"Kathe Koja - Fireflies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koja Kathe)

FIREFLIES by Kathe Koja
Kathe Koja's new novel, Going Under, will be published by Farrar, Straus &
Giroux in September. She lives in the Detroit area with her husband, artist Rick
Lieder. In her first story for us since November 1992, she takes a look at more
than one dark side of the universe.

Look, he said. Look at all the stars.

Steep back steps, less porch than stoop, rusting wrought-iron railing and barely room enough for two,
but they had once been lovers and so it was easy to sit touching, hip to thigh. His head back against the
screen door mesh, looking up; on her right arm a fresh bandage, white and still, like a large moth waiting
with folded wings.

They look like fireflies, she said. Awkward, left-handed, she lit a cigarette; without being asked, the man
opened her bottle of beer, an Egyptian beer called Stella, star. He had just come back from Cairo; she
was going somewhere else.

Fireflies? he said. He had a kind of accent, not foreign but not native either: unplaceable long vowels,
sentences that curled up at the ends, like genie's slippers, like the way they talk down south. One big
backyard, to have fireflies that size?

Think of the grasshoppers, she said, and laughed, winced, dragged on her cigarette. The smoke rose in
the darkness; it was very late. Or the dragonflies.

Or the June bugs, he said. His own beer was almost empty. What'd the doctor say?

She did not answer. The cement of the steps was damp, clammy against the backs of their legs; like a
slab, a tomb, tombstone and Esperson called, she said. He told me they were taking my paper.

The, the vacuum one? Oh honey that's great! He pressed her leg, the bare skin below the edge of her
cut-offs; his hand was warm, with long strong workman's fingers, small hard spots like rivets on the palm,
his skin a topographic map of his days: cut wood, carry water, name and number and know all the plants
in the world. Sometimes she imagined him out there in the green aether of the woods, any woods:
mending a split sapling, digging arbutus, testing the soil. He the earth, she the void and When does it
come out? he asked. When will you--

When do you leave again? she asked. Where are you going?

Montreal, he said, but not till December? or maybe the new year, I'm not sure. It depends on--It
depends. When did Esperson say--

Look, she said, one hand out, her left hand with its tubed coal of cigarette. Fireflies; look. Above the
dark drenched grass a ballet of on and off, little lights delicate, sturdy, irregular. From the porch they
watched together in silence, a long wondering silence; he put his hand on her leg again, and squeezed, but
absently; he sees this all the time, she thought. In the woods.

Your paper, he said. Tell me what it's about. In layman's terms?

Shifting a little on the steps, trying not to move her right arm. Basically, she said, it's about how most of
what's out there, most of what's here--tapping her chest--is vacuum energy. The cosmos is one-third