The Leap

Summary:

This story is about a girl narrating her life and her mother’s life. Her mother’s name was Anna and she work as a blindfold trapeze with her firsthusband Harry Avalon. The narrator says that she owes her existence to her mother three times and that’s what this story is about.

The first was when shesafe herself. Her mother used to be an acrobat with a group called the Flying Avalons. When she was seven months pregnant, she was performing the finale of their actwith her husband when the circus tent was struck by lightning her husband fell into the crowd and Anna grabbed a guy wire, which was superheated by lightning. Herhusband died but she survived.

While she was in the hospital, Anna met her second husband, a doctor, who was the narrator's father. The doctor taught Anna to readwhile she was hospitalized, and they fell in love. The narrator refers to the fact that her mother fell in love with her father and gave birth to her as the secondreason she owes her for her existence.

The narrator owes her existence to her mother a third time because of an incident that occurred when she was sevenyears old. The narrator was home with a babysitter when their farmhouse caught fire. By the time her parents returned home she was trapped in the upstairs room. To saveher child, Anna climbed to a tree that was closed to the narrator’s room then she made a leap and hanged on the roof. Anna crawled into the room take her and thenthey jumped out the window to the firemen’s net, and when they were falling she knew it was true what her mother told her “As you fall, there is time to think”.