“What happened?”
He shook his head.
She grabbed his wrist.
He smiled and pointed toward the barn.
A fence nail.
A small cut.
Nothing serious.
She cleaned it anyway.
When she finished, Gideon handed her the notebook.
You worry too much.
Rosalie wrote:
Someone has to.
He stared at the words.
Then looked away.
But there was something strange about Gideon.
His deafness was complete enough that he often failed to notice loud sounds.
Yet sometimes Rosalie caught him reacting to things he should not have known about.
A horse shifting in the barn.
A door opening behind him.
A wagon approaching from the road.
It was as if he sensed vibrations rather than heard them.
His right ear was always slightly swollen.
Rosalie noticed it on the fourth day.
Then the fifth.
Then the sixth.
She finally wrote:
Does your ear hurt?
Gideon’s pencil stopped.
