In the Valley of the Sun by Andy Davidson EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Andy Davidson
- Language: English
- Genre: Horror Suspense
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
THE SUNDOWNER INN
SUNDAY
October 5
The boy sat in church clothes on the steps of the
farmhouse, a white rabbit in his lap. He tumbled the rabbit in his arms,
cradled it, all the while looking out from the wide morning shade of the
porch to a spot far down the grassy hill, where his mother now stood, her
back to him, the wind pulling at the hem and sleeves of her Sunday dress,
the one with the yellow birds over blue and the high lace collar. She stood
like a steel bolt set on end, balanced and still.
Earlier, the woman and the boy had looked out together from inside the
house, from behind a shut screen door. Staring out. A pickup was parked in
the gravel lot behind the motel. A cabover camper sat on its back. The
camper was filmed in orange road dust, a single long crack in the sleeper
window. The crack was sealed with duct tape. There were six other hookups
behind the Sundowner, and all of them, like the motel itself, were empty.
The woman had put her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Stay,” she’d
told him. “And don’t come down less I call.” She had looked at him, and
the boy had nodded, a red clip-on tie in one hand, his shirt collar buttoned
tight. After that, his mother had kissed him atop his head and pushed
through the door, fly-screen slapping behind her. She went down the hill in
bold, long strides.
The boy ran through the house and out the back and past the clothesline,
past the old windmill and tank, and into the small, tin-roofed shed, where in
the dark the two white Netherland dwarf rabbits sat in wire cages atop a
makeshift work table the boy’s father had built. Both nibbling fresh cabbage
stems. The boy scooped the female from her cage—a warm, white handful
—and went round the corner of the house, and when he saw his mother at
the foot of the hill, he sat down on the porch steps to wait and watch,
holding the rabbit close.
Today of all days, the boy thought. He ran his hands through the rabbit’s
fur. She better not take anything for granted. It could be any mean son of a
bitch in that thing.
His mother turned in the scant brown grass and when she saw the boy on
the steps with his rabbit she waved.
The boy waved back.
Annabelle Gaskin stood in the sage at the edge of the motel, one hand
shielding her eyes from the morning sun, the other clenching and
unclenching a fold of dress at her side. The wind pushed tumbleweeds
across the fields and highway and gathered them like wayward chicks
beneath the brick portico of the old filling station that was the motel’s office
and cafe. The farmhouse cat, an orange tabby with a bobbed tail and a leaky
eye, sat on the concrete pump island, licking its paw. Atop the station’s
roof, what was left of a great winged horse—a white Pegasus of molded
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