In a place called Oakside no different than any poor village, there once lived a girl named Liana. Her hair was brilliantly black and shone like a raven’s wing. Her eyes gleamed deep purple almost like amethysts. Anyone meeting Liana for the first time wanted to take a moment to see the color of her eyes or to admire the sheen of her hair. Some offered a piece of candy from their pocket and bent down to ask her name. Liana would run away crying “Eeee! Eeee!”
“I only said hello,” said a woman to Cleo, Liana’s mother. “I didn’t mean the child any harm.”
Cleo held Liana’s hand. She cleaned up at the marketplace—corn cobs, chicken bones, rotten peaches, and sausage casings. Whatever had been forgotten on the ground she scooped into her burlap sack with a shovel. Her husband made coffins. Between the two of them, they eked out a living.
But this was not the first time something like this had happened. “She can’t speak,” explained Cleo. “A doctor said one day she might grow out of it.”
“A pity,” said the woman, who backed away. “She’s such a pretty girl.”
Liana played with pine cones and colorful rocks. She’d learned that her voice startled people, a terrible, croaking sound that no peppermint candy could soothe. While other people just opened their mouths and words fell out, she could only shriek. Sometimes she wished she had a brother or sister. Maybe that way, she thought, her mother wouldn’t look at her with such round, sad eyes. Liana carried a notepad and a pencil around her neck so she could write to her parents. As long as she got good grades, her teachers didn’t mind that she never spoke in class. They had enough noisy children. But behind Liana’s back, most people in Oakside called her dumb and stupid.
“Don’t you worry,” said Cleo. My girl’s just a slow learner.” Cleo hadn’t let go of the hope that one day Liana would speak.
Samuel enjoyed showing her how he could turn a simple piece of wood into a candlestick. To please her, he carved wings of a bird outstretched at the top to collect wax drippings—each feather carefully layered. Father and daughter had a way of talking to each other with their hands. But sometimes the silence they shared together spoke even louder. She flapped her arms as if asking Samuel to make the birds’ wings move. Samuel understood and fashioned a wooden peg so that they fluttered up and down. She opened and closed her mouth and wanted to know if he could make the beaks do the same. Samuel smiled, and soon there was another wooden peg.
Before Liana lived with them, Samuel had made coffins. Now word traveled throughout the marketplace about the beauty of Samuel’s candlesticks. With a talent for bartering this thing for that, Cleo dripped candles into alternating layers of yellow and blue to sell alongside her husband’s candlesticks. By the time Liana had turned thirteen, she no longer needed to clean up after the marketplace. Cleo ran a stall where she sold her family’s wares.
But Liana still couldn’t talk. She spent her time with Samuel in his workshop or with Cleo at the marketplace. At night, she had the same dream she always had about a girl lost in the forest with tiny wings. It bothered her like a splinter.
Children teased her about being different. To them, she was a girl with strange piercing eyes who wore Cleo’s handmade clothes. “All she can do is say is Eeee, Eeee!”
Every day after lunch, a bunch of kids gathered in a circle around Liana and tugged at her coat. They chanted:
Liana can’t speak
Something’s in her throat
Liana can’t speak
She’s a stupid goat
They danced around, held their hands tightly so she couldn’t break out of their circle. Liana shrieked as loudly as she could. “Eeee! Eeee!” The kids began to imitate her until there was a great howling from the road leading away from the school. They laughed. One girl in the circle told them to stop. A teacher dashed out and began to scold them. Liana ran without looking where she was going carrying her satchel of books deep into the forest, away from her house, hearing laughter behind her as her teacher herded the class back into school. She could feel them pointing sharp arrows into her back. Liana didn’t want to tell her parents what had happened—that their daughter would always be an embarrassment to them, no matter how many times Cleo hugged her and that it didn’t matter if she couldn’t speak; she would always love her. Liana knew that it did matter and how she would never be like other children.