The Wonder of All Things by Jason Mott

Author:Jason Mott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Even if Ava remembered what had happened with the deer, her mother would not have let her talk about it. In the days following their journey into the woods Heather treated her daughter like delicate glass. At bedtime, on that first night, she tucked her daughter in and knelt beside the bed and asked, “Do you remember?”

Ava closed her eyes and thought as hard as she could about their walk together, but she could not recall. She shook her head, and so her mother recounted the story to her.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Heather said.

“Did I really help it?”

“You did,” Heather said. “But you scared me, too.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Ava replied. “Tell me again how it happened.”

Then Heather would retell of their walk, of the deer with the arrow through its lung, of the two of them kneeling beside it, expecting to share its last moments. This was the time when Ava would become excited. She would grip her bedcovers and squeeze them to her chest and a grin would spread across her face. “What happened next?” she would ask. And Heather would act out the way Ava pulled the arrow from the animal’s chest. The two of them would fix their hands together and pull the imaginary arrow out together.

“And then I covered up the blood and closed my eyes?” Ava asked.

“That’s right,” Heather replied. “And you’re sure you don’t remember anything else? You’re sure you don’t remember what you did or what you thought?”

“No,” Ava said. “I wish I did.”

Over and over again the story was passed from mother to daughter, refined just a little more each time, until it had become as much of a tale as that of men who discover icebergs buried beneath mountains. They shaped it together, with no input from Macon because he did not know about it. It was a secret between a mother and daughter. Heather asked her daughter about how it happened. She wanted the answers, but she began to realize that Ava did not have them. And, eventually, she wondered how much of it she could even believe herself. At the end of the day, all that had happened was that her daughter pressed her hands on a wounded animal and, perhaps out of fear, the animal mustered up strength enough to stand and flee into the woods. For all she knew, it might have marched out of sight only to die the death it was already destined to have.

“He wouldn’t believe us if we told him,” Heather told her daughter when the child asked why she couldn’t tell her father. “He’s the type of man that understands what he can grab ahold of. Not like you and me. He’d never believe us, and if he did, he’d want to tell people about it.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Ava asked.

“You passed out afterward and I don’t know why. I just know that I don’t ever want that to happen to you again. And if other people found out about this—even your dad—they might want you to keep doing it.

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.