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

to City College for a masterтАЩs in library science. My brother found it especially amusing that my work
was considered a science, but I took it quite seriously. I was assigned to the reference desk, still giving
advice, as I had in high school, still the one to turn to for information. I was well liked at the library, the
reliable employee who collected money for wedding presents and organized baby showers. When a co-
worker moved to Hawaii I was persuaded to adopt her cat, Giselle, even though I was allergic.

But there was another, hidden side to me. My realest self. The one who remembered how the ice fell
down, piece by bitter piece. The one who dreamed of cold, silver hearts. A devotee of death. I had
become something of an expert on the many ways to die, and like any expert I had my favorites: bee
stings, poisoned punch, electric shock. There were whole categories I couldnтАЩt get enough of: death by
misadventure or by design, death pacts, death to avoid the future, death to circumvent the past. I doubted
whether anyone else in the library was aware that rigor mortis set in within four hours. If they knew that
when heated, arsenic had a garlic-like odor. The police captain in town, Jack Lyons, whoтАЩd been in my
brotherтАЩs class in high school, often called for information regarding poison, suicide, infectious diseases.
He trusted me, too.

Once I began researching death, I couldnтАЩt stop. It was my calling; I suppose it was a passion. I ordered
medical texts, entomology books, the Merck manual of pharmaceuticals so as to be well versed in toxic
side effects when Jack Lyons called. My favorite reference book was A Hundred Ways to Die, a guide
for the terminally ill, those who might be in dire need of methods and procedures for their own demise.
Still, I always asked Jack if he hadnтАЩt someone more quali than I to do his research, but he said, know
IтАЩll just get the facts from you. No interpretations.тАЭ

In that regard, he was wrong. I was quiet, but I had my opinions: when asked to recommend which fairy
tales were best for an eight-year-old, for instance, AndersenтАЩs or GrimmтАЩs, I always chose GrimmтАЩs.
Bones tied in silken cloth laid to rest under a juniper tree, boys who were foolish and brave enough to
play cards with Death, wicked sisters whose own wickedness led them to hang themselves or jump head?
rst into wells. On several occasions there had been complaints to the head librarian when irate mothers
or teachers had inadvertently scared the daylights out of a child on my recommendation. All the same, I
stood my ground. AndersenтАЩs world was with virtuous, respectable characters. I preferred tales in which
sel girls who lost their way needed to hack through brambles in order to reach home, and thoughtless,
heedless brothers were turned into donkeys and swans, itching like mad under their skin, blood shining
from beneath their feathers. I didnтАЩt believe that people got what they deserved. I didnтАЩt believe in a
rational, benevolent world that could be ordered to suit us, an existence presumed to snugly into an

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invented logic. I had no faith in pie charts or diagrams of humanity wherein the wicked were divided
from the good and the forever after was in direct opposition to the here and now.

When I walked home from the library on windy nights, with the leaves swirling, and all of New Jersey
dark and quiet, I wouldnтАЩt have been surprised to ?nd a man with one wing sitting on the front steps of
Town Hall, or to come upon a starving wolf on the corner of Fifth Street and Main. I knew the power of
a single wish, after all. Invisible and inevitable in its effect, like a butter?y that beats its wings in one
corner of the globe and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world. Chaos
theory, my brother had informed me, was based on the mathematical theorem that suggests that the
tiniest change affects everything, no matter how distant, including the weather. My brother could call it
whatever he wanted to; it was just fate to me.