"Nancy Kress - Phillipa's Hands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

The bell rang again. Philippa tried to think but the pain still wouldn't let her. She sat pressing several folds
of a bed sheet to the amputated joint; as the outer folds reddened she had moved onto a different
section. Much of the sheet was red, and the air swelled with the rich, metallic scent of blood. But Philippa
knew she would not lose enough blood to die, would not get gangrene in the amputated tissues, would
not even faint from shock. So many things that never happened. She sat pressing the blood-sodden sheet
to her maimed left hand with the thumb and one whole finger of the right, and listened to the doorbell ring

A schoolbus crash in Calgary, a cholera epidemic along the Indus River, a dam burst in Colorado, a
political massacre in El Salvadore.

Could the grocery boy see through the dingy curtains covering the front window?

And the two she hadn't believed, the first times: the bridge collapse in Florida, the crop failure in a
Chinese province she couldn't pronounce.

The curtains had a hole, just above the window sill nearest the door, the fabric had been clawed through
by a cat that had run away the day after Jim's funeral. Jim's cat. If the grocery boy stooped, he could
peer through the hole. Philippa tried to inch her rocker in the other direction, but the effort just made her
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dizzy. it would be a few hours yet before she could eat anything, clean up the bedroom, change the quilt.
She was running out of quilts.

The doorbell stopped ringing, and the knob rattled. Philippa made a small noise; from the rocker she
could see that the chain was off. But the door was locked, she was sure of that, she'd locked it last night.

The door heaved twice, the first heave curving the wood gracefully inward like a the bow of a violin, the
second springing it back on its hinges and bouncing it so hard against the faded wallpaper that the
doorknob punched a round hole in the plaster board beneath. A hand caught the door on the rebound. It
wasn't the grocery boy from Hall's Superette but Sam Hall himself, walking into the room with the
deliberate, shambling step Philippa knew since high school. He wore his mechanic's coveralls, boots
leaving sloppy snow on the carpet and grease at the knees in splotches like the outlines of distant
countries.

Philippa glared at him, furious and embarrassed. He gazed mildly around the room and she had the idea
that he missed nothing, saw it all through to the buckling bones: her mother's clock ticking heavily in the
corner, the piles of newspaper furred with dust, the ashtray from Niagara Falls killed with paper clips and
pennies and thread, the rounded corners of the overstuffed sofa tufted with dangling buttons, the
unwashed curtains and scrupulously washed ceramic Madonna, with its beautiful draperies and foolish
simper. Saw it all, as if it were the engine of a truck he were taking apart behind the Superette, removing
one part after another in his slow way, running a careful thumb over each to feel its essential soundness
under the necessary grease. Then he looked again at Philippa, at the bloody sheet and four healed
stumps, and behind his eyes moved something that she didn't like.

тАЬPhilippa, you oughtn't be doing that to yourself here."