"John W. Randal - Bad Animals" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randal John W)

John W. Randal
BAD ANIMALS

At night Magdalene would take Lizz out to the edge of the jumbled trailer park and they'd sit, drinking warm
Pepsi, and watch the luminous ash fall from the pitch black sky. Beautiful flakes of gray would cover their
skin with the softness of big dusty moth wings.
The girls were smooth and lovely at that darkly glowing hour. Clean animals, bright eyes hidden by swirls
of tangled hair. They'd been with Jenner for a long time-but he rarely talked to them. Jenner spent most of his
time in the trailer, smoking pot in his fraying lounge chair, his eyes red, his skin continuing to pale-chasing
translucency. But they didn't think about that during ash fall.
Lizz didn't have fingernails, so she always wore a pair of gloves, cuffed in frilly lace. The gloves had
originally been white-but steady exposure to the ash had colored them a creamy granite. The medicine is
turning me to stone, she liked to joke to Magdalene.
Jasper Barlow, old like Jenner, fixed the trailer park's generator when it went down (and consequently
smelled forever of grease and hot, ionized metal). He had grown more and more convinced that bad things
were crawling on stunted, birth-deformed limbs out in the weeds on the east edge of the trailer park. Jasper,
licking an ever-present sheen of mucous from his pasty lips, said that ugly things were out there in the waist
high grass; that he could see the glitter of their bright eyes, hear the slither of their hunching bodies. The old
man's breath would come faster and faster as he preached this assertion to the girls, his twiggy hands
trembling in his lap like gnarled insects. His fingernails were always caked with black grease. Ten perfect
dark crescents.
So Lizz wore the gloves. No need for him to know. Jasper was the only one who understood the lurid
internal mysteries of the generator that sat like a fat god in the power shed. And the girls liked the light.
"Can you smell the city tonight?" Lizz asked. Her irises thinned to vivid green rings as her pupils
expanded. She looked through the shifted woods, out into the wider blackness, and beyond that too... to
where the city pumped like a machine, or a heart. There really wasn't anything different to see in those deep
distances but Lizz smiled anyway: prelude to storytime.
Magdalene inhaled, an almost endless tidal intake. Her eyes closed. Soft ash floating aimlessly down
from the sky covered them both. After a long moment, the older girl parted her maroon lips:
"Engines... the streets smell wet from a passing rain. Tires heating against the asphalt..." And Magdalene
smiled too, "Like snakes."
Lizz passed the Pepsi to her sister and Magdalene drank the warm fizzing liquid. Holding up her gloved
hand, Lizz stared at the flakes of ash collecting on her palm. The ash didn't melt like snow, it just crumbled
away into smaller and smaller specks of shimmery dust. An alchemy of disintegration.
"Snakes." Lizz said. She grinned reproachfully at Magdalene.
"A man is smoking-his woman hot with beer. Someone bled, not long ago. Sex smells in an alley."
Magdalene shook her head, "Animals."
"Us, maybe," Lizz contradicted. "Not them."
Magdalene doesn't even shake her head. It's an old argument. Old as God. She takes another sip of the
Pepsi. Then she checks for any observers, before licking her lips with both tips of her tongue.

Yellow light bulbs are hung on patched electrical cords around the trailer park; they form artificial
constellations around the scattered rectangular homes. The ash fall tapers off in about an hour, as it usually
does, its glimmering blanket swiftly crumbling and fading away. The girls go back, wending around the
trailers. They can hear TV from some, talking or crying from others. A few folks are sitting on rusted cars or
on the weathered concrete steps to their homes.
Jimmy Horus has a jar full of lightning bugs that he shows them. The little insects glow with every color of
the neon rainbow. It's been a long time since they were just that cold ghostly green-yellow. The girls squat
and stare into the jar. Dots and flickers of bug-light shift and swirl in Zodiacal patterns. Lizz shows the boy
how to punch holes in the mason jar's lid-so that the lightning bugs can breathe.