When Nina was small, they had a cat. He was ancient, mangy fur and broken-off whiskers, ears in tatters from fighting days long since passed. A relic from Magda's own childhood, he had little interest in Erik—but loved Nina from the first. Before Magda so much as suspected she might be pregnant, long before she was certain enough to tell Erik, that cat, who had spent all the years of his life preferring to lie beside Magda to be petted, switched to lying across her stomach, instead. The bigger she got, the louder he'd purr while doing it, until Erik could stand outside their front door and know already that Magda was resting inside on the couch.
Before the baby was born, Erik feared the cat might smother her (an opinion greeted by Magda with great scorn, and which caused most of their marital discord during her pregnancy, as he bowed to to her preferences on nearly everything else). Afterward, it soon became clear that the cat was no danger to her; instead of lying across Magda at every opportunity, he now lay beside Nina whenever the opportunity arose. When locked out of the nursery at night, he scratched and howled until they reached compromise: Nina and cat both slept in beside Erik and Magda's bed, until Erik agreed Nina was finally big enough to smother him.
When Nina started school, the cat followed her there, and waited outside until she emerged again. He was her constant companion, everywhere, and if Magda sometimes fretted that Nina didn't have many friends, Erik never thought she seemed lonely.
One day, the cat, who had grown thinner over a period of weeks even as he seemed to be eating as much as ever, followed Nina to school, as he always had—but by the time class was out, he was too weak to stand. Nina carried him home, that day. By the time Erik got off work, the cat was very weak, and nearly gone.
There was no convincing her to go to bed that night, and no point in insisting that animals preferred to be alone when they died—for when Nina got up to go to the bathroom, the cat cried until her return, and when she scratched him behind his ears, he purred as loudly as ever at the comfort.
The vigil lasted all night long, shortly after dawn, when it ended.
Erik had never thought of what it would be like to see his daughter sobbing in grief; nothing in a lifetime of pain had prepared him to witness hers.
"We'll bury him out back, all right?" he said, softly, when Nina's crying had calmed down a bit. He'd wrapped the cat up in one of Nina's baby blankets already—he'd have protested at wasting such a thing on a cat, but hadn't been foolish enough to argue the matter when she was so upset; she had a good many old baby blankets, anyway, and wasn't likely to miss this one—while Magda had held her, stroking her hair and whispering to her softly. "He liked it in the woods, remember?"
"...Yes," Nina said, wiping her eyes. "I know his favorite spot. He told me."
Under any other circumstance, Erik might have pursued this—'What do you mean, "told you?"' Bad enough that she was constantly explaining the cat's preferences in minute detail, as if she had any way of knowing why he preferred the patch of light from one window to the patch of light from the other. Now, though, he barely noticed the strangeness of the wording, focused instead on finishing with this.
In the woods, at the spot Nina chose, Erik dug, and dug deep. The last thing he needed was some scavenger digging the cat up, perhaps leaving the corpse in their yard, ugliness his daughter didn't need to see or know. When he was done, he lowered the body into the hole and covered it up again.
Other than their breathing and the scraping of the shovel, there was no sound in the forest, although whenever Erik glanced at Nina, tears still streamed down her cheeks.
Then, when it was nearly done, Magda said, sharply, "Erik."
This choice of words, Erik noticed. He'd been Henryk now for years, even in his own home. Even Nina didn't know his real name; even Magda hadn't uttered it, not even in the privacy of their bedroom, since before Nina's birth.
"What is it?" Erik asked, but when he tried to catch Magda's eye, she was looking upward.
Erik hadn't noticed the sky growing darker again, hadn't heard a rush of wings or the branches above shifting under a thousand landings. He hadn't noticed anything, yet the trees were filled with birds of all shapes and sizes, more birds than he'd ever seen in one place in his life.
There were squirrels in the trees, too, and even a few bats. There more squirrels on the ground, along with foxes and rabbits. Closest to his daughter, there stood a doe, with a young fawn hanging close behind her. When Nina out out her hand, the doe nosed her palm, not seeming at all afraid.
Nina didn't seem afraid either, but Erik had fear enough for the both of them. Whatever spell all these animals were under, it couldn't last. The doe would trample Nina underfoot in her own terror; the birds would fly at her eyes; the bats could be rabid, or any of the rest of them. There were too many, and his wedding ring and Magda's, the eyelets of their shoes—none of that would be enough to stop them all.
"Nina," he said, "we're going back inside the house now. Slowly, so we don't—"
But Magda elbowed him before he could finish, and when he looked at her, she shook her head.
"What?"
"It's okay," she said, though Erik couldn't see how, as a few latecomers flew in and settled on some of the lower branches. "I think...I think she takes after you."
"It can't—she's too young." He hadn't manifested until he was twelve, where Nina was only six. Besides, this wasn't what he'd been looking for whenever he eyed Nina to see if she preferred to use a metal spoon or a wooden one, what toys with what parts she reached for first. If she were a mutant, surely her gift would be more like his than this. "That's not what this is."
Magda raised her hands, gestured all around them; tilted her head toward their daughter, who now had several squirrels in her lap, and a pair of wrens atop her head, grooming her hairs in-between grooming each other. Nina didn't seem to have been paying any attention their conversation, and if she wasn't likely to completely forget her grief any time soon, she was at least distracted enough in this moment to be having a low conversation of her own with her new friends.
"—Maybe," Erik conceded.
Nina's friends stayed for the better part of an hour, then began to take their leave in ones and twos. They never again came in such numbers, but after that day, there was never any day that at least a few of them didn't drop by to keep her company.