Never Grow Up

There once was a little girl. Just a normal little girl, with no quirks or interests that differed from any other little girl’s. She liked to draw, she was kind to small creatures, her dirty blonde hair was never free of knots or snarls. She was too curious, and she thought the forest was magical. Let’s call her Anne, a name befitting such an average child. 

Anne’s family had just moved into a new house, far from the city they had formerly frequented. Her father, a journalist, had gotten fired due to one too many published articles of misinformation. He and her mother had told Anne they’d simply wanted a change of scenery. Anne wasn’t buying it, but being six years old she didn’t really have much choice in the matter. And so, her parents packed up their cozy little apartment, their noisy Yorkshire terrier, their curious now six-year-old, mere days after her birthday, and moved to the country in early June to start over. 

Anne didn’t like her new house. It was too big, too quiet, and it creaked at night in the wind as if it were breathing. She didn’t like having to leave her friends, and for the first time in her mere half-dozen years, she was lonely… and more than a little bit bored. So, the child found herself gazing up at the giant pines and oaks and maples, trees so much bigger and more wild than any she’d ever seen lining a parking lot or sidewalk. They all looked so different, different leaves, different bark, different ways they laughed in the breeze. They each seemed like gods to the little girl, kind archaic beings content to watch and listen. Anne, being young and impressionable, soon fell in love with their chorus. 

Though the forest was a new concept for her, the endless expanse of wood and fern and dirt and countless, unnamed creatures, Anne soon found herself wandering deeper and deeper inside with every passing summer day. She liked the way the sun, peeking through the leaves, left little pools of light on her arms, the way the leaves tickled her cheeks. She often called herself a faerie queen, and the wood was her domain. Her parents found this odd. A child having an imagination? Unheard of. They didn’t understand why Anne no longer found interest in her books about verbs and nouns and adjectives. What more could she need than persons, places or things? Anne paid them no mind, and her gaze remained glued to her kingdom.

One day, Anne had ventured further than ever before, and found herself in an odd, circular clearing. At its center stood a massive oak, with a large, weathered wooden box held safely in its branches. A ladder shambled down the shaft of the tree, with half of its rungs rotted through or hanging precariously. To most, it would’ve looked like a rush to the hospital waiting to happen, but to Anne, it looked like a castle. A real treehouse? She’d been under the impression they’d gone extinct, like dinosaurs or giraffes. Caution long gone in favor of curiosity, Anne stumbled up the rickety ladder, her grin wider than the moon. 

What Anne expected: nothing. She was six years old and her brain was made of TV static and opportunity. What Anne found: a single, upside-down wooden crate in an otherwise empty treehouse. Yet somehow, the child was not disappointed. Rather she saw the crate as a treasure chest probably filled with candy or quarters. As she crept closer, the sunlight leaking through the cracks in the boards and the open square of a window lit up the crate just enough for Anne to glimpse something inside. With a quick, clumsy, full-bodied shove the crate was knocked aside, revealing its hidden contents. A rusty multi-tool, a dirty set of child-size socks, a broken pair of glasses, all of which Anne threw in indiscriminate directions in favor of what lay underneath - an uneven pile of child-like drawings, all done in faded crayon. The depiction in crayon was what really caught her eye. 

There was a small stick-figure boy, with bright orange hair and big, round glasses standing in the corner. A giant, hairy beast took up the rest of the page. To Anne, it looked almost like a ferret, or a dragon, or some sort of stretched-out dog. Between the two figures stood a dark red heart. Anne carefully set that item aside to ask her parents about later, before glancing at the rest of the pictures. They all appeared to be relatively similar, the orange-haired boy, who called himself Aaron (though the R was always backwards) and the strange, gargantuan snake-dog. In every picture they stood in a different pose, but for the most part each drawing was the same. Anne quickly lost interest and cast the drawings aside. 

Just as she was about to give up hope of finding some sort of treasure, she glanced back towards where the crate had been, and found one last doodle scribbled on the floorboards of the treehouse. It was a picture of Aaron, with a twig-like finger pressed against his lips. Hovering above him were the words, “There’s a secret on the roof.” Anne’s brown eyes sparkled. So, the hunt wasn’t over. She was simply looking in the wrong place. The treasure must be on the roof!

And so, the little girl quickly looked around the room, until her eyes landed on the window. In a flash she was perched unsteadily on the sill, trying with all her might to reach the edge of the roof to pull herself up. She didn’t understand that her tiny arms did not have the muscle to accomplish such a feat. Nor did she look down, for had she done so she might have realized the ground was many, many feet below. A fatal distance should she fall. Her foot slipped from the ledge, and she let out a small yelp before beginning her plummet to the forest floor. 

Oh, how her parents would bawl, finding their only child's broken little body crumpled in the dry, long-dead leaves. Except, she never hit the ground. Anne fell less than three feet before landing, or rather being caught by something soft, furry, and smelling of moss and soil. She could feel the thing slowly and gently lower her to the ground. She couldn’t quite bring herself to open her eyes, that is, until her feet, secure in their glittery, pink sneakers, safely met the forest floor. Her eyes opened of their own accord, and quickly grew to the size and circumference of dinner plates at what she saw. There it was, the snake-dog, the dragon.

It looked very similar to Aaron’s drawings, in Anne’s eyes anyway. The only difference being it was far, far bigger. Even hunching over itself like an inchworm, it easily reached the treehouse above. It had a long, mink-like body, with sleek brown fur laced with bark and moss. Its limbs were small, like a newt’s, but each was tipped with sharp, wooden talons in the place of feet or hands. Its face, hovering not six inches away from Anne’s, also appeared to be made of wood. It was shaped like the skull of a bull or maybe a deer, with stag-like antlers wrapped in birch bark erupting from it like a crown. A terrifying sight to be sure, the stuff of nightmares and campfire stories, but Anne saw something else.

“You must be the king of the forest,” she stated, her descent from the treehouse and apparent survival instincts already long forgotten. “Awesome! Because I’m the queen of the Faeries, so you gotta be my husband!” Anne tapped the creature's wooden snout and clucked with glee. The king’s eyes, two points of light like captured fireflies, flashed at the little girl's confidence. As Anne went on about their apparent engagement, the beast relaxed its gargantuan body and lay down before her, basking in the sun, but keeping its attention glued to the little menace. It had been so long since it’d had company, especially company as lively as this. It’d missed it.

Anne spent as much time as she could that summer in the treehouse, the king's domain. It always appeared when she called to it, and it always took her on a new, equally exciting adventure. It taught her how to swim in the river and tried to teach her how to balance on the river rocks, though it was far too big to do so itself. It taught her how to climb the trees, and which ones were safe to do so. It taught her how to catch the frogs in the brooks without harming them, and how to let them go. It had become not just her only friend, but her best friend, her companion, her guardian. And so, they stayed, romping in leaf piles in the autumn, building snowmen in the winter, hunting for newts in the spring. For four full years, until Anne’s tenth birthday on June 1st.

“They’re giving me my old job back, Annie, can you believe it?” Her dad held onto her shoulders with a grin smeared across his face. Her mother shared the same expression from where she stood in the kitchen, trying in vain to hide Anne’s birthday cake she had bought from the supermarket. 

“I won't have to work for the newspaper company. You won't have to go to that crappy, county school anymore. We won’t have to live in the middle of nowhere! We can go back to the city, we can go home!” 

As her father went on and on, Anne felt black, winter water rising up in her stomach. 

“No.” She heard the word, quiet as a whisper, leave her lips.  

“We can go to that old pizza place on the corner you like again, we’ll have good wifi.”

“No!” Anne barked the word louder that time. 

“Anne, honey.” Her mother sauntered over and placed a hand on her head. “You don’t have to go play in those icky woods anymore. How about this, once we go home and daddy makes some more money we’ll buy you a new iPad.” 

“I said no!” Anne had begun shouting. “I don’t want to leave! I can’t leave him, he’ll get too lonely without me!” 

“Annie, what are you talking about? Come on, your friends will be here soon for your party. Let’s get you in your nice dress.” 

“I don’t want them here! They all hate me and call me weird. He doesn’t though, and he needs me. I’m not leaving!” Anne shouted before dashing out the door as if her feet were on fire, and disappearing behind the tree line. 

It was already sundown by the time the girl reached the treehouse, panting and crying and generally just looking like a snotty mess. 

“King?” she whimpered, the beast's given name cascading into a sob. Said beast, who had been dozing by the river, having been told by Anne it would not see her that afternoon due to her birthday party, bolted upright at the sound of her call, and tore through the forest faster than lightning to greet her. When her teary brown eyes met those of the forest king, she ran to it and hugged it with all the force her tiny body could muster. 

“They want me to leave you, King. They want to take me back to the city, with the loud cars and people and…” Anne interrupted her own words with a sob into the creature's fur. After a moment she forced herself into some semblance of composure.

“I’m not gonna let them take me away from you, King. I promise. I’ll just live in the treehouse. Yeah, perfect! I’ll live in the treehouse, and I just won't go to school anymore. I’ll stay here with you.” Anne lost her train of thought as she felt the beast rumble in her arms. 

A quiet sound emanated from the creature, the creature that hadn’t made a single noise in their four years together.

“King are you… singing?” Anne asked, her shock causing her to momentarily forget her predicament. The forest king continued its song, and the breeze in the branches of the trees seemed to hum as well. The leaves carpeting the soil whispered along. The brook babbled, and the mourning doves awoke to join in the tune. Fireflies drifted lazily into the clearing from all directions, blinking to life around them. The song of the king, the hum of the forest, the fireflies flickering on and off and on again, everything served to make Anne extraordinarily drowsy. She collapsed onto the long body of the beast, and it held her in its warm, comforting, soil-scented embrace. 

Anne watched the creature flirt with the fireflies, allowing them to land on its long wooden claws before flicking them off back into the darkening sky. She watched it as her eyes grew heavier and heavier. It turned to her, its song still pouring from its body like a melodic river. Its eyes pulsed with their familiar warm, yellow glow, and the forest king pressed its cool, wooden forehead against the girl as she drifted into sleep.