"Gregort Maguire - Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maguire Gregory)

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If I could say to you, and make it stick,

A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue

Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold . . .

If I could say this to you so you saw,

And knew, and agreed that this is how it was

In a lost city across the sea of years,

I think we should be for one moment happy

In the great reckoning of those little rooms . .

тАФHoward Nemerov, "Vermeer," from Trying Conclusions: Old and New Poems

Stories Painted on Porcelain

Hobbling home under a mackerel sky, I came upon a group of children. They were tossing their toys in
the air, by turns telling a story and acting it too. A play about a pretty girl who was scorned by her two
stepsisters. In distress, the child disguised herself to go to a ball. There, the great turnabout: She met a
prince who adored her and romanced her. Her happiness eclipsed the plight of her stepsisters, whose
ugliness was the cause of high merriment.

I listened without being observed, for the aged are often invisible to the young.

I thought: How like some ancient story this all sounds. Have these children overheard their grandparents
revisiting some dusty gossip about me and my kin, and are the little ones turning it into a household tale of
magic? Full of fanciful touches: glass slippers, a fairy godmother? Or are the children dressing themselves
in some older gospel, which my family saga resembles only by accident?

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

In the lives of children, pumpkins can turn into coaches, mice and rats into human beings. When we grow
up, we learn that it's far more common for human beings to turn

into rats.

Nothing in my childhood was charming. What fortune attended our lives was courtesy of jealousy, greed,
and murder. And nothing in my childhood was charmed. Or not that I could see at the time. If magic was
present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to

catch sight of it.