"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Salvage Efforts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

you?" he said, his voice hoarse. "I had to re-create you from next to nothing!
It was almost beyond me!"

Despair flooded me. If he had indeed created me, how was I ever going to escape
his control?

Was I even myself? What if he had put me back together but had forgotten some
important pieces, or left out things he had never liked?

I lay without speaking for some time, exploring myself. If anything was gone, I
couldn't tell.

I would never be able to tell.

He touched my cheek. I could feel his hand's warmth, but gone was the ability to
sense intimately the whorls on his fingertips, the sweat and fear that touched
his palm. "Eva," he said, "what happened?"

"I agreed to love and honor you," I said, "not to be your clothes."

"It was just a joke!"

"It stopped being funny when someone else touched -- scratch that! I didn't
think it was funny from the first. You made me powerless."

He sat for a while, gazing toward the wall. "I didn't mean anything by it."

"You never do."

"I promise never to do it again," he said.

I sighed.

That night he went out. I wanted him to. He had stayed by me for several hours,
just touching me, occasionally apologizing until I told him to stop that, it was
all right, I knew he hadn't intended to hurt me.

After he left, I lay and thought about being thread, being cloth, finally let
myself appreciate how different and strange that had been. Before I knew my
husband, I had never felt anything like this. And I used to thrive on novelty.

I rose and got a suitcase down from an upper closet shelf and set it open on the
bed. I pulled out my dresser drawers and took underwear and socks out, one pair
at a time, placing them in the suitcase. The cloth tingled against my hand; I
felt as though we were related.

I didn't want to have this attitude toward clothes. I wanted them to go back to
just being things I could wear without thinking about it. Perhaps this
uncomfortable association would fade. Though my affinity for cats hadn't changed
since the night that my husband...