"Hoffman-HereWeCome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

"Who are you?" she asked after the silence had stretched.

"Edmund," he said.

"What do you want?"

"Nothing," he said.

"Nothing? Why'd you move if you don't want anything? You could have just stayed
in the wall." She had never met anybody who wanted nothing. She wondered if he
were lying.

"It was time to move," he said. Something was happening to his skin in the
waning light, the green fading, leaving tan behind. His clothes and curly hair
stayed green. She hadn't noticed the clothes until the rest of him changed.
T-shirt, pants -- green, mossy even; bare arms and face, hands and feet. And it
was freezing, but he didn't look as though he felt the cold.

"Want a sandwich?" she said.

He stretched and yawned. He came closer. She had thought his expression was
wooden, but now she saw it was more like ice, frozen . . . though thaw was
coming. He blinked. He finally smiled. It changed her image of him completely:
he looked friendly and almost goofy.

Still gripping the cellophane just in case, she scooted over, leaving room on
the bench. He sat down.

She peered into the brown paper bag. "Looks like I got a tuna and a
ham-and-cheese left. The tuna might be bad. Fish goes bad faster than cured
meat."

"I'll try the ham-and-cheese," he said. "Thanks."

She gave him the sandwich. He struggled with the cellophane for a minute. She
grabbed it back and unwrapped it for him. "How long you been part of a wall,
anyway?"

"I don't know," he said. "I wonder if my car will run." He bit the sandwich and
chewed, abstracted, as though he were listening to his mouth. "Hmm."

"It's Christmas Eve," Matt said when he had finished the sandwich and sat
watching her, smiling faintly.

"Huh," he said. "Been a wall a couple months then, I guess. I'm not sure."

She peeked at his mental landscape. A forest clearing, with a single tree rising
from the center, sunlight stroking one side of its trunk. Wind blew and the tree
leaned into it as though its bark were skin, its core supple.