The Museum of a Lost Girls Life

Marie Wildapple spent the first ten summers of her life in the embrace of Veilwood Valley.

She arrived there first in the house of Aunt Gabrielle as a toddler with chocolate smeared cheeks and grass-stained knees, trailing after a mother too young to properly belong to anyone, including her own daughter.

Marie followed her through those summers like a petal in the wind, clinging to her for safety and familiarity in a overly measured household. In Aunt Gabrielle's house everything came with a rule attached to it. And Marie, who arrived in this world with immeasurable curiosity and endless thirst for knowledge, found herself restricted to a degree where she feared she might vanish from boredom alone.

Those summers taught her an early lesson: that the world does not feel the same in every room, and that in one house you may be treasured, and in another you may be tolerated only out of duty.

But Aunt Gabrielle's rules weren't the only thing that made her feel small. The glinting secrets exchanged between her mother and her cousin, Olivia made little Marie feel uninvited. She was too young to understand what they were giggling about. The stories that dissolved when she entered the room reinforced what she suspected: she did not fully belong here and she wasn't truly welcome.

While her mother was always glowing in this environment, Marie faded from all the circumscriptions.

She wished she could molt like a cicada and step out of her own cocoon as someone else—older, wiser, an adult and her mother's best friend, like Aunt Olivia. She longed to join them in their conversations, to laugh with them on their jokes. No, she ached to make them laugh with her very own jokes.

But that was impossible, so little Marie did what she knew best and charted the forest in search for a sense of belonging.

But her woodland adventures seemed to please no one else, but her. Her mother's aunt, Gabrielle discovered her secret quite swiftly and did not approve of it. Her house was a decent house where decent behaviour was expected. And gallivanting around the forest like a some errant woodland creature was not on the list of Aunt Gabrielle approved decent things.

"A small child like her should not wander the woods alone. You never know what horrors await her." was what she used to say.

And so, Marie Wildapple was forced to not live up to her name. Well, partially. She had to suppress her wildness as if it never existed, and sit at the dining table with a school workbook, decently just like those wee apples were sitting in the fruit basket in front of her. Like they weren't even there, until someone wanted one.

This is how it went every summer, and Marie started to dread the day when they had to leave home for Aunt Gabrielle's place. Until one cold winter night changed the course of her life.

Her mother gave birth to another child. The baby was named Elisabetta, and she was the strangest looking creature Marie had ever seen. Having not seen a baby before, she thought her newborn sister looked like a shrunken old man; who—when she did not turn fuchsia colored from crying— was as pale as a painted brick wall.

Elisabetta however turned out to be a blessing and a curse in little Marie's life. The summers changed the year her sister was born, as summers often do when families grow in unexpected directions.

The three of them visited Aunt Gabrielle in Veilwood again and Marie —rather tall, round and forgettable—became even more aware of her own plainness. To which she was cruelly reminded every time a person praised her baby sisters angelic beauty, but became speechless upon looking at Marie. Although Marie wasn't an ugly child, she was just not as beautiful as adults love children to be. And so, the once treasured first born child found herself drifting toward the edges of every room.

That summer, Marie learned another thing: the quiet agony of being tolerated while someone else was being cherished.

But Marie was blessed in ways her sister wasn't—something that was to be discovered many a years later. Her curiosity was paired with wit and a bright mind that noted everything. She quickly figured that, while the whole world was watching Elisabetta—however upsetting that felt—the same time they did not watch Marie. She slid into invisibility, and this was something she could use to her advantage.

Marie, old enough to be invisible but young enough to rebel, has learned to sneak out of the house and into the woods like a fox sneaks into a garden, and into the hen house. It was easy. First, she simply had to announce her presence loudly, cut into conversations and interrupt the adults until she was dismissed. Then, she could gradually drift away. Once she was out of sight, she was out of mind.

And Veilwood, with its watchful trees and shy winds, received her each time like a favored daughter. She spent weeks roaming the forest trails, gathering odd looking rocks, drawing her favorite Amanita Muscaria mushrooms, collecting pretty flowers and colorful leaves to press between book pages later in the house. She talked to the trees and the fern as if they were her best friends, listening to her complaints.

Some days she could even steal the magnifying glass or the binocular from Uncle Attila's office, and discover a whole universe living in the moss or take notes of the peculiar activities of the magpies.

Her expeditions were completely innocent, and never exceeded further than nature and the animal kingdom. She never wandered as far from the house that she wouldn't see or hear if someone was looking for her. She learned to keep track of time by learning the cycles of nature.

For instance, the moment she could feel the scent of Aunt Gabrielle's gardenias even from the forest, she knew it was time to return for dinner if she didn't want to get into trouble.

Marie arrived to the conclusion, with the earnest conviction of children, that what she figured about life was set. And so, she did not know, that gardenias don't bloom all summer long and she didn't notice the drooping florets.

It didn't take much for the women of the house to figure that Marie sneaked out of the house once she didn't show for dinner. Marie was deep into her biological research. She startled from her sketchbook to her own name, carried to her by the wind. The dusk already started to thicken around her, but she didn't notice it without the strong aromas of the gardenias tickling her nose.

She threw her pencils and her drawing into the small tote bag, she sprinted towards the house as fast as her short, stumpy legs could carry her. Even if she could teleport, it was too late. Aunt Gabrielle stood in the doorway, hands on her hips with the scariest expression Marie ever seen on her face.

She grabbed Marie by the ear and she pulled her into the house, yelling, demanding to know her whereabouts and who gave her the permission to leave. Marie knew better: the bigger the lie, the bigger the punishment and no one will side with her to spare her. She admitted without hesitation that the she sneaked out of the house without anyone knowing.

What's worse, she turned feral. She cried and marched into the house with her muddy shoes on, threw her dusty tote bag on the dining table and yelled back Gabrielle that she doesn't care anymore because they all hate her. To top that, she blew her runny nose into the sleeve of her shirt.

That was more than enough to Aunt Gabrielle, she sent her up to her the attic room without dinner.

"No! But... that's terrible. Mom, tell her not to lock me into the attic room!" she begged, but her mother felt more relief from knowing exactly where her child is locked up, than from having to supervise her.

And just like that, Marie's one week confinement begun with the only permission to leave for the bathroom, for which she had to ring a small bell, and to spend one hour in the garden to get some fresh air while solving mathematics assignments with Olivia.

The attic room was a pretty pleasant guest room with a queen sized bed, a view over the valley, and bookshelves covering an entire wall. There were boxes full of old photographs, a globe and even a small telescope. Marie might have loved being locked up in such a room all alone, if not for one thing: the door.

That door.

Past the linen cupboards and the fading oil portrait of Great-Grandmother Annemarie was a narrow, unassuming door that no one seemed to use.

It always freaked Marie out. It was in a dark corner, where the sunlight never reached. Even the lamps couldn't illuminate it with their warm, yellow light. More curious still was the coldness of that corner in comparison to the rest of the room. Even on the hottest days, when the whole house felt like a sauna, that corner was freezing cold. Even the window fogged beside it.

If Marie stood too close to the door, she could feel the wind blowing through the cracks, and it made a creepy squeaky noise only at night, so she couldn't fell asleep.

Whenever she asked about that door and what's behind it, the answer was "Nothing, we don't go there."

She never tried to open it before, but she always assumed that naturally, it would be closed. For the better part of the summers, Marie passed that door with the obedient indifference of childhood.

For dinner, she was allowed to join the family at the table, where she was inspected if she learned her lesson already, only to be told that she didn't.

For Marie, there was only one way to get the creeps out of her bones if she wanted to survive a week in that room: by befriending her fear. She sat in the her aunt's cosy armchair with a book, eyes closely kept on the door. She inched a little closer to it by the hour, until she was so close she could feel the cool breeze on her toes. Then she remained there until she got so used to the feeling that she could read without paying attention to it.

Children who spend their lives unnoticed develop a talent for noticing things. And Marie had noticed a brass dish on Aunt Gabrielle’s dresser on the corridor—an ordinary little catch-all for safety pins, buttons, and old keys of various shapes.

She remembered one in particular: a narrow skeleton key with a carved stem and a loop worn soft and shiny by the years of use. Years of use for… what? For this door?

The next evening when Marie was called for dinner, she picked the skeleton key from the bowl without a single noise, and slid in her pocket on her way back to the attic room.

Marie, determined as ever, waited until the next morning, when the house was awake and everyone was too busy with their lives to pay attention to what she does up there. When she found the timing right, she inserted the skeleton key into the lock and found it perfectly fitting. With a click, she turned the key and the door latched slightly open.

She vacillated for a brief moment. Her heart was bumping in her throat, her legs wavered for a second as she reached for the handle. She could either step inside and face her fear, or close the door and try to take the key back from where she took it from.

But Marie Wildapple wasn't made for the easy way out. Nomen est omen, as her grandmother used to say. She took a deep breath in, grabbed the handle and stepped in.

The first thing she noticed was the temperature. Not cold, as she expected it, but strangely temperate and bright.

The room was just as pleasant, if not more, than the one on the other side. It was dusty and covered in cobwebs, but it was nice.

It was the room of a girl.

Everything had been left exactly as if the room was expecting someone to return before nightfall: clothes laid out on a chair, a hairbrush with honey-colored hairs still caught in its teeth, paper and crayons scattered on the carpet.

Marie felt the peculiar sensation of looking into a museum of a life that was left unfinished, and it felt terribly wrong.

She hurried out, closing the door carefully, but not before she got caught by Olivia.

"You're lucky I came to check on you. What were you doing there?" she stood in the middle of the room with arms crossed over her chest.

"I... I just..."

"It doesn't matter. You must have questions, don't you?" Marie answered with a nod.

Aunt Olivia drew a deep breath in and gestured to Marie to follow and sit on the bed with her.

“We locked that door years ago,” she said finally, her voice so level it was almost rehearsed. “No one goes in there.” A tremble passed through her aunt — the kind that moves through someone who has contained grief for so long it has become a part of their posture.

Olivia revealed she had a sister. She was older than Olivia, but they never met. She died a couple months before Olivia was born. She wandered off to Veilwood forest and never came back. They found her body several days later washed ashore by the river. Aunt Gabrielle locked her room so time wouldn’t move forward without her.

"She thought she could shut the door on her, and on the memory of what happened. But grief doesn’t stay where you put it. If you lock it up, eventually it stains everything.” She said it all with a face that looked calm to the untrained eye but which Marie, after so many summers, recognized as full of fragile scaffolding — a structure built to keep something wild and unsettling from surfacing. "My mother always says you remind her of my sister."

Marie felt a trembling ache rise — compassion and sorrow intertwined, the way vines knot themselves around a branch not out of malice but longing for something to cling to.

That summer, she learned something else, too: that some rooms are sealed not to protect the world from what is inside, but to protect the heart from what it cannot bear to remember.

Stillness lay over the room like dust. And for the first time, she understood — truly understood — why she had always felt unloved and restricted in this house.

It was not because she was bad or unlovable. It was because she had been living in the shadow of a girl no one dared speak of, a girl whose absence had rearranged the emotional architecture of the entire family.

The rules were imposed on everything to keep her safe, to keep her intact. But Marie wasn't a creature one could tame. She was a creature of endless inquisitiveness, with inherited rebellion fizzing in her veins. But she was also more mature than her age, and learned to stay put when she really has to. But not for long.

She returned to the room later and placed something of her own inside—a little pin she received from her grandmother once. It had a tiny compass attached to it, and Marie left it as a sign of kinship and the intention of leading the lost girl home.

This story is part of a series called "The Veilwood Tales". A collection of short stories about Marie and Elisabetta— two sisters separated by the veil of a faerie realm, each story was inspired by Vocal challenge prompts.

Thank you for reading these stories, and the kind support and encouragement I received from so many of you to keep writing this cycle. ❤️ It really means a lot to me!