"Elizabeth Hand - Cleopatra Brimstone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

This one just kept growing and growing . . . When Liz Hand first talked to me about "Cleopatra Brimstone"
that a neat title?) she thought it would come in somewhere around eight thousand words. Then it began to grow
next time we chatted (this is e-mail I'm talking about; which, as I've said before, is equivalent to the Victorian p
systemтАФyou can get "mail" in the morning, again at noon, and yet again in the late afternoon), she said it
come in at about fourteen thousand words. By that time I was getting tight for space in the book but thought fou
thousand would be just fineтАФthen the story landed on my doorstep (with a solid ka-thump!j and I noted with h
that it had grown to almost twenty thousand words!
As things were really tight by that time, I thought about asking Liz to cut the storyтАФbut I just couldn't. Her w
(as in her novels Black Light and Glimmering) is so full-bodied and evocative that I had to present it as written.

Cleopatra Brimstone
Elizabeth Hand

Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orang
black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her, and the sunlight made
glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world fa
to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upward to grasp them but could not: they w
too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.
Could they ever have been real?
For years she thought she must have dreamed them. But one afternoon when she was ten
went into the attic, searching for old clothes to wear to a Halloween party. In a corner ben
a cobwebbed window she found a box of her baby things. Yellow-stained bibs and tiny f
jumpers blued from bleaching, a much-nibbled stuffed dog that she had no memor
whatsoever.
And at the very bottom of the carton, something else. Wings flattened and twisted ou
shape, wires bent and strings frayed: a mobile. Six plastic butterflies, colors faded and
wings giving off a musty smell, no longer eidolons of Eden but crude representation
monarch, zebra swallowtail, red admiral, sulphur, an unnaturally elongated skipper
Agrias narcissus. Except for the narcissus, all were common New World species that
child might see in a suburban garden. They hung limply from their wires, antennae long s
broken off; when she touched one wing it felt cold and stiff as metal.
The afternoon had been overcast, tending to rain. But as she held the mobile to
window, a shaft of sun broke through the darkness to ignite the plastic wings, bloodred,
green, the pure burning yellow of an August field. In that instant it was as though her e
being were burned away, skin hair lips fingers all ash; and nothing remained but the butter
and her awareness of them, orange and black fluid filling her mouth, the edges of her
scored by wings.

As a girl she had always worn glasses. A mild childhood astigmatism worsened when
was thirteen: she started bumping into things and found it increasingly difficult to concen
on the entomological textbooks and journals that she read voraciously. Growing pa
her mother thought; but after two months, Janie's clumsiness and concomitant heada
became so severe that her mother admitted that this was perhaps something more serious,
took her to the family physician.
"Janie's fine," Dr. Gordon announced after peering into her ears and eyes. "She needs to
the opthamologist, that's all. Sometimes our eyes change when we hit puberty." He gave
mother the name of an eye doctor nearby.
Her mother was relieved, and so was JaneтАФshe had overheard her parents talking the n
before her appointment, and the words CAT scan and brain tumor figured in their hu
conversation. Actually, Jane had been more concerned about another odd phy