"M Rickert - The Girl Who Ate Butterflies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

She wore summer dresses of the nineteen-forties (regardless of the season)
thirty years after that time, but unmended and clean as if they had never been
worn before. She also wore a slip which was also not the fashion. The dresses
were airy as wings, so thin that the slip straps with paper clip-looking
adjusters could be seen through them, as well as the flower at her chest, a
squashed tiny pink or white or yellow rose. In the winter she wore little
sweaters, the kind with three-quarter length sleeves and pearl buttons, while
the other students at Oakdale High were ripping their jeans and rubbing their
new sneakers in dirt. She was pretty but not fashionably so. Hardly anyone
noticed. Really, only one.

Quetzl lived in Oakdale in the summer with his father who worked in the city and
provided little supervision or restraint. A rare, dark-skinned creature in the
town of apple-white, he spent the summers playing his guitar and smoking pot. He
watched Lantanna from a distance, first as something vaguely noticed, a blur of
color in a vision of black and white, then, with more focus, as she took her
daily stroll early each morning past his house, always and mysteriously (in that
age when most moved in packs) alone. "She's a space cadet," his friend Emma told
him once when she saw him watching Lantanna. But he watched with growing
fascination because in the dull, same-paced world of Oakdale, Lantanna was
different, and because he was different too, he recognized her as one of his
kind.

The day it began Lantanna went to her mother with blood-stained panties. Her
mother looked up from the dusty white chiseling to say, "This is the blood of a
broken heart all women suffer. It is inevitable. Wounds must bleed." Then, when
Lantanna began to cry, scolded, "You should be happy. This is good. You will
live a long, pain-filled life."

She showed Lantanna the box of tampons and demonstrated how to use them,
watching as she did, tapping her fingers to get back to her work. Lantanna
inserted the thin white cardboard-sheathed cotton with a stab of discomfort and
in a tremulous voice asked if she was still a virgin. Yes, yes, her mother
nodded. "Though it doesn't matter. Time is relative. After all," she said, "you
already have the wound."

Following her mother's instructions, Lantanna washed the blood from her fingers
and panties with cold water and yellow soap. By the time she left for her
morning walk, her mother was back in the yard absorbed with angel and stone.
Lantanna walked past in silence, absorbed in her own study of astral realities.
What, she wondered, made true angel wings? Were they gossamer and thinner than
glass like butterflies' wings, or were they heavy with flesh and feathers,
coursed with veins and blood?

She did not notice Quetzl following her. And he, so absorbed in the swing of her
pale pink dress, the arch of her long legs to the drop of short white slip, did
not realize Emma followed him, her eyes glinting with fire.

When Lantanna got to the meadow she walked into the tall grass and lay down.