"Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

Snow

I

Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact. Wishes are brutal, unforgiving things. They burn
your tongue the moment theyтАЩre spoken and you can never take them back. They bruise and bake and
come back to haunt you. IтАЩve made far too many wishes in my lifetime, the when I was eight years old.
Not the sort of wish for ice cream or a party dress or long blond hair; no. The other sort, the kind that
rattles your bones, then sits in the back

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of your throat, a greedy red toad that chokes you until you say it aloud. The kind that could change your
life in an instant, before you have time to wish you could take it back.

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but donтАЩt all stories begin this way? The stranger who comes
to town and wreaks havoc. The man who stumbles off a cliff on his wedding day. The woman who goes
to look out the window when a bullet, or a piece of glass, or a blue-white icicle pierces her breast. I was
the child who stomped her feet and made a single wish and in so doing ended the whole world тАФ my
world, at any rate. The only thing that mattered. Of course I was self-centered, but donтАЩt most eight-year-
old girls think theyтАЩre the queen of the universe? DonтАЩt they command the stars and seas? DonтАЩt they
control the weather? When I closed my eyes to sleep at night, I imagined the rest of the world stopped as
well. What I wanted, I thought I should get. What I wished for, I deserved.

I made my wish in January, the season of ice, when our house was cold and the oil bill went unpaid. It
happened on the sixteenth, my motherтАЩs birthday. We had no father, my brother and I. Our father had
run off, leaving Ned and me our dark eyes and nothing more. We depended on our mother. I especially
didnтАЩt expect her to have a life of her own. I pouted when anything took her away: the bills that needed
paying, the jobs that came and went, the dishes that needed washing, the piles of laundry. Endless,
endless. Never ever done. That night my mother was going out with her two best friends to celebrate her
birthday. I didnтАЩt like it one bit. It sounded like fun. She was off to the Bluebird Diner, a run-down place
famous for its roast beef sandwiches and French fries with gravy. It was only a few hours

on her own. It was just a tiny celebration.

I didnтАЩt care.

Maybe my father had been self-centered; maybe IтАЩd inherited that from him along with the color of my
eyes. I wanted my mother to stay home and braid my hair, which I wore long, to my waist. Loose, my
hair knotted when I slept, and I worried; my brother had told me that bats lived in our roof. I was afraid
they would ?y into my room at night and make a nest in my head. I didnтАЩt want to stay home with my


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brother, who paid no attention to me and was interested more in science than in human beings. We
argued over everything, including the last cookie in the jar, which we often grabbed at the same time.
Let go! You ! Whatever we held often broke in our grasp. Ned had no time for a little sisterтАЩs whims; he