"James Patrick Kelly - Monsters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Kaplan shot her a grateful look and hurried off to keep Maggie from ransacking
the till. Henry bent to snare the vest Jerry had thrown. He dropped it in
the hamper.

"Look at you." Celeste chuckled. "He's gone and you're still picking up after
him."

"It's your fault." He snapped at her. "You laughed, you got him fired."

"That's bullshit, Henry, and you know it. Jerry blew this job off long ago.
If you ask me, he got what he deserved. I'm sorry if that bothers you. I'm
sorry if you hate my guts. But other people don't make you do bad things.
You do them yourself."
Even though she was wrong, he didn't reply; she'd only chew his ear some more.
He folded his untouched muffin and rammed it into the cup still half full of
lukewarm tea. Of course other people could make you do wrong. Henry was
proof of that. And he didn't really hate her. Yes, the grotesque hump
repelled him and she had the personality of Brillo but he was also a little
sorry for her.

It was the monster who hated her.

"So what do you want me to do?" she said.

***

Henry figured that the reason it was always dark in church was because God
didn't like bright places. His God tended to lurk in the shadows and not say
much, like a stranger at a wedding. When He spoke in His midnight whisper, it
always took Henry by surprise. God certainly wasn't a rattletongue like
Celeste or a smartmouth like Jerry. Henry believed that He preferred the dark
because, like Henry, He was shy.

Even though Our Lady of Mercy was only two blocks from Kaplan's, Henry's
midday routine was to bring his lunch to St. Sebastian's because the light
there was so bad that it was hard for anyone to see him eating. Also,
Sebastian was the martyr that some Roman emperor had shot full of arrows; his
painting was in the side chapel. Henry liked to sit in the third pew from the
back with his regular tuna sandwich, pickle and chocolate milk. The priests
usually left him alone because he never made a mess, but sometimes
parishioners would crab at him.

The rain had come earlier than predicted, chasing at least a dozen other
people into the church, so he had to be cagy about eating. And the clouds had
dulled his favorite stained glass; the reds had gone to mud, the blues almost
black. Each of the fourteen narrow windows of St. Sebastian's depicted one of
the Stations of the Cross. Henry liked to pray to the sixth: Veronica wiping
the face of Jesus. Once, years ago, he had wondered whether the impression of
His face that Jesus had left on Veronica's handkerchief could be removed with
wet spotter, or maybe a hydrogen peroxide soak. It was as close as he had