Page 17 - Mateo and the Gift of Presence audio flip book Ch 1-2

What Happened Next

realized that dinnertime was fast approaching and he’d likely
have to eat another piece of tasteless purple fruit or waste away
from hunger.
It didn’t occur to Mateo that he might fix his own
dinner, by scouting through the forest to find something edible
and then cooking it up over a camp fire.

Dinners at the fine house by the sea appeared on the
table as if by magic, and Mateo’s parents had long ago given up
on asking him to help. He had some nebulous idea that cooking
was involved, with pots and pans and oil and such. But beyond
that, he was completely clueless.
Mateo was coddled, you see. His parents thought they
were doing him a favor, but they had made him helpless and
dependent instead. And at the age of ten, when boys in other
cultures hunt game with arrows and bring it home to feed their

families, this made Mateo a rather pathetic creature, though he
never thought about himself like that.
In truth, Mateo was nowhere close to starvation, and
could have subsisted for many months on seafood at the beaches
nearby, if he’d only gone exploring. But instead, he started to
feel very sorry for himself, spinning a story that a forest that
had felt so wonderfully home-like had unfairly betrayed him by

failing to provide dinner at the expected hour.
You can decide at this point whether you want to give
Mateo the peanut butter sandwiches you brought with you into
this chapter. But I advise against it because someone else in this
story will soon need them much more than well-fed Mateo, and
you may prefer to give them to her instead.

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