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

skirt, a square still peacock-bright with its blood-colored rose, crimson
letters spelling out John's name and a date the previous spring.

As a child Moony had loved that skirt. She loved to watch her mother sashay
into
the tiny gazebo at Mars Hill on First Night and see all the others laugh and
run
to her, their fingers plucking at the patchwork folds as though to read
something there, tomorrow's weather perhaps, or the names of suitors yet
unmet.

But now Moony hated the skirt. It was morbid, even Jason agreed with that.

"They've already got a fucking quilt," he said, bitterly. "We don't need your
more wearing a goddamn skirt."

Moony nodded, miserable, and tried not to think of what they were most afraid
of: Martin's name there beside John's, and a little rosebud done in
flower-knots. Martin's name, or Ariel's.

There was a key to the skirt, Moony thought as she watched her mother sip her
wine; a way to decode all the arcane symbols Ariel had stitched there over the
last few months. It lay in a heavy manila envelope somewhere in Ariel's room,
an
envelope that Ariel had started carrying with her in February, and which grew
heavier and heavier as the weeks passed. Moony knew there was something
horrible
in that envelope, something to do with the countless appointments Ariel had
since February, with the whispered phone calls and macrobiotic diets and the
resurgence of her mother's belief in devas and earth spirits and plain
old-fashioned ghosts.

But Moony said nothing of this, only smiled and fidgeted with her earrings.
"Go
ahead," she told Ariel, who had settled at the edge of a wicker hassock and
peered up at her daughter through her wineglass. "I just got to get some
stuff."
Ariel waited in silence, then drained her glass and set it on the floor.
"Okay.
Jason and Martin are here. I saw them on the hill --"

"Yeah. I know, I talked to them, they went to Camden for lunch, they can't
wait
to see you." Moony paced to the door to her room, trying not to look
impatient.
Already her heart was pounding.

"Okay," Ariel said again. She sounded breathless and a little drunk. She had
ringed her aquamarine eyes with kohl, to hide how tired she was. Over the last
few months she'd grown so thin that her cheekbones had emerged again, after