The Forgotten Girl

Iris knew that straight through these woods was her school, but she’d never bothered to test out the shortcut. Their parents warned them not to go into the woods by themselves. And Suga warned them twice as much about the spirits of the snow. How they preyed on children who wandered out in the snowy darkness alone.
But in that little clearing, there was a fresh, untouched blanket of snow, calling her farther into the woods, just before that impenetrable wall of darkness.
It was too dark. The branches looked like spiders, waiting to pull her into the darkness and swallow her whole. Like in one of the nightmares she had last week.
She shook her head again. She was not afraid of the dark. And she didn’t want to pass up the chance to keep playing. She pointed a purple-gloved finger deeper into the woods.
“Let’s go over there.” Daniel cleared his throat. “Iris, we can’t go over there. We shouldn’t even be out here.”
She rolled her eyes.
“It’ll just be for a second. I promise.” She added, when he frowned at her, “Please? Come on.”
He nodded slowly. Iris pulled him farther, past the edge of the big clearing, through the next line of trees, to the smaller one. The darkness seemed so solid as it surrounded them, it felt like they were in a cave. All around her, Iris could only see trees. As if they’d entered another world.
The trees seemed to stand in anticipation under the pink and-black snowy sky. Watching, waiting, so still as the snow touched the branches. She shivered, probably because of the cold. She lay down slowly, the cold pressing closer against her back than it had before. She moved her arms and legs, making the angel, ignoring a strange feeling that she was slowly sinking into the snow …
Daniel reached out his hand and pulled her up. Iris shook the feeling off and smiled. She was proud of her work. “I’ve never made a snow angel this good!” She looked at Daniel to agree, but he was leaning over, frowning at her angel.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at it. “Look.”
She peered more closely at the angel, the way her dress flared around her feet, her arms frozen in midair as if she’d finally gotten their attention.
There was something buried, just barely, under the snow angel’s chest, where her heart would be. It glistened in the moonlight. They bent over and worked together to uncover it.
Their hands froze in midair, mimicking the angels’.
Daniel gasped.
“Iris, that’s…”
Iris stared down at the crumbling stone, a gust of cold air pushing past her, forcing her to speak.
“A grave.”
The wind whistled as they looked down at the marker and the angel surrounding it. She almost looked like she was guarding it. Iris felt the sensation of someone standing behind her, and whipped around just in case. She thought she saw something flicker in the distance, and she forced herself to calm down. It must be one of the twinkling lights from the Christmas house.
Iris shivered. It felt even colder, but surely that was because they had stopped running around. “What does it say?” she whispered, her voice cutting through the silence. Daniel wiped the falling snow away from his glasses, took a breath, and knelt down by the small gray square. He was shivering, too. “Avery Moore. Rest in peace, darling. May 5, 1945 to September 7, 1956.”
Daniel stared at the grave marker for a second, his lips moving as if he was counting under his breath, then looked up at Iris, his eyes even bigger behind his glasses.
“She was our age.”
Iris shivered again. They were silent, both probably thinking the same thing-what happened to her? Why was she buried here?
Suddenly, the snow didn’t feel fun anymore. It was too dark out. Too cold. Too quiet. They felt too far from their houses.
“I’m cold,” they both blurted out at the same time, startling each other. Their voices seemed to carry farther than they should’ve on the wind.
“Iris, let’s go back.” Daniel scrambled to stand up and grabbed Iris’s hand again, first walking, then running through both clearings. The trees stood tall and dark, ominously, as they passed by. The snow fell heavier, no longer looking like frosting. The white branches were now skeletal hands, waving them backward. Iris could almost feel it, a pull trying to keep them there.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Daniel breathed, before letting her hand go and slipping through the back door to his house. Iris slipped through her own, forgetting to wipe her feet on the mat outside, not so carefully walking up the stairs, and throwing all her wet clothes into her closet. The darkness felt thick, the same way it had by the little clearing. Like it followed her here.
Still shivering, she trained her eyes on her night-light, but the small glow gave her little calm. She began her usual ritual of looking around to prove to herself that the pile of clothes in the corner wasn’t an animal, that the tap-tap-tap in the window right now was just ice and not someone trying to get her to look up –
But when she glanced at the window, it was into the black, round eyes of a little girl.