What the Animals Knew: The Red Water at the Ford The Reed & The Flame, #5

Note to Readers: This standalone short story is also included in the complete edition, The Reed & The Flame: A Collection of Short Stories of Faith and Endurance. If you already own the complete collection, you already have this story! Looking for the full journey? You can enjoy this story on its own or get all ten stories together in the collected volume.

We are innocent, and we are not clean.

The deer of one wood have kept the same ford since before there were men to trouble it. They know the fitness of the wolf and the turning of the year, the clean cold water on the teeth, the milk that carries the whole life of the wood down into every new fawn. And they know one thing more — a wrongness that comes with men and their iron: a killing that feeds nothing, a stain that will not wash out of the water. They have no word for it. They carry it anyway, age after age, and they go on.

Told entirely from inside the animals' wordless knowing — no human voice, no explanation, no sermon — What the Animals Knew is the formal experiment at the heart of The Reed & The Flame, a new collection from the author of The Candle. It renders the groaning of creation (Romans 8) from the one vantage that cannot sin and cannot look away: the innocent that suffers without fault, endures without being asked, and keeps coming back down to the water.