"Esther M. Friesner - Helen Rembembers the Stork Club" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)
Esther M. Friesner
Copyright ┬йCopyright 2005 by Esther M. Friesner
First published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct-Nov 2005
Old habits die hard. Every morning Helen wakes up at the same god-awful hour, the same time that
Aggie used to start barking for his first walk of the day. Aggie is three years dead, ashes in a
pink-and-gold J. C. Penney vase on the mantelpiece, and yet she still wakes up, come rain or come
shine, come hell or high water, to walk a dead dog through the city streets and to see if anything's
changed.
Has it? That depends on whether she looks out of her window or into her mirror. The city's springtime
still brings blossoms to the little gated communities of daffodils on Park Avenue and summer's always
stinking hot, except where spills of overchilled air from storefronts turn her sweat to icy tears as she
walks by. Autumn in New York is one of the few things she still doesn't find to be overrated, but winter's
a bitch that could give frigidity lessons to her fourth husband's third wife.
Today it's spring, and damn well about time. Each winter here seems to last just long enough for her to
start a serious flirtation with making the move to Florida at long, long last. But then what? There's not
enough money left in any of her accounts to pay for a little Pompano Beach piedтАФterre and still keep up
the payments on her mint cond. pre-war high ceil. 2 BR, LR w/FPL, frml DR gem. It's rent-controlled,
thanks be unto her dear, departed Daddy, who taught her the value of getting in on the ground floor with
real estate deals. Of course he was talking about Pompeii, but Helen knows enough to sift through all the
ve-ry slow-ly ut-tered instructions men benevolently insist on handing down to her. It's pearl-diving in
Her apartment is worth a fortune in today's market. If she went down to Florida only to discover that
fist-sized cockroaches and aggressive mildew held no allure, she'd never be able to afford another place
like this one; not in Manhattan, and she'll board Charon's ferry willingly long before she'll set foot on the
Brooklyn Bridge, thank you so very much.
So she can't move, though the landlord would be ecstatic if she did opt out of the city. Every time he sees
her, he looks at her with hot, hungry eyes. She knows it's no longer her flesh he craves to possess, but
her real estate. Plus a change, plus c'est la mme damn chose. That's how it was with her first husband,
too. Menelaus could have had his pick of plenty of other women once he discovered she'd flown the
Spartan coop, but none of them would give him the political clout to continue to rule her kingdom. (Not
that he ever told the truth of it to the Mykenaean troops massed up to take her back from Troy. It's
always best to claim you're fighting a war for high principles like love and honor, especially when you're
playing out the bloody Punch and Judy puppet show with other women's sons.)
Helen slips her feet into backless blue terrycloth slippers with white daisies embroidered on the toes and
shuffles into the bathroom. One of the forty-watt bulbs in the two-headed flower-blossom fixture over the
sink blew out last Tuesday and she still hasn't gotten around to replacing it. She rather likes the dim and
creamy lightтАФit's kind to her. The deeper wrinkles near her eyes lose some of their power to cut her to
the heart. Too bad the soft rings of sagging flesh around her neck refuse to do the same. They're her own
personal choke-collar, and Grampa Kronos really gets a kick out of yanking her chain.
She sighs and thinks wistfully of her bed. If she went back between the sheets and didn't come out until
tomorrow or the next day, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? Her friends are dead, dust and
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |