One hundred and eight years ago, in March, a girl goes into a forest.
Delores wanders through the trees with no idea where she's headed.
Do you think that's the end of it? That there's an answer now, a clear place to point to for what went wrong? A dumb kid makes a dumb choice, story over?
She goes into the forest for a reason.
Her father's dead and her mother's dead. Not at the same time, and maybe, sad as it is, it'd have been kinder for her to have lost them in one stroke. Instead it was first one and then the other, with a remarriage in between the two, and her stepmother's getting married again now.
She goes into the forest for a reason, and no one finds her for a reason. There's still snow on the ground.
Don't those reasons have reason too, though? How far back are you willing to go? If her father hadn't been so desperate to remarry, hadn't gotten a wife from so far off, he wouldn't have caught ill from her. If it'd been any midwife instead of the doctor there was, her mother wouldn't have died. Should we question why there's no midwife by this point or just accept the reason and look no further? Perhaps blame goes to the apprentice, who gave up the profession and trained no replacement, when she knew, she surely knew, there'd be precisely these sort of consequences? Or the last midwife, an old woman with a tongue sharp from arthritis and a cuddly purrloin and so, so many drying plants, perhaps that's where the blame lies, perhaps if she'd only done things a little differently or a little less, kept a little quieter, let them burn the purrloin... Perhaps not, though.
And it branches, doesn't it. There was a doctor, wasn't there, and why didn't he know what an old woman had, why wouldn't he even wash the rot of corpses from his hands? She'd have made it, Delores' mother, if the doctor only hadn't been there. If he hadn't reached in.
But there's too much at this point and perhaps it's only a distraction, all the branches and all the knots.
Perhaps there's too many pitfalls and patching up one would only change the reason and not the outcome. Perhaps she'd have gone into the forest even if things went a different way.
What is certain is Delores goes into the forest. She does not have any pokemon with her because Delores is five years old.
You know this doesn't end well, but let it be said, the forest is kind enough. She smiles at pokemon that in later years will be gone: a pikipek who merrily hammers a hole in a bug-infested dead oak, a mightyena and pups who sniff the air and regard her curiously before continuing on their way, a sluggish servine who wriggles away through the snow-buried leaf litter when her weight crunches apart a fallen branch nearby. There are songs sung above her that have been sung for ten thousand years. They will last until the first machine rumbles in to drown them out, and then they will depart for good.
She's early enough for them but too late for the huge trees, the ones that were once the most common species of the forest. They withered to fungal blight brought over from halfway around the world years and years before she was born, another string of events and decisions. But they don't die all at once, they insist on sprouting back up from their own roots, trying to fight their way out of the grave again only for their bark to split and the blight slide back in. After she stares enchanted at her favorite pokemon, bidoof, playing in the swollen nearly to a lake river, after she slips walking on the bibarel's dam -
(her stepmother had just got her those shoes, and she's not used to them)
- and ends up soaked in icy meltwater from up the mountain, she finds the old hollow of one of those trees, stump shrouded in new shoots to block the wind almost completely. It's dry and not even dusty, the wood slower to rot than the other kinds of trees. And she curls up there because she is cold and tired, and she shivers, and she stops shivering. Her breathing slows as she falls asleep. And then that stops too.
One hundred and eight years ago, in March, a girl goes into a forest.
In April, what's left of a man's body washes out of the forest.
"It just goes to show, you can be the sort of person who does everything right, we all know he always did everything right, and yet," a grieving community will say, "this kind of thing can still happen."
"It just goes to show, just one mistake," a grieving community will say, "just one miscalculation, one bit of bad luck, and this can happen out of nowhere."