"Michaela Roessner - Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roessner Michaela)

man will at last drink even seawater. But now the food turned fickle too,
and bound away on kangaroo and gazelle legs.
Would the concept work? Mac wanted to convey the idea as a ghostly
tableau, submerged like a dream behind the surface of the long mirror,
haunting the few drinkers bellied up, like himself, to the bar. But by
preserving the mirror's refractive, elusive quality he wouldn't be able to
render the image in the detail it deserved; the picture would be too
vague. His comrades at the Masonic lodge, with their finely honed taste
for symbol and mystery, might grasp it. But the average newspaper reader?
No.
A loud gasp from behind broke Mac's scribbling reverie. He looked up to
see a movement in the mirror before him: A sausage link arced through the
air, reached an admirable altitude, then plunged out of sight below the
lower edge of the mirror. Then a pickle mysteriously launched; a loaf of
bread; two hard-boiled eggs; three pickled herrings; a veritable fireworks
display of food. Mac's fantasy had come to life.
Mac's eyes, reflected in the mirror as he stared, resembled the
hard-boiled eggs. A shiver like an electric current coursed up and down
his spine, followed by a sensation like an empty whistling wind Ч the
swift hollow feeling of dщjр vu. He remembered in an instant all that his
Masonic fellows and Grandmasters had ever told him about the ability of
the power of thought to attain reality.
The electric current, the whistling wind, the transcendent moment
evaporated as Mac heard more gasps at his back, then cries of alarm. In
the mirror before him comestibles still bounded and frolicked. He spun
around on the bar stool.
The other bar patrons were standing back aghast from a cyclone of
commotion at the bar cage.
A greedy young man had evidently overloaded his plate. Items of food were
rolling off it. In dropping down to catch the overflow before it hit the
floor he had crashed into the bar cage, causing the edibles there to
become upwardly propelled. As he scrambled after this second batch he
bumped into a fellow diner, causing yet another egg to take wing without
benefit of hatching proper equipage. Hoarsely shouting, the clumsy youth
snatched it out of the air and thrust it back onto its nest-plate,
colliding with the lunch cage again.
This time a chain of Polish sausages snaked up and away. The bumbling
maniac grabbed the last link, snapping the meaty string like a whip around
a plummeting pickle, then depositing it on another diner's platter. That
fellow, a stout man embrined in bourboned melancholy, looked down and said
mournfully, "But I don't like pickles."
"My apologies, my good man. I'd noticed a resemblance so I thought it was
yours," the troublemaker wheezed as he threw himself after a cracker
cartwheeling across a table, thus freeing himself from disastrous
proximity to the free lunch cage. "As soon as I get a free hand I'll come
back and rectify matters."
Mac realized he'd been holding his breath and began to let it out in
relief. Prematurely . . . for all the young man had done was broaden his
field of operations.
The miscreant collided into tables, sending new articles from his own