"Elizabeth Hand - Prince of Flowers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

arranged the puppet at its bottom, wrapping Kleenex about its arms and face.
Hairbrush, wallet, lipstick: all thrown back into her purse, hiding the puppet beneath
their clutter. She repacked the crate with its sad array of blossoms, hammering the
lid back with her shoe. Then she scrabbled in the corner on her knees until she
located a space between stacks of cartons. With a resounding crack the empty box
struck the wall, and Helen grinned as she kicked more boxes to fill the gap. Years
from now another inventory technician would discover it and wonder, as she had
countless times, what had once been inside the empty carton.
When she crowded into the elevator that afternoon the leather handle of her purse
stuck to her palm like wet rope. She shifted the bag casually as more people stepped
on at each floor, heart pounding as she called goodbye to the curator for Indo-Asian
Studies passing in the lobby. Imaginary prison gates loomed and crumbled behind
Helen as she strode through the columned doors and into the summer street.
All the way home she smiled triumphantly, clutching her handbag to her chest. As
she fumbled at the front door for her keys a fresh burst of scent rose from the
recesses of her purse. Inside, another scent overpowered this faint perfume тАФ the
thick reek of creosote, rotting fruit, unwashed clothes. Musty and hot and dark as
the museum's dreariest basement, the only two windows faced on to the street.
Traffic ground past, piping bluish exhaust through the screens. A grimy mirror
reflected shabby chairs, an end table with lopsided lamp: furniture filched from
college dormitories or reclaimed from the corner dumpster. No paintings graced the
pocked walls, blotched with the crushed remains of roaches and silverfish.
But beautiful things shone here, gleaming from windowsill and cracked Formica
counters: the limp frond of a fossil fern, etched in obsidian glossy as wet tar; a
whorled nautilus like a tiny whirlpool impaled upon a brass stand. In the centre of a
splintered coffee table was the imprint of a foot-long dragonfly's wing embedded in
limestone, its filigreed scales a shattered prism.
Corners heaped with lemur skulls and slabs of petrified wood. The exquisite cone
shells of poisonous molluscs. Mounds of green and golden iridescent beetles, like
the coinage of a distant country. Patches of linoleum scattered with shark's teeth and
arrowheads; a tiny skull anchoring a handful of emerald plumes that waved in the
breeze like a sea-fan. Helen surveyed it all critically, noting with mild surprise a
luminous pink geode; she'd forgotten that one. Then she set to work.
In a few minutes she'd removed everything from her bag and rolled the geode
under a chair. She unwrapped the puppet on the table, peeling tissue from its brittle
arms and finally twisting the long strand of white paper from its head, until she stood
ankle-deep in a drift of tissue. The puppet's supporting rod slid neatly into the mouth
of an empty beer bottle, and she arranged it so that the glass was hidden by its robes
and the imperious face tilted upward, staring at the bug-flecked ceiling.
Helen squinted appraisingly, rearranged the feathers about the puppet, shoring
them up with the carapaces of scarab beetles: still it looked all wrong. Beside the
small proud figure, the fossils were muddy remains, the nautilus a bit of sea wrack.
A breeze shifted the puppet's robes, knocking the scarabs to the floor, and before
she knew it Helen had crushed them, the little emerald shells splintering to grey dust
beneath her heel. She sighed in exasperation: all her pretty things suddenly looked so
mean. She moved the puppet to the windowsill, to another table, and finally into her
bedroom. No corner of the flat could hold it without seeming even grimier than
before. Helen swiped at cobwebs above the doorway before setting the puppet on
her bedstand and collapsing with a sigh on to her mattress.
In the half-light of the windowless bedroom the figure was not so resplendent.