Lessons From Ducks by Tammy Robinson

Author:Tammy Robinson [Robinson, Tammy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00S29BUTG
Published: 2015-01-09T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter sixteen

Over the next few days, apart from when it was having a spell in the hot water cupboard, the egg barely left Anna’s sight. During the day she kept it close to her person, nestled in the safety of her bra where it could absorb the heat from her body and be comforted by the sound of her heart beating. If she did an activity that required exertion and therefore posed breakage risks to the egg, she did her hot water bottle trick. Sometimes she just sat in her armchair, the egg cupped in her hands and her hands held directly in the beam of a heat lamp she’d purchased from the local hardware store.

Apart from the third day when the shrill sound of the phone shattered the silence, she remained undisturbed. She knew without answering that it would be Judy calling to find out when she’d be back so she let it ring out.

No one knocked on the door.

No one text her cell phone, although they’d have been out of luck if they had as the majority of the time she forgot to charge the thing and it faded gently, beeping softly, into darkness.

It was just her and the egg.

Curiously, she couldn’t have felt less alone. There’d been times in the past when the sense of being all alone in the world had been so strong she’d even got so desperate as to go and knock on a neighbours door on the pretence of borrowing something, a hammer perhaps, even though she had two of her own, just to make sure she wasn’t the last person left alive.

Most of the time it didn’t bother her. She shrugged off the normal human need for companionship and wore a mantle of contended solitude instead, the ducks all the friends and replacement family she needed.

Now there was that feeling, like that feeling in the air when winter gasps out his last breaths and spring takes her first joyful steps across the grass leaving budding daffodils and ridiculously cute bouncing lambs in her wake.

When she placed the egg against her chest and felt the shell soaking up her warmth, she could have sworn she could see a light deep within. Muted and soft, but an unmistakable life force.

Anna researched everything she would need to know about caring for a newborn duckling. She ordered a bag of special food online, enough to last for a few weeks according to the website, by which stage the duckling would begin to eat vegetables and fruit and other foods. She found a website that sold pet accessories, for every pet under the sun it seemed, and even though she could easily have splurged and bought special drinking bowls and a fancy container to use as the ducklings bed, in the end she decided a bowl from the cupboard and an old litter tray she found in the garden shed would do the job just fine. She lined the litter tray with warm blankets she ripped up.

On the fourth day of Anna’s absence from work the world changed again.

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.