Amantha's sudden little gasp for breath, her right hand to her delicate throat, is—her stepfather assumes—to do with the decidedly macabre character of the exhibit, increased by its presently claustrophobic confinement behind heavy curtain.
"It's okay, honey,” Donald says, immediately down in a squat and drawing his wondrously attractive stepdaughter into his comforting arms. “For some people, burials aren't sad times but actually happy ones, with all sorts of rejoicing and singing and dancing."
Donald is amazed by the sudden strength the child suddenly wields by wrapping his neck and pulling him tightly against her, her small and delicate cherubic mouth suddenly up so close to his ear that he can feel her little gasps of breath, sympathetically echoed by the frantic (frightened?) bird-like heartbeats beneath her undeveloped breasts.
"I can hear him screaming,” she whispers so softly that Donald thinks that he's misheard until she repeats, with a shudder, the very-same and strangely unsettling thing.
END
* * *
Visit www.mlrpress.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Scared Stiff Page 31
