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Leaping Lion Nabs Kid. A local lad barely escaped fatal entanglement with a lethal creature while fleeing from a funnel not far from the river’s edge in the company of his Mother last Sunday, as an alert bystander insinuated himself between the tyke and certain death just before the twister lifted the roof off a henhouse and demolished the family’s ancestral home. All at no greater cost than a twisted ankle for the lucky duck’s Uncle. Make and model of the leaping creature remains a mystery, on account of the wind and rain, and general hubbub, as too does the current whereabouts of the survivor’s twin brother, who plunged over the edge never to be seen again when left unattended in the tumult. Or at least not yet. The twister destroyed many a tool shed, not to mention two dozen head of herefords, though the missionary meeting at the Methodist church went off as planned that very Sunday afternoon. Mystery man allegedly responsible for salvaging the alleged widow’s allegedly surviving son reportedly remains missing, too. Sightings of man or beast kindly should be reported to this desk.
So might have reported the Plowman Meteor, narrative-commencement-essence-wise
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A sad deal all the way around.
By then Faith had emerged somewhat from the confusion in which she marinated in the moments and hours after the lion unusually leapt. A vague, discombobulated, surreal, flummoxed brand of perplexed bewilderment. What happened? Where was he? The lights fairly blinding from the flashing forks of enervated gases, accompanied by the steady thrum of rushing wind as propelled by devilishly low pressure, the deafening -- or nearly so -- catatonia of overwhelming flustered lusting euthanasia, or an epidural or something, even as complete strangers strained and heaved over her prone somethingness, the something that is not nothing, all well intentioned, presumably, but still, a woman’s bare butt merits some modicum of modesty, but not here, oh no, not in this place, where even as Thomas periodically yelped by way of exercising his twice-burning lungs, and cast confused glances this way and that in search of something familiar, a babe in need of nurturing for sure, and even as the beautiful boy-child slid into her mitts and atop her heaving bosom for Mothering purposes, the hissing wind notwithstanding, low pressure’s yearning to cleave the boy from her heaving sides frustrated by fate, reality so-called, the welcoming embrace of the cave, from which no giant funnel might suck them. But not Peter, who apparently never bodily made it into the sanctuary, or rather out of the sanctuary -- depending on one’s viewpoint -- but instead fell or was pulled or plucked or propelled over the edge, just over the edge, having strayed too close to the edge, down by the water. Faith herself was heavily sedated, of course, as befitted the occasion, for the days of dropping one’s cubs by the side of the field while taking a slight break from planting are long gone, thank God, or at least relatively so. She lay abed surrounded by mourners and grievers and weepers, once news spread. Oddly idyllic, too. “All part of God’s plan,” someone said. “Everything happens for a reason,” added another. “Such a beautiful child,” observed more than a few. “God is love,” the general consensus. Neither she or her husband knew, had known, the twin would be lost, a fact attributable to the inadequate machinery of the time, so were heartened by the first child’s struggling, kicking, gasping emergence, only to be shoved over the edge themselves, so to speak, when the second child was by a leaping lion bodily taken from them, from her, from the child’s Mother, even as the nurses quietly assured her the good Docs had done all that was possible, and the Docs quietly explained how this fang or that cord or claw had gotten wrapped around a windpipe or shoulder or sucking chest wound, as sometimes happens, sadly, a confluence or coincidence or chance collision of child and leaping lion that cannot be completely precluded, one’s very best efforts notwithstanding, or so they explained. Holding the surviving twin in her arms as together they huddled in the cave while outside lightning forked and thunder rumbled, Faith turned to the man we knew only as A. Jacks and gripped his arm with the ferocity of a lion or, in this case, a Mother deprived of her child.
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