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

be
staying in Maine, while she returned to high school. Ultimately it was the
thought that she might not see him again that made Moony decide to spend this
last summer at Mars Hill.

"That's what you're wearing to First Night?"

Moony started at her mother's voice, turned to see Ariel in the middle of the
summer cottage's tiny living room. Wine rocked back and forth in her mother's
glass, gold shot with tiny sunbursts from the crystals hung from every window.
"What about your new dress?"

Moony shrugged. She couldn't tell her mother about Jason's dream, about the
black dress he'd seen her wearing. Ariel set great store by dreams, especially
these last few months. What she'd make of one in which Moony appeared in a
black
dress and Ariel didn't appear at all, Moony didn't want to know.

"Too hot," Moony said. She paused in front of the window and adjusted one of
three silver crosses dangling from her right ear. "Plus I don't want to
upstage
you."

Ariel smiled. "Smart kid," she said, and took another sip of her wine.

Ariel wore what she wore to every First Night: an ankle-length patchwork skirt
so worn and frayed it could only be taken out once a year, on this ceremonial
occasion. Squares of velvet and threadbare satin were emblazoned with suns and
moons and astrological symbols, each one with a date neatly embroidered in
crimson thread.

Sedona, Aug 15, 1972. Mystery Hill, NH, 5/80. The Winter Garden 1969. Jajouka,
Tangiers, Marrakech 1968.

Along the bottom, where many of the original squares had disintegrated into
fine
webs of denim and chambray, she had begun piecing a new section: squares that
each held a pair of dates, a name, an embroidered flower. These were for
friends
who had died. Some of them were people lost two decades earlier, to the War,
or
drugs or misadventure; names that Moony knew only from stories told year after
year at Mars Hill or in the kitchen at home.

But most of the names were those of people Moony herself had known. Friends of
Ariel's who had gathered during the divorce, and again, later, when Moony's
father died, and during the myriad affairs and breakups that followed. Men and
women who had started out as Ariel's customers and ended as family. Uncle Bob
and Uncle Raymond and Uncle Nigel. Laurie Salas. Tommy McElroy and Scan
Jacobson. Chas Bowen and Martina Glass. And, on the very bottom edge of the