"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The String (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

two
knives out of the drawer and tied one end to each knife.
Then he started to pull little loops from the tight core.
Each loosening opened other possible avenues of unravelling, and he stared
into
the heart of the string, more and more fascinated. Each time he created some
slack, he followed it down into the core, pulling and teasing, until it was
lost
in the nest of tightness. Each time, he felt a little ping of joy when the
core
of the string became more and more revealed.
It was three a.m. before he stopped, surprised at the time. How could he have
become so absorbed? He was about to untie the string from the knives and
throw
it away when he stopped, smiled, and chucked the whole thing in a drawer. At
least it was something to do.
He went to bed feeling better than he had in a long time.
#

When he got home from work that night Jessica ran to meet him and said,
"Guess
what? My lung capacity increased."
"Is that true?" Dan asked Anita, who was peeling carrots.
She didn't turn, but stopped what she was doing as she spoke. "That's what
they
said," she replied, in the terribly even voice she used whenever they
discussed
Jessica's medical problems. Then she went back to scraping carrots.
"That's wonderful, pumpkin," Dan said, and picked Jessica up, tossed her in
the
air. They'd learned to celebrate about anything, but this was something
extraordinary.
"Yeah," she said, laughing. She went over and opened the silverware drawer so
she could set the table. "What's this?" she said, and pulled out the wad of
string dangling from one of the knives. "Is this the kite string?"
"Oh, Dan, I thought I told you to throw that away," said Anita.
Dan grabbed it, feeling unaccountably protective. "It's fun," he said. "You'd
have to pay a lot of money for a puzzle as good as this." He put it up on a
shelf. "Here, I'll help you set the table," he said.
After dinner, when everything was put away, Anita flipped on her CAD again.
Her
work was never done. Jessica started her homework, and Dan got his string
down
off the shelf and started to play with it.
It was wound quite tightly. He needed something to slide underneath the
strands
and pull them. Absently, he got up, rummaged in the drawer, and got two
oyster
forks. Hooking one through the central morass, he used the other to work a
loop