Ava's Gift. Jason Mott
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“Because it’s what people do when they don’t know what else to say,” Brenda said matter-of-factly.
“She’s doing fine,” Macon said, walking up beside them. “And she’s going to be even better with each and every day,” he added.
She hugged Ava again and said, “Well, whatever the hell it is, we’ll sort it out. Don’t worry any more than you have to.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ava said, peeking around the woman.
“I suppose you want to say hello to Wash,” she said as she released Ava and stepped aside.
Ava and Wash met each other just beneath the eaves of the porch. He was still pale, Ava thought, but he seemed to be doing well enough.
“Hey,” the boy said softly.
“You’re not going to show me your stomach again, are you? Because you really don’t have anything worth showing,” Ava said. “You know that giant marshmallow guy at the end of the Ghostbusters movie? That’s totally what you reminded me of.”
“Shut up,” Wash said, grinning.
“I’ve had nightmares about it,” Ava continued.
“Shut up!” he said, and finally he stepped forward and hugged her. He smelled like pines and grass and the river.
“Okay, okay,” Macon said, walking over. “Break it up. We’ve got a dinner to eat. And I’m starving.”
Dinner was a blur of sweet and fried foods and conversations about the hospital, about what was going on in the town, about what the internet was saying about the air show, how far the videos had spread.
The subject no one discussed, the subject they all talked around, was what exactly had happened that day. What exactly did Ava do, and how? And why couldn’t she remember it? Would it truly fix itself? And what of Wash? Was he really healed? Like some rare breed of sword swallowers, they swallowed their curiosity that night.
After dinner, Wash and Ava sat alone on the front porch, looking up at the stars and listening to Macon, Carmen and Brenda in the kitchen telling stories about how Stone Temple used to be—conversations sparked by the news reports of how the town had been taken over by people in the recent days.
“Does it hurt?” Wash asked.
“Does what hurt?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Anything, I guess. You don’t really look like yourself,” Wash said.
“For a person who reads as much as you do, you’d think you’d be a little better at describing things, Wash.”
“Whatever,” Wash said.
A small cricket made its way up onto the porch. It sat on the worn oak wood and looked at the two children. It did not sing for them.
“You know what I mean.”
She did know what he meant, of course, even if she did not want to admit to it. She noticed it immediately in the days after she woke up in the hospital. It was on the day when she was well enough to get out of bed on her own and make it to the bathroom. Macon was there with her and tried to help her, but she had inherited stubbornness from her mother. She refused him and, very slowly, made her way to the bathroom as he watched her every step, ready to leap up to help her. “I’m fine,” she told him when she finally reached the bathroom.
She closed the door and stood before the sink. She was so tired from those few steps that she’d almost forgotten her reason for coming into the bathroom to begin with. She leaned in against the edge of the sink, huffing. When she finally caught her breath she lifted her head and saw a different version of herself in the mirror.
The girl in the mirror had Ava’s bones and skin, but the bones were too sharp, the skin pulled too tightly about the face. Her cheekbones, which were naturally sharp—another inheritance from her mother—looked like shards of stone reaching out from the side of a cliff. The color had drained from her usually dark skin, and it was dry and flaky, as though it might suddenly crack and bleed at any moment, worse than any winter windburn she’d ever known. It was mottled and spotted in places, though the appearance of it was so odd that she wondered if she might be imagining it.
This was the worst of it, she had thought that day.
Now she was out of the hospital and a part of her had hoped that the version of herself that she saw that day was gone. But now Wash, being of the honest nature that he was, had confirmed for her what she had known the entire time: nothing was healed, not really.
A cricket on the porch seemed to look up at them. Out in the night, among the darkness and grass and trees and breadth of the world, other crickets sang a soft melody. It was always a mystery, how creatures so tiny were able to build such a large presence for themselves in the world. The sound of the insects rose and filled Wash’s and Ava’s ears and drowned out the conversation they were not having—the one they both knew they should have, the one about what really happened that day, beneath the rubble and debris of the fallen grain silo.
“It must be sick,” Wash said, looking down at the silent insect. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t just come up here this close to us like this.” He leaned forward, but the insect did not retreat, as it should have. “Yeah,” Wash said, “definitely sick. Or hurt. Did you know that you can always tell the males apart from the females because the males are the only ones that chirp?”
“You’re rambling, Wash,” Ava said. A chill swept over her and she folded her arms across her chest to keep warm.
“Sorry,” Wash said. He reached down and gently picked up the cricket. It was a delicate black marble in his hand. It did not try to escape. It only positioned itself awkwardly in his hand. “Its leg is broken,” Wash said. He showed it to Ava.
The silence that came and filled the space between them then was one of demand, one of curiosity, one that sought answers to a question so confounding that, between the two of them, they could not think of another way to answer it.
“Have you always been able to do it?” Wash asked.
Ava opened her palm.
Wash placed the wounded cricket inside.
“Does it matter?” Ava asked. “Does it make me different?”
“If you thought you had to keep it secret, even from me,” Wash replied, “I guess that would make you different than I thought you were. That’s all.”
“I just wanted you to be better,” Ava said.
For a moment, Ava only stared at the insect. It shined like a pebble, glossy and iridescent in the dim lighting from the porch. She did not know exactly what to do with the creature. She looked at Wash, as though he might have the answer, but the boy looked back at her blankly with his brown eyes and his mop of brown hair.
Ava closed her palm. The cricket wiggled about briefly, trying to maneuver away from her fingers. She was slow in her movements, being sure to keep a wide pocket in the pit of her hand so that the insect was not crushed.
“What now?” she asked.
Wash shrugged his shoulders.
Ava nodded. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the thing she held in her hand. From the wall of darkness in her mind, the insect began to emerge. It was shiny and small and full of angles. She thought about its broken leg and how she wanted it to be better.
Then the cricket she saw inside her mind—which was large and the center of her focus—receded into darkness and, in its place, there came what looked like a Ferris wheel lit up at night. Ava smelled cotton candy and caramel apples. She was gripped by the sensation of being very small and being carried on someone’s shoulders. The person that carried her smelled like her father—sweat and grease and earthiness. She soon understood that this was memory in which she now lingered. Something from the recesses of her mind having to do with a Fall Festival they had attended