"patrick_o'_leary_bad_boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'leary Patrick)

Bat Boy
a short story
by Patrick O'Leary




Until the day the boy brought home the bat, he had never surprised his father.
The boy hadn't been exactly dumb before. Not exactly. But нн why not admit it?
нн he hadn't sparkled, either. He hadn't shone. He hadn't punched his way
outside his ordinary mind. True, he could sing at will any number of TV theme
songs, and he displayed a scholar's rigor in the way he examined, plucked,
jarred and observed insects. He had an eye for detail. He might someday make a
scientist, his father hoped.
He hoped.
"Where'd you get the cage? Where'd you get the bat?" he asked the proud boy.
The bat had been winged, the boy explained. He had found it flopping on the
sidewalk. He had secured a golden cage from a garage sale down the street. He
had trapped the bat. He had brought it home to show his father нн interrupting
as he sat smoking and reading the important new voice in fiction in the lawn
chair in the backyard with the leaves still unraked.
"What are you going to do with it?" the father asked reluctantly, sensing
obligations.
"Keep it," the boy said determined. "Feed it liver like the polliwog we grew in
the plastic cube."



My life, the man thought, will not work as a story, he thought.
No one would believe it, he thought, remembering how he fed it with a toothpick,
the green frog lunging eagerly at the shit brown flecks of liver, his face
becoming mostly mouth.
See, this was the problem.
Having grown a frog in your kitchen, what do you do with it? What then? That was
the difference, he concluded, between children and parents. With children there
are no third acts. There is Polliwog. There is frog. And who cares after that?
It's time for a commercial. They don't think about нн ohhh нн entrance exams.
Wisdom teeth. Tuition payments bigger than a mortgage. What happens when sex
stops? When you forget how to love?
What had they done to the frog? He couldn't remember. Had they left on vacation
and forgotten to assign a caretaker? Had the frog leaped out of his safe cube
and perished on the tasteless linoleum? Anything can happen to a frog. They're
like children. They don't think. They don't know about...things.
He remembered his birth day нн the day he brought his father tools into the
Birthing Room: the stopwatch, the bottle of Mateus, and the cassette deck with
the tapes: programming he'd labored over for just the right Amniotic ambience:
Mozart. In A Silent Way. Early Judy Collins. He rehearsed the routine: Keegling.
Kissy breaths. Hold and push. They were ready.
They weren't ready.
His wife wrenched into what the Instructor had dubbed "Transition" in the grand