying to her. And their screams! Or rather, the way they pretended to scream. Even Telli knew that newts don’t actually scream, but they open their mouths like they’re screaming, so she liked to mentally fill in their screams for them. After all, everyone should be allowed to scream if they need to, even Telli, regardless of what her parents told her when she woke up in the middle of the night.

She wasn’t sure why they wriggled and screamed so much. Maybe the thing beyond sight made them wriggle, just like it made the water ripple or the tree’s leaves shake or the fungus quiver. She tried asking them once, but then remembered that she no longer spoke newt, so she naturally couldn’t expect an answer, could she?

Telli missed her parents sometimes. She hadn’t seen them since that one night when the front door had started rattling. She tried waking them up to tell them about how the door was rattling and how she had looked outside and seen nothing there to cause it. They told her to go to sleep and that it was just the wind, but Telli knew that wasn’t true because the grass wasn’t waving. The thing that makes the trees’ leaves shake and the water ripple surely couldn’t be the thing that makes the grass wave. That was obviously the wind.

Maybe the thing that makes the water ripple and the leaves shake at night and the fungus quiver and maybe the newts wriggle (she still wasn’t quite sure) also made doors rattle. She tried to tell her parents this, but they wouldn’t listen.

That night her house burned down. She was unscathed because she had been running from home for a long time by then, but she saw the flames flickering in the distance, and knew that when she had escaped, she must have let the unseen thing inside, because after all, what else could make flames flicker like that?

Burnt out houses weren’t so bad, especially since they don’t have parents in them. No one to yell at you. No one to point fingers when you make a mistake. No one to tell you to stop it with all the fantasy nonsense. Even so, she missed them sometimes, particularly whenever she looked at the remnants of the hearth where she’d piled some books to keep the unseen thing out. Apparently, that hadn’t worked. She’d failed, the house had burned down, and she would have to live with that. That was what the trees told her, anyway. It was important to acknowledge your mistakes, even if you learned about them from your parents yelling at you. She could still hear Mother and Father sometimes, screaming, cursing her, pointing out where she’d gone wrong. She wondered if maybe the house remembered them and was yelling on their behalf.

Oh well. At least there was the river and the newts, and newts don’t yell.

Even Telli knew that.

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