Deadly Animals

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, mental illness, child abuse, child death, death by suicide, animal death, and graphic violence.

Ava Bonney, a 14-year-old girl, sneaks out of her apartment in the middle of the night. Ava creeps through the apartment building, grabbing her hidden Red Book and double-pointed blue pencil. Ava walks into Rubery’s dark streets and heads to an abandoned house where she has a “roadkill body farm” (4). Ava collects animals killed by traffic, and she observes their decomposition weekly. It’s her first time visiting the corpses at night, and she is excited to see her newest acquisitions, a snake and a fox.

While observing the fox, Ava notices an intense smell of putrefaction and too many greenbottle flies. She spots the source of the strange conditions: the corpse of her classmate, Mickey Grant, who has been missing for two weeks. Ava isn’t afraid to see a human body, but she quickly leaves the garden after saying the Rabbit’s Prayer from Watership Down. Ava calls the police, disguising her voice to report the body. Ava returns to her apartment, washes up, and slips into bed.