Spring awakens

It was to be a happy day for our family, a joyous morning. In the night, my mother had given birth and I found my baby sister sleeping soundly in my father’s arms as I descended the stairs for breakfast.
Such a beautiful and pure sight, this nameless gift bestowed upon our family. As a young girl I stood in silence, my face inches from where both babe and father slept, and allowed my senses to drink deep the new life before me.
Just as my nose was about to brush the forehead of my tiny sibling I realised my father had stirred. His stern, sad eyes told me to return to my room and let the household rest, for now.
It was spring today. I could tell from the buds forming on my favourite tree, which snaked across the window of my bedroom. Looking out onto the fields to the front of the cottage I noticed that the furrows of the soil, often crisp with morning frost, were clear and brown today.
Some way north of the cottage, perhaps a quarter of a mile into the vast network of fields was a drainage ditch. This was somewhere father told us never to play near because it was a dangerous place, a place that could suck you down forever. I stared hard today at that ditch, because slowly clambering forth from the hollow was the body of a small girl, about my own age.
It was difficult to see if she was clothed, but even from this distance it seemed her body was tinted green, like the summer grasses. With childhood wonder I pinched at my skin and rubbed at my eyes: two more children, two boys, were following her from the ditch. Each carried the same strange green hue.
I planned to watch their antics some more but froze and tingled with juddering spine as I noticed the girl staring at the cottage, at the window, at me.
I remember now, that stare seemed to bore right into me, encouraging my pulse to pump the blood faster throughout my entire body. Adrenaline flooded my brain and thoughts and sounds pulsed in my mind, strange enticing thoughts. I opened my bedroom window and stepped onto the ledge.
The spring breeze of morning seemed to whisper to me to hop onto the friendly bark of my tree. Though I was no climber, I managed the difficult clamber along and among the branches and down to the dewy ground. Through the main window of the house I saw my father and sister asleep, but they seemed very far away now and getting farther by the second.
I was skipping at first, joyously bouncing towards the murky ditch in the middle of the crumbly fields. Running, with joy in my heart, to meet the green children.
“It is spring, run, jump to us,” came their voices, clear now in my head. “We awake unto new life. We hunger. We are sorry.”
When I cleared the last of the sparse hedgerows I came upon them, standing in a line, expressionless. I found that I knew their names. Petandral, the oldest boy; Leanlo, his sister; Gerrent, the young brother.
Without sound, I was instructed to lay myself in the soil before them. They placed their green hands upon me. The cold flame of winter that passed through me then saw me howl like a soul in the pit.
Slowly my eyes readied to close for the last time as the children stripped the life from me. As peace descended upon my body, the blooming scent of lilies and white daffodils filled my nostrils. The ice chill at once departed and the warmth of summer filled my bones. I saw my mother stood next to me and she offered me her hand. The green ones had retreated and were waiting patiently at the edge of the ditch, their eyes fixed only on me.
“Go home Sophie, quickly now,” said my mother, and I nodded. As I ran home a thick fog descended from the moors to the west of the fields and the rooks cawed their approval.
It soon engulfed the fields behind and our own small cottage ahead, but I knew the way home and the cries of Leanlo bidding me return to her were easy to ignore.
As I passed through our front door I was at last able to scream. The thick fog had dared to pass a little into the parlour with me, but dissipated as my newborn sibling woke and shrieked.
My screams only subsided when I dived onto my bed and bit the pillow hard. I shed such tears, tears for my dead mother that day. Such fearful tears of the cold she had passed into.
Father and I never spoke about the night my mother died in childbirth. There was an understanding that nothing would be said between us.
But it is a horror unknown to children that I endured every day of my adolescence. To know the temperature of the hollow hand of death, and understand how it would all have felt to my mother, at her last moment and perhaps ever after...
It is an almost unbearable knowledge that Leanlo and her brothers cursed me with on that first day of spring.

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This tale is a sequel, of sorts, to my very first tale... Winter Quakes