Granted by John David Anderson

Author:John David Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

26

Books can teach you only so much. Ophelia had been subjected to endless tocks of training, reading manual after manual and poring over pictures, but sometimes you can learn about a thing only by experiencing it firsthand.

And sometimes you had to get those hands dirty.

No one had ever bothered to teach Ophelia that there was treasure to be had in trash cans (outside of broken turkey bones, of course). She wasn’t trained to be a Scavenger. They certainly hadn’t told her that it was possible to find doughnuts in the garbage. Such a ludicrous thought. Who would throw away doughnuts?

And yet, here they were. A whole box of them sitting near the top of the plastic bin, beckoning with sugary promises that made her mouth water. Granted, it hadn’t been easy getting up there. Ophelia wasn’t at all ready to risk flying and further injuring her wing, so instead she carefully perched on Sam’s nose and he leapt up, putting his front paws as high as possible.

“Excuse me,” Ophelia said to the circle of bees who were dutifully fulfilling their own mission: Operation Feed the Queen. “Do you mind sharing?”

The bees, perhaps noting some distant kinship with another winged creature, simply nodded. Not much for conversation, bees. Great dancers, though. Ophelia stared greedily at the box that had come open when it was dumped. Its contents appeared untouched, though she was certain the bees had put their hairy mitts all over them. Half of the doughnuts glistened with glaze, and the other half were coated in white frosting like a crust of hard-packed snow on a mountain’s peak. Ophelia carefully lowered herself over the lip of the bin onto the box and took a deep breath. Garbage never smelled so good.

“Regular or frosted?” she called out to Sam.

“I don’t know. Which one is better?” he barked, the tip of his nose just peeking out over the edge.

“You really can’t go wrong.”

In the end she tossed over one of each for him, getting sugar flakes all over the front of her uniform, which was annoying but would be worth it. Then she took another white frosted for herself, heaving it up over the side before climbing back onto Sam’s snout and hanging on tight as he lowered her down. Both of the frosted doughnuts had hit the asphalt frosting side down and all three were covered in grit, but that didn’t stop Sam, and it wouldn’t stop her either.

“Oh,” he said, woofing down his first in three bites. “Oh. Yes. You were right. This is so much better than dead stuff.”

“Told you so,” Ophelia said, carefully picking out the tiny rocks and bits of dirt from the top of hers and then daintily tearing off handfuls with only her fingertips, already sticky. The doughnuts were stale—there had to be some reason they were thrown out—but even an old doughnut with enough frosting is better than most other things she could imagine. Ophelia broke off another piece and let it slowly dissolve on her tongue, the glaze going straight to her head, making her dizzy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.