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

streetlights, as though fires floated on air, or small clumsy stars dipped low.
He was tall beside her, his hand warm in hers, his footsteps almost silent. It
took a while for her defenses to gentle down, and then she realized that it felt
good to walk with another person. She couldn't remember the last time she had
done it like this --if ever.

"Sometimes I feel like I might just float away," he said presently. "I have a
sister. I visit her once in awhile. It keeps my feet on the ground."

"I saw my sister last spring." Matt had talked to her sister last Christmas for
the first time in years. In the spring Matt had hitchhiked across the top of the
country from Ohio to Seattle, catching rides sometimes from people and sometimes
from friendly trucks, who opened their back doors to her at truckstops and let
her out at other truckstops when they were about to turn away from her route.

Seeing Pam had been strange and difficult. Matt and her sister had started out
from the same place and gone such different directions that they had almost no
common ground left. Pam and her husband had offered Matt a room to stay in and
help finding a job. Matt fixed the broken dishwasher and repaired a reluctant
vacuum cleaner and a tired clothes dryer, and then she had hugged Pam and left.

"Mostly I just wander from one place to the next," said Edmund, "waiting to be
needed for something, then trying to figure out what it is."

Matt wandered too, always looking at things. Sometimes she helped people, but
she didn't go around looking for people to help. "What about what you want?"

"I don't know," he said. They walked farther. "I used to do what I wanted, until
I started getting mean, and wanting things other people cherished. Scared me.
Wasn't the person I wanted to be. So I decided to try the opposite."

"And things want you?"

He nodded. "Sometimes it's nothing urgent. The cemetery wall had been failing to
pieces for ages, for instance, and it could have gone on disintegrating without
disturbing the integrity of the local space-time continuum." He grinned and she
looked up at him. "I know, I can't believe I talk like that either. Especially
when I'm not used to talking at all. But that wall wanted to be pulled back
together. I wasn't busy with anything else, so I kind of melted in and helped
the wall collect itself and strengthen its bonds with its pieces. Then just as I
finished, there you were."

"What makes you think I'm your next project?"

"That's the way the spirit usually works, I guess. I finish one task and then
comes another."

"So what are you supposed to do about me?"

He shook his head and smiled. "Maybe nothing. I know you don't need me or