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FICTION

The Curious Case of Elizabeth Seams

A short story about a mysterious 12-year old girl who can talk to trees

Shari Lopatin
The Interstitial
Published in
20 min readDec 20, 2024

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Oak Creek Canyon. Photo by Author. © Shari Lopatin, 2022

They said she summoned spirits from beyond — the bad kind — but when I met Elizabeth Seams, I saw only a shy, introspective, twelve-year-old girl.

She wore pigtails, and played with Barbies, and talked about Ariana Grande. She looked young for her age. I noticed that immediately about her. However, the moment she spoke, she quoted Edgar Allan Poe without hesitation and later told me her favorite book was The Giver by Lois Lowry.

My editor had heard of the girl who talks to trees while searching the social media stratosphere for peculiar and eccentric stories. It was a tweet from a man with fifty-two followers who claimed to be a government watchdog that caught my editor’s eye.

“Why would any adult publicly shame a twelve-year-old girl as demonic?” he asked during our weekly editorial meeting at the magazine.

“Where is it?” one of my colleagues asked.

“Oak Creek Canyon.”

“Where’s that?”

“Arizona.”

Momentary pause. “They’re all quacks out there.”

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The Interstitial
The Interstitial

Published in The Interstitial

The Interstitial strives to curate intelligent, insightful, and thought-provoking pieces about what it means to be human. We bring our readers a distilled view of the complexities, contradictions, and edges of humanity across all genres.

Shari Lopatin
Shari Lopatin

Written by Shari Lopatin

Former journalist all about big ideas and good stories. I write about life, culture, & social issues. No AI here! www.sharilopatin.com

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