"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Skeleton Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

The Skeleton Key
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Blood is the ink in which we write the meaning of our lives.
I didn't discover this until after I died. That was when the scribbles I had made with my blood while
living became leg-ible, and I had reason to thank the god I had consecrated myself to.


By the time I was thirteen I knew Hermes was my favorite god. My mom had read me the D'Aulaires
book of Greek myths when I was eight, and I had memorized all the pictures and most of the myths
pretty soon after that. At ten I got my new best friend Sasha to read the book, and though we were
attracted to Artemis and Athena, we loved Hermes best. We were obsessed with things Greek after that.
Our thirteenth Halloween, instead of trick-or-treating, Sasha and I snuck off to the hill back of Lindley
Farm.
The air was full of frost and wood smoke and mischief. We wore our winter coats, hats, gloves and
scarves. Sasha carried a canteen half-full of red wine she had stolen from her par-ents' liquor cabinet. I
had a saucepan, some charcoal bri-quettes, and a little piece of raw flank steak. We had thought about
using candles to light our way, but it was too windy and somebody might see us, so we each had a
flashlight.
Near the top of the hill, not far off the hiking trail, lurked a clearing. We pushed our way through
bushes to get there. Between sentinel trees with bare branches, we scuffed new-fallen leaves aside with
our boots to bare the earth to the constellations, and sat on the damp ground. I set the charcoal on a flat
rock and managed to light it without extra lighter fluid (I'd dosed it before I left the house).
Sasha and I did our Greek things: she poured a libation of wine on the earth, dedicating it to all the
Olympians, after which we took a comradely sip and winced at the tongue-drying alcoholic taste. I
scorched the steak over the coals, saying I hoped the fragrance of the smoke would nourish the gods.
We chanted a chant we had devised with many erasings and lots of note-passing in history class, which
was the most boring class we had, with the least attentive teacher. Our chant was full of careful phrases
about how all the gods were great and yet we wanted one of them in particular to watch over us, if that
wouldn't offend the rest of them too much (in Greek myths many people appeared to have patron gods,
so it didn't seem out of line to ask for it).
We slashed our thumbs with a razor blade I had taken from my dad's medicine cabinet, squeezed
out a drop of blood each on the ground (thanking Gaea), pressed our wounds together, and declared
that we belonged to the Sis-terhood of Hermes.
Sasha's blood was cold and so was mine, but with our fin-gers pressed together I felt warmth, even
though the rest of my hand was freezing. I saw a falling star above me and sud-denly my arms prickled,
with hair standing on end. I glanced at Sasha. It was too dark for me to see what she was thinking behind
her face. Neither of us breathed for a moment. A flower of warmth blossomed in my chest.
"Tess?" Sasha murmured.
"Yes," I whispered, but that was all we said.
At last we separated our hands. I started breathing again, and my sense of the mystery in everything
went away, but I remembered how it had felt.
Coming down the hill, Sasha and I were silent. We never did talk about it directly, but we continued
to act as if the Sis-terhood were real.
We taught ourselves the Greek alphabet to the extent of using it as a replacement code for regular
letters, and we wrote notes to each other we had trouble decoding. We met once a month and snuck off
to our hill, no matter what the weather, and performed rituals we made up, sometimes stealing bits from
things we found in the encyclopedia or myth books. It was the best secret we had ever had. Often I felt
the silence come over me, the sense that something was listening to us and responding. Sometimes we
received signs that our prayers were answered: Sasha got an A on a test she barely studied for; I got the
bike I wanted for my fourteenth birthday; we both got dates for school dances; and Sasha found a