The Untold (Courtney Collins) by Courtney Collins

Author:Courtney Collins
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-28T21:00:00+00:00

SHE DID NOT KNOW how much time had passed. She had skinned the roo completely. She wished that she could skin herself, that she could pare herself right back to bone and pull apart those bones and reconstruct herself again.

She lit a fire and cooked some of the meat but as the fire licked up she saw the carnage she had created and her appetite was gone. She was disgusted with herself and with the waste of it.

There was blood all over her.

She smothered the fire with dirt and spread out the fur of the roo on the ground and then she lay down on it and wept. She was inconsolable.

Jack Brown was nowhere within reach and he would never be. The pact to wait was not for the reason she told him, that they must choose the right moment to escape. She had asked him to wait because she was trying to muster the courage to tell him that the child inside her was not his, it was Fitz’s. In almost six months she had not found the courage to tell him. At first she thought it could have worked, their escape to the mountains, man, woman, child, seeking freedom. But could he have ever loved a child of Fitz’s? Or could she? Imagining Jack Brown was my father was the only way my mother did not find me a repellent thing. As I grew inside her, she did her best to blot out my nasty biology. But the truth remained. And the truth was awful.

I could not hold that against her, her fiction. Because in it there was a seed of truth. Jack Brown could have been my father and, like my mother, I would have preferred that he was.

My poor mother curled against the fur of the roo. She pulled it around her and then she said, Hold me.

And her own words surprised her. But the words kept coming:

Hold me.

Hold me.

Hold me.

And in their utterance, she did not have another thought.

In the morning the stench of the pelt was made real by the sun and she unrolled herself from it and peeled off her bloodied clothes. She walked silent and naked, leading Houdini, afraid of how much death was in her.

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.