"Mary Rickert - Don't ask" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

DonтАЩt Ask
by M. Rickert

Mary RickertтАЩs first collection of short stories, Map of Dreams, garnered
some nice reviews over the past year and it is currently a finalist for the
World Fantasy Award. Her new story is a fantasy that might make you
forget the women who run with wolves and make you think of the
children instead....

****

When the lost boys returned with their piercings, tattoos, and swagger, we
rejoiced and greeted them with balloons, bubble gum, chocolate chip
cookies, and bone-crunching hugs, which they did not resist. Only later did
we realize that this was one of their symptoms, this acquiescence, not a
sign of their affection for us, though we do not doubt their affection.

How could wolves slope through town, unseen, and steal our boys
from bicycles, from country roads, from the edge of the driveway, from our
kitchen tables, dank with the scent of warm milk and soggy cereal; from our
armsтАФwasnтАЩt it just yesterday that we held our boys close and sang them
lullabies? How could they be taken from us?

Yet they were, and we wept and gnashed our teeth, tore our hair and
screamed their names into the dark. Through the seasons we searched for
them so thoroughly that even in our dreams we could not rest and often
awoke to find dewy grass stuck to the soles of our feet, dirt beneath our
fingernails, our hair matted by the wind. We continued to search even after
the Sheriff, with his hound dog face and quivering hands, said he would
never stop looking but couldnтАЩt keep meeting with us and the very next day
we woke up and no one waited at the door with pots of coffee and boxes of
sticky, bright-colored doughnuts, and we sat at our kitchen tables and
listened to school buses pass, not even slowing down for the memory of
our sons.

But why speak about sorrow now that our boys have returned? They
are home again, sleeping with hairy feet hanging over the edges of little boy
beds, wearing the too small T-shirts, the split pants that reveal their long
bones and taut muscles which quiver and spasm while they dream.

Of course we realized that in the years our boys were gone they had
grown, this was the hope at least, this was the best possibility of all the
horrible scenarios, that our lost boys were growing in the wolvesтАЩ den and
not slaughtered by themтАФso yes, we are happy, of course we are, but what
is this strange sorrow we discover in the dark? Why canтАЩt we stop weeping
during this, the happiest of times?

****

Years before our boys returned there was the return of the famous