"Elizabeth Hand - Last Summer on Mars Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

He stuck his thumb out to indicate Ariel, her long black hair frizzed and
bound
with leather thongs, an old multicolored skirt flapping around her legs. She
was
talking to a slender man with close-cropped blond hair and goatee, wearing a
sky-blue eartan and shabby Birkenstock sandals. "That your mom?"

"Yeah." Moony shrugged and glanced at the man in the cartan. He and Ariel both
turned to look at their children. The man grinned and raised his wine glass.
Ariel did a little pirouette and blew a kiss at Moony.

"Looks like she did too much of the brown acid at Woodstock," Jason announced,
and flopped onto the grass. Moony glared down at him.

"She wasn't at Woodstock, asshole," she said, and had started to walk away
when
the boy called after her.
"Hey -- it's a joke! My name's Jason --" He pointed at the man with Ariel.
"That's my father. Martin Dionysos. But like that's not his real name, okay?
His
real name is Schuster but he changed it, but I'm Jason Schuster. He's a
painter.
We don't know anyone here. I mean, does it ever get above forty degrees?"

He scrambled to his feet and looked at her beseechingly. Smaller even than
Moony
herself, so slender he should have looked younger than her, except that his
sharp face beneath floppy white-blond hair was always twisted into some ironic
pronouncement, his blue eyes always flickering somewhere between derision and
pleading.

"No," Moony said slowly. The part about Jason not changing his name got to
her.
She stared pointedly at his thin arms prickled with gooseflesh, the
fashionable
surfer-logo T-shirt that hung nearly to his knees. "You're gonna freeze your
skinny ass off here in Maine, Jason Schuster." And she grinned.

He was from San Francisco. His father was a well-known artist and a member of
the Raging Faery Queens, a gay pagan group that lived in the Bay Area and
staged
elaborately beautiful solstice gatherings and AIDS benefits. At Mars Hill,
Martin Dionysos gave workshops on strengthening your aura and on clear nights
led the community's men in chanting at the moon as it rose above Penobscot
Bay.
Jason was so diffident about his father and his father's work that Moony was
surprised, the single time she visited him on the West Coast, to find her
friend's room plastered with flyers advertising Faery gatherings and newspaper
photos of Martin and Jason at various ACT-HP events. In the fall Jason would