The Missing Floor

"There's supposed to be a floor," Maya said.

Soren looked down. There was a floor. Dirt, brown and bare, packed hard between the maple trunks. He toed it. It didn't give.

"No," she said. "A soft one. A squishy one. Look at the packet."

The packet said their transect should be covered in leaf litter, quote, several inches deep. It listed things to find in it. Trout lily. Trillium. Bloodroot. A little bird called an ovenbird that builds its nest right on the ground, shaped like an oven, hidden in the dead leaves.

"I don't see any leaves," Soren said.

"That's what I said." Maya crouched. "It's May. There was a whole autumn. Where did the leaves go?"

Ms. Okafor was forty feet away with the rest of the class, holding up a laminated trillium card and pointing at a patch of nothing. She was a substitute. She kept saying the flowers were probably just late this year.

Soren got down on his knees and put his face close to the ground. He wrote something. Then he pressed his palm flat and pushed. "It's like a sidewalk," he said. "A forest isn't supposed to feel like a sidewalk."

"Autumn happens every year," Maya said. "Every year the maples drop a million leaves. Every year. For how long?"

"Thousands of years."

"So there should be a mountain of leaves. Thousands of years of leaves." She stood up fast. "Where is the mountain, Soren?"

He didn't answer, because he had found something. A hole. Small, round, going straight down, with a little pile of grainy dark pellets around the rim like somebody had squeezed the dirt through a tube.

"Something eats them," he said slowly. "The leaves. Something ate a thousand years of leaves."

Maya knelt next to the hole. "Something that lives down there."

They both looked at the pile of pellets. Then Maya did the thing she did. She dug two fingers into the soil beside the hole and pulled up a fistful.

Inside it, curled and pink and shining, was a worm. A big one. It flinched from the light and started muscling its way back down into the dark.

"Earthworm," Soren said. "That's just a worm, Maya. Worms are good. Worms are, like, the whole point of dirt. My grandpa puts them in his garden on purpose."

"Then why does the packet not have worms on it?" Maya turned the fistful over. Three more, smaller, threaded through the crumbs. "If worms are supposed to be here, why isn't the good floor here?"

Soren stopped. He looked at the worm going down its hole. He looked at the bare, hard, worm-churned ground. He looked at the maple trees, which were huge, which were old, which had been dropping leaves since long before his grandpa, long before anybody's grandpa.

"The trees are older than the worms," he said.

"What?"

"Think about it. The floor is gone. But the trees are ancient. That means the trees grew up with the mountain of leaves. The mountain was here first. The worms came after." He was writing fast now, not looking at the page. "If the worms had always been here, there'd never have been a mountain to grow up in."

Maya's mouth opened. "They're new."

"The trees are native. The flowers are native. The little oven bird is native. The worms"

"The worms are the strangers," Maya finished. "That's why they're not on the packet. Nobody wrote them down because nobody expected them." She looked at the pink thing disappearing into the earth and her voice went quiet. "Where were they before? Worms have to come from somewhere."

Ms. Okafor drifted over, saw the dirt on Maya's hands, and frowned. "We're looking at flowers, you two, not making mud pies. The trilliums are just running late."

"They're not late," Maya said. "They're gone. The worms ate the blanket they sleep under."

Ms. Okafor laughed the way adults laugh when they think a kid is being cute. "Worms are good for soil, sweetheart. Everybody knows that." She moved off toward the trilliums that weren't there.

Soren watched her go. Then he said the thing that made the forest tilt.

"Maya. There was ice here."

"What?"

"Glaciers. We did it in September. All of this, all of Minnesota, was under ice a mile thick. The ice scraped everything off. It killed everything in the ground." He pressed his hand to the hard soil again. "Ten thousand years ago there wasn't any dirt at all. It was under a mountain of ice."

Maya got there before he finished. "The worms didn't survive that. Nothing did. So when the ice melted"

"The forest grew back with no worms. For ten thousand years. No worms." Soren's voice was almost a whisper. "That's how you get a mountain of leaves. That's how you get the soft floor. That's how you get flowers that need the soft floor, and birds that nest in it. They all grew up in a forest that never had a single worm in it."

Maya stood very still, holding the crumbs of soil.

"So the whole forest," she said, "the real one, the one the packet is describing, is built on there being no worms."

"And the worms came back," Soren said. "On somebody's boots. In somebody's fishing bucket. And now they're eating a thing that was never supposed to be eaten."

They both looked down at their feet, at the hard brown floor that used to be a mountain, at the little round hole with its ring of pellets, at the place where a bird made of dead leaves used to hide.

Maya opened her fist. The soil fell in a thin stream, and every worm in it was already gone, tunneling down, taking the last of the forest apart one mouthful at a time.

Soren looked at the mud on his own boots. He didn't move for a long moment. Then, very carefully, he began scraping it off against the edge of a root.