"There's nothing here," Maya said. She scraped her trowel sideways and hit dirt right away. Bare, dark, crumbly dirt.
"That's the problem," Soren said. "There's supposed to be more."
"More what?"
"Leaves. Last fall's leaves. The squishy layer." He pushed his hand into the soil and pulled up a worm, fat and pink and coiling. "This is where we wanted them, though. Look. There's a million of them."
Maya took the worm and dropped it in the coffee can. Then she stopped and looked at the ground again, the way she looked at a math problem that was lying to her.
"Soren. Where are the leaves?"
"What do you mean?"
"It's a maple woods. There are maples everywhere." She pointed up. "They drop leaves every single year. Tons of them. Where did they all go?"
Soren looked down at the bare floor. He had walked through these woods his whole life and never once thought about the floor being wrong. Now that she said it, he could not unsee it.
"They rot," he said. "They turn into dirt."
"Every year? All of them? There's never any left over?" She walked ten steps to the edge of the woods, where the trees met the old fence line, and crouched. "Come here."
He came.
Under the fence, where the lawnmower never reached, there was a soft brown blanket. Layers of it. Leaves from this year, and crumbly broken leaves under those, and below that something dark and spongy that wasn't quite dirt and wasn't quite leaf.
"There it is," Soren said. He pressed it and it pressed back, like moss. "That's the squishy layer. So the woods used to have this. All over."
"And now it only has it where something's protecting it." Maya looked back at the open woods, all that bare dark dirt. "What ate it?"
Soren held up the coffee can. The worms inside were climbing over each other.
They were both quiet.
"No," Maya said. "Worms are good. Worms make the soil healthy. Everybody says that."
"In a garden," Soren said slowly. "My mom puts them in the garden on purpose. To break stuff down faster."
"So they break stuff down faster." Maya looked at the bare floor again. "Soren. What if the woods didn't want it broken down faster?"
He pulled out his notebook and a pencil. He drew the fence, and the soft blanket under it, and the bare ground past it. He drew an arrow from the worms to the bare ground. Then he stopped, pencil up.
"There shouldn't be a difference," he said. "Worms have been here forever. Why would they only just now eat all the leaves?"
"Maybe they haven't been here forever."
"They're worms. They're in every kid's book about dirt."
"Your book worms," Maya said. "Maybe these aren't the same." She picked one out of the can and held it close to her eye. It tried to escape between her fingers, strong and quick. "This one's in a hurry."
They took the can back to Soren's kitchen, where his grandmother was shelling peas. She had grown up in these woods.
"Grandma," Soren said. "When you were little, was the forest floor soft? Like, deep soft? Leaves up to your ankles?"
She didn't look up from the peas. "Up to my shins. We used to lose our boots in it. There were little white flowers all through it in spring, thick as snow. Trillium. Spring beauty." She smiled at the peas. "Don't see those so much now."
"What happened to them?"
"Things change," she said, the way grown-ups say it when they don't actually know.
Maya and Soren looked at each other.
"The flowers grew in the squishy layer," Maya said, very quietly, so the grandmother wouldn't hear it as a question and answer it wrong. "Their seeds. Their little roots. They lived in the leaves, not the dirt."
"And the leaves are gone," Soren said. "So the flowers are gone."
"And anything that needs the leaves." Maya's eyes went wide. "Birds. The ones that nest on the ground. They hide their nests in the leaves. No leaves, no hiding place."
Soren was writing fast now, the arrows multiplying across the page. Leaves to flowers. Leaves to birds. Worms to no leaves.
"But how did they get here?" he said. "If they weren't always here. Worms can't walk to Minnesota."
That night they looked it up. And the thing they found made both of them go still .
The ice.
Ten thousand years ago a glacier two kilometers thick had sat on this whole part of the world and scraped it clean. No worms survived under that much ice. None. For ten thousand years, the northern forests grew up with no earthworms at all. The maples and the trilliums and the ground-nesting birds built an entire world on the idea that nobody would eat the leaves. The leaves were supposed to pile up. The squishy layer was the floor of everything.
Then people came, with boats from across the ocean, with soil in flowerpots and worms in fishing cans, and let them out.
"We've been bringing them," Soren said. "For fishing. Like us. Right now. Today."
Maya looked at the coffee can on the counter. The worms were still climbing.
"This forest is ten thousand years old," she said. "And it never met a worm until us."
They carried the can back outside in the dark. Not to dump it in the woods. They both knew, without saying it, that you could not put a thing back into ground that had never had it.
"Where do they even belong?" Soren whispered.
"Across an ocean. In woods that grew up with them." Maya held the can against her chest. "This whole place built itself for ten thousand years on a layer of dead leaves. And nobody noticed it was the most important thing here until it started disappearing."
Soren shone his flashlight at the open ground past the fence. The bare dark floor stretched away between the maples, smooth and clean and wrong, all the way into the trees.
Where the light hit the soft blanket under the fence, one of last year's leaves lifted slightly and settled, as something underneath it moved on.
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A science-verified short story for curious kids · Curiosity Land