"Elgin,.Suzette.Haden.-.Ozark.-.01.-.Twelve.Fair.Kingdoms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

chocolate and so alive it clung to your fingers (and to
everything else, so that you spent half your life picking Guthrie
hair off of any surface you cared to examine, but we'll let that
pass). And she had the Guthrie bones ... a face shaped like
a heart, and great green eyes in it over cheekbones high arched
like the curve of a bird's wing flying, and the long throat that
melted into perfect shoulders. . . . And oh, those breasts of
hers! Three children she'd suckled till they walked, and those
breasts looked as maiden as mine. She was well named, was
Thorn of Guthrie, and many of us had felt the sharp point of
her since she stepped under the doorbeam of Castle Brightwa-
ter thirty-one years ago. I have always suspected that those
Guthrie bones made her womb an uncomfortable place to lie,
giving her a way to poke at you even before you first breathed

6 SUZETTE HADEN ELGIN

the air of the world, but that's a speculation I've kept to myself.
I hope.

"Well, now that we're thoroughly disgraced in front of the
whole world," sighed my grandmother, "what do we propose
to do about it?"

"This is not the first manifestation of something cockeyed,"
said Jubal Brooks. "You know that. Responsible."

"There was the milk," my grandmother agreed. "Four
Mundy's in a row now it's been sour straight from the goat. I
assume you don't find that normal, granddaughter"

"And there was the thing with the mirrors," said Emmalyn.
"It frightened me, my mirror shattering in my hand like that."

I expect it did frighten her, too; everything else did. I was
hoping she wouldn't notice the spiderweb. She was a sorry
excuse for a woman; on the other hand, we couldn't of gotten
Patience of dark without taking the sistci; too, and all in all it
had been a bargain worth making.

Patience was sitting with her left little finger tapping her
bottom lip, a gesture she made when she was waiting for a hole
to come by in the conversation, and I turned to her and made
the hole.

"Patience, you wanted to say something?"

"I was thinking of the streetsigns," she said.

"The streetsigns?"