"Bruce Holland Rogers - Dead Boy At Your Window" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

Dead Boy At Your Window
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1998 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


In a distant country where the towns had improbable names, a woman looked upon the unmoving
form of her newborn baby and refused to see what the midwife saw. This was her son. She had brought
him forth in agony, and now he must suck. She pressed his lips to her breast.
"But he is dead!" said the midwife.
"No," his mother lied. "I felt him suck just now." Her lie was as milk to the baby, who really was dead
but who now opened his dead eyes and began to kick his dead legs. "There, do you see?" And she made
the midwife call the father in to know his son.
The dead boy never did suck at his mother's breast. He sipped no water, never took food of any kind,
so of course he never grew. But his father, who was handy with all things mechanical, built a rack for
stretching him so that, year by year, he could be as tall as the other children.
When he had seen six winters, his parents sent him to school. Though he was as tall as the other
students, the dead boy was strange to look upon. His bald head was almost the right size, but the rest of
him was thin as a piece of leather and dry as a stick. He tried to make up for his ugliness with diligence,
and every night he was up late practicing his letters and numbers.
His voice was like the rasping of dry leaves. Because it was so hard to hear him, the teacher made all
the other students hold their breaths when he gave an answer. She called on him often, and he was
always right.
Naturally, the other children despised him. The bullies sometimes waited for him after school, but
beating him, even with sticks, did him no harm. He wouldn't even cry out.
One windy day, the bullies stole a ball of twine from their teacher's desk, and after school, they held
the dead boy on the ground with his arms out so that he took the shape of a cross. They ran a stick in
through his left shirt sleeve and out through the right. They stretched his shirt tails down to his ankles, tied
everything in place, fastened the ball of twine to a buttonhole, and launched him. To their delight, the
dead boy made an excellent kite. It only added to their pleasure to see that owing to the weight of his
head, he flew upside down.
When they were bored with watching the dead boy fly, they let go of the string. The dead boy did not
drift back to earth, as any ordinary kite would do. He glided. He could steer a little, though he was
mostly at the mercy of the winds. And he could not come down. Indeed, the wind blew him higher and
higher.
The sun set, and still the dead boy rode the wind. The moon rose and by its glow he saw the fields and
forests drifting by. He saw mountain ranges pass beneath him, and oceans and continents. At last the
winds gentled, then ceased, and he glided down to the ground in a strange country. The ground was
bare. The moon and stars had vanished from the sky. The air seemed gray and shrouded. The dead boy
leaned to one side and shook himself until the stick fell from his shirt. He wound up the twine that had
trailed behind him and waited for the sun to rise. Hour after long hour, there was only the same grayness.
So he began to wander.
He encountered a man who looked much like himself, a bald head atop leathery limbs. "Where am I?"
the dead boy asked.
The man looked at the grayness all around. "Where?" the man said. His voice, like the dead boy's,
sounded like the whisper of dead leaves stirring.