Page 16 - Mateo and the Gift of Presence audio flip book Ch 1-2

Mateo and the Gift of Presence

“Perhaps Mrs. Hatfield will kick me out of school!”
he thought, in sudden delight. “She’ll tell my parents that
my purple fingers are distracting the other students and I’m
suspended forever!”
It was a fun fantasy, and Mateo could have spent many
hours enjoying it. But, in the otherworldly forest, there were

more interesting opportunities. So he walked over to the
nearest tree and climbed into its dark branches, wondering if
the purple fruit tasted sweet and juicy, like oranges, or bitter
and chewy, like the curly mustard greens his mother so often
served for dinner.
As it turned out, it was neither. It tasted like stale bread.
“Oh well,” he told himself, “a boy can’t be picky when
he’s starving.”
He dug in and finished off an entire fruit, which was

about the size of a mango but without the large seed, and then
swung about for a while, pretending he was a monkey.
“A monkey?” you might be asking. “Really?”
Well, I’m afraid so. But if you’re tempted to scoff at
Mateo at this point in the story, please don’t write him off quite
yet. Swinging from branch to branch in an alien forest is actu-
ally a lot of fun, especially when the limbs of the trees you’re

swinging in are close together like the bars on a jungle gym.
Any self-respecting child on such an adventure would surely
have climbed high in the forest canopy to get a view and find out
more about where he was. But that idea never crossed Mateo’s
mind. Instead, he played monkey for the next four hours, which
I shall skip over to save time, and it was nearly sunset before he

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