"Amy Sterling Casil - Jonny Punkinhead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Casil Amy Sterling)

multiplied itself, changed things. Then, they bore children. Children with
something worse than missing limbs, or hydrocephaly or spina bifida or muscular
dystrophy or cerebral palsy.

These children were born with bizarre defects, like Jonny's; a head sized and
shaped like a great jack-o-lantern covered with patchy hair, extra fingers,
extra toes, a spinal deformity that rendered him paraplegic and the ultimate
horror, a blind, filmy, goggling third eye.

Then there were the children with no eyes, merely a nose hole and a gaping maw
for a mouth. The children with three arms and a tail, with fishy scales and
slit-eyes, the ones with fins in place of hands and feet.

And the horrible irony was that most of Sherman's charges were of normal
intelligence. No gravely mentally disabled among them, these children were born
with the ability, though they might not have even had eyes with which to see, of
knowing how different they were, and one day perhaps realizing that despite all
their pretty names, like "differently abled," they were what most people called
monsters.

I know the histories of our children, save the few found in dumpsters or on some
church doorstep. Most are inner city kids, many of them brown or black or golden
under their fur or scales. Jonny is black.

On certain nights, when I wake in a sweat at three in the morning and trudge to
the patio for a cigarette, because my wife Monique will not allow me to smoke in
the house, I wonder if God forgot all these children, while they grew in the
womb. Why did he gift them with these deformities, why not merely with
old-fashioned spina bifida or muscular dystrophy or retardation or fetal alcohol
syndrome?

This virus, it's like Blake's scaly angel of death, coming for the first-born
sons of the Egyptians, their parents waking to find their beloved children dead.
Blake's angel, drawing his foul gossamer wings over the lintels of all the
parents of all the children of Sherman.

It's the poison in our lives leaking out, I think, as I drive home to Monique
and my lovely girl Karen, who is fifteen and blossoming and perfect in every
way; fierce poison leaching from the evil that is our modem lives, destroying
and twisting genes, changing babies into monsters. It's the vile despair of the
inner city, the hopelessness, the cruelty, the poverty, writing itself large and
making itself manifest, opening itself to the cruel, blind dance of proteins,
amino acids.

I've left Sherman, and I'm pulling into the pizza place, to bring home a treat
for Karen. We like pizza. Monique is on a diet again, and if I don't bring
something home, Karen and I will be stuck with pot pies, and I can't bear the
thought of that.

I'm still thinking about Jonny and his absent grandmother as I park. I don't