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

tradition of "Surgical Strike," "Police Action," and "Expletive Deleted." Every
push the blood vessels popping on her cheeks till they were rosy. They had never
been rosy before. The contractions like Laocooan as he held her from behind and
felt the serpent hidden in her belly coiling. He hadn't known a body was capable
of that. And the pain, which he didn't want to remember. And how it went on.
Which he didn't want to remember. And how, after a time, he became very angry,
then very tired of being angry, and then it was all he could do to hold his
wife's hand and not snap at her: "For God Sakes! You wanted this Baby! Get it
out!"
And those ridiculous hairnet booties.
The baby had erupted purple from her ripped place: smeared with blood and
cheese, tugging a yellow coiled balloon like you get at the circus and dragging
an ungodly alien jellyfish нн Blue Brain In A Baggie нн and she had stopped
crying, and someone had turned the lights on and the pain had stopped like a bad
joke нн the interminable set up, the cringing punch line, the relief нн oh the
relief. And this small lubricated human folded on her wrecked belly like a frog.

These things never happened in books. Or if they did they had a point. After
that, he could never quite figure the point. Everything seemed to be half a
metaphor. Or a dream that evaporated as you tried to pull it into focus. A
thought with potential which refused to grow into an idea.
He remembered now. The frog had disappeared.
He recalled: It had ceased to be interesting once it had achieved its mature
form.
And then: (Cringe) talking to his unborn son through the pregnancy, through his
wife's enormous belly and reciting poetry and saying its name. Adopting the
voice adults only used with children. And doing the same in the Birthing Room
after it was out in the world. A scrunched-up traumatized buddha on her belly,
listening for her heartbeat, dying to get back in. And he had said again, only
this time without the barrier of mom, the boy's name. And the dark frown
loosened and the dark new eyes looked directly into his own, as if to say: "Oh.
You're out here, too?"
Nothing prepares you for happiness.



"Have you named the bat?" he asked his son, amused by the idea.
The boy rolled his eyes. Something this "cool" was obviously beyond the
convention of naming, outside the realm of pets.
The bat looked at them from his golden prison. He hung like a clichщ, upside
down. The body was mouse brown and fuzzy. The membranes of the wings were green
and black and taut and puckered between the bones like a нн like a what,
exactly? Its tiny claws gripped the golden bars with the wrong amount of fingers
нн and they were positioned at an odd juncture on the wings нн midway between
the wing tip and the belly. The snout was ugly. The teeth pronounced a double
row of fangs. He could see it breathing.
Neighborhood children came and went, waiting for the bat to entertain them.
Regular simian kids who provided none of the social incentives the boy so badly
needed. Occasionally they would poke the cage and the bat would shudder.
They left.