direction. Her body twisted toward a heavy wire and she managed to hang on to the braided metal, still hot from the lightning strike.

In this part of the story, the “act of falling” symbolizes impending doom. In the passage, the mother has remarked upon the amount of actions that can be taken to survive “within the act of falling," or within the split second between enjoying safety and facing doom. Rather than reaching for her husband’s ankle, which seems like the most obvious and emotional reaction to falling with a beloved, the mother twists her body around and hangs onto the “braided metal, still hot from the lightning strike.” Subjugating her natural responses of physical and emotional pain to reason, the mother survives.

This value of presence of mind during crisis is also later reinforced when the narrator tells the story of how her mother rescued her from the burning room when she was a child. In the story, the narrator too has done everything she was instructed to do during a fire situation, and in so doing, demonstrates the ability to stay calm and use reason during a crisis situation. She has tested the door handle to see if it is hot, stuffed her rug into the crack to contain the fire, and then sat down to wait for help. In this scenario, fire represents impending doom. Just as the narrator is about to be consumed by the fire, her mother has the presence of mind to act when others, such as her husband and the firemen, do not. She uses the tree and her skills as a trapeze artist to get to her daughter’s upper story room through the window, and even presents herself as calm to avoid frightening her child, even though her heartbeat tells another story.

Finally, darkness represents impending doom in the story, but at a slower pace. The narrator’s mother cannot see, readers are told at the beginning of the tale. Despite being ultimately doomed to deteriorate further, the mother lengthens her well being by moving slowly and carefully about the house. The narrator says that her mother has never “lost her balance or bumped into a closet door left careless open,” and in the very next sentence, the narrator attributes her mother’s carefulness to “early training.” What the reader must put together is that the training that has led to her mother living such a careful life was in the moments of disaster she survived.

The following quote probably best represents the connection between symbolic darkness and the calm use of reason to survive:

It seems incredible that she would work high above the ground when any fall could be so dangerous, but the explanation—I know from watching her go blind—is that my mother lives comfortably in extreme elements. She is one with the constant dark now, just as the air was her home, familiar to her, safe, before the storm that afternoon.

The narrator's mother lives in the frame of mind that darkness is “constant”; just as she was comfortable and felt safe in the air as a trapeze artist, despite the obvious dangers, so now she is familiar with the idea that death is always a threat, and operates as if comfortable with the reality.

The title of "The Leap" conjures the words of the Existentialist Soren Kierkegaard, who described faith as a leap. The narrator's mother, Anna Avalon, who made a living in leaping with faith into the arms of her husband, also decided to leap twice in the faith of her belief in the importance of maternal love in order to save her children: the unborn baby during the circus accident--

As he swept past her on the wrong side, she could have grasped his ankle, the toe-end of his tights, and gone down clutching him. Instead, she changed direction--

and the narrator as a child in a burning home. Anna had enough faith in the importance of motherhood and the saving of another life that she has twice risked her own life and leaped to save her children. For Anna Avalon human life has always been precious and meaning in her life has depended upon those for whom she is responsible; therefore, she has made leaps.  This, then, is a theme of "The Leap"--the importance of the life of one's child, a being who shapes the meaning of love.

The conflict in The Leap by Louise Erdrich is in the choice of whose life to save and it appears twice. The narrator is telling the tale of how she came to be. In doing so, she recounts the two occasions on which her mother had to make a choice about whose life/lives to risk and whose to save. The first came while the narrator's mother was pregnant and still performing with her husband, the narrator's father, as a circus trapeze artist. A terrible lightning storm sent a bolt directly to the Big Top while the two were in mid-flight in a stunt. Her mother had a split-second choice to make and, instead of grabbing for her falling husband and joining him in his plunge to death, she grabbed a burning cable to save her baby at the cost of great personal harm.

The second incident came when the narrator was a child and the house caught on fire while her mother was away from home for a bit. The narrator was trapped upstairs in the blazing house when her mother came home to firemen at an impasse as to how to rescue the little girl. Once again the mother had a choice to make as to whose life to risk and whose life to save. She stripped off her clothes, climbed a tree, went out on a dangerous limb (physically and metaphorically), leapt to the house and, suspended by her heels dug into the roof's drain gutter, pulled her child to safety through the open bedroom window.

This is an interesting question because there are no direct dialogue passages in "The Leap." There are, however, indirect dialogue passages. Dialogue is the exchange of direct comments between characters or in directly stated monologue that are indicated by quotation marks, some call them inverted apostrophe marks. Here is a random example of direct dialogue:

Tat the cat said, "I should like Christmas pudding."

Oscar, the big black cat with the large yellow eyes, said, "We shall be sure to supply you with some when the time comes."

Indirect dialogue is when the narrator or a character says that someone said something. Here is another random example, this time of indirect dialogue:

Tat the cat faced Oscar, the big black cat with the large yellow eyes, and told him how very much he should like Christmas pudding. Oscar, having a heart as large as his eyes, replied to Tat that he should glady be supplied with Christmas pudding when the time came.

You can see in the second random example that we receive the same information (plus the narrator's comment on Oscar), but the dialogue that is being reported is embedded in the narrator's words. Indirect dialogue can also be embedded in a character's words, like in this other random example:

"I was speaking to Tat," said Oscar, the big black cat with large yellow eyes, "and learned that he should like Christmas pudding. I told him that he shall surely have it when the time comes."

In "The Leap," the dialogue is indirect and of the style of the second random example. The narrator, Anna's daughter, relays to the reader what those speaking said, but she does this through her own voice, just as the random narrator above relays what Tat and Oscar said. Here are a couple of examples of indirect dialogue from "The Leap":

They laughed and flirted openly as they beat their way up again on the trapeze bars.

when I opened the window she told me to raise it wider and prop it up with the stick so it wouldn't crush her fingers.

my mother asked him to unzip her dress. When he wouldn't be bothered, she made him understand.

There are other examples of indirect dialogue in "The Leap." Just look for the bits where someone's conversation is suggested. Also, Erdrich uses this technique so effectively that she evokes the mental image of the conversation ongoing.

[Tat the cat and Oscar, the big black cat with the large yellow eyes, are the creation of Audrey Titcombe (author), Bill Titcombe (illustrator). The random dialogue is my own invention.]

There are actually two physical leaps and one psychological one. The physical ones take place under the circus tent and on a roof of a home; the psychological one occurs in the hospital when the mother learns to read. All three of these leaps save lives. While different from one another, all three leaps occur in the atmosphere of crisis.

• The first leap occurs during an electrical storm in which lightning strikes the main pole and the electricity races down the guy wires. Anna Avalon could have grabbed her husband's ankles and fallen with him, but she twisted her body and changed directions, desperately grasping the guy wire, saving her life. 
  However, she burned her hands severely. She was lowered carefully to the sawdust ring; however, a rescuer accidentally broke her arm in freeing her from the entanglement of wire. So, she spent a month and a half in the hospital where her baby was stillborn.
• While she was in the hospital, Anna learned to read "as a way to overcome the boredom and depression." This was her second leap, as her mind was opened to the printed page; in addition, she fell in love with her doctor, the narrator's father.

"I wonder if my father calculated the exchange he offered: one form of flight for another.

• The third leap occurred after the mother and father return home from their dinner date and discover that the house is in flames. Although it has been years since her acrobatic act, Anna strips off her dress and climbs a broken ladder, then inches along the length of a tree bough until she is able to grab a limb and swing toward the house. However, the branch cracks and falls to the ground as Anna leaps through the air and lands on the roof. Then, she hangs upside down from the backs of her heel on the gutter, instructing her daughter how to swing open the window. She enters the room and grabs Anna; they fly out the window together heading downward to the firefighters net and safety.

I take it that your question refers to the different elements of plot that can be found in any story. What can confuse us in this story is the way that flashback is used, which therefore means that the story is presented in a non-chronological fashion. This can make it hard to follow the plot and what happens. However, the exposition comes at the beginning of the story and presents the narrator's mother as being old and talks about her "cat-like grace" even though she is blind. The rising action talks about her past as a blind trapeze artist and the way in which she suffered a tragedy, with the climax coming as the narrator remembers when her house was on fire as a child and how her mother rescued her. The resolution comes as the narrator remembers learning the truth of her mother's words herself: "As you fall, there is time to think." The last paragraph describes a very moving intimacy and closeness between the narrator and her mother as they fall together down from the narrator's bedroom window into the circle that the firemen were holding out for them to fall into.