"Bruce Holland Rogers - The Apple Golem" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

knife, he peeled and shaped the fruit. Artfully, he pieced the silvery flesh together on his table, joining
piece to piece with wooden slivers, and by some craft he knew, he kept it from corruption. The fruit did
not turn brown or shrivel in the air. Long days he worked, correcting often for some flaw that he
perceived, sometimes starting over, until the feet that he had carved and pieced from apple flesh lay
finished on the table.
***


And then he made the legs, from apples growing rounder on their branches. Into the night sometimes
he worked, seeing by a witchlight that he conjured in his room. The hips were broad, but not unseemly
so. Delicately, he carved her apple heart and lungs, covered them in apple ribs, and overlaid her chest in
apple skin. Shoulders, then. Her arms. Her hands.
***


Her face was the labor of a week. Green-apple-skinned he made her, save for her red-skinned lips
and the aureole of her breasts.
***


"Live," he said, and other words, such as his kind would know. And then he kissed her, touching with
his pulsing tongue her apple-tasting one.
***


She blinked. She stirred. And even as he lingered in the kiss, she began to move beneath him. He
touched her apple knee, the yielding, now-warm skin of her apple-flesh-made thigh. He felt along the
length of her, and where he touched her skin it knit together and was whole. His fingers traced her
cheeks, her lips, and gently crossed her throat. He caressed her breasts and sides, breathed softly on her
eyes to make them clear. When his hands had brushed her everywhere, brought all of her to life, he
pressed his knee between her legs to make her yield.
***


The thing that gnawed at him no longer gnawed. For a time, Baltasar was satisfied. He lived as he had
lived before.
***


The apple golem, after that first night, lived among the apple trees, moving in the forest shadows like a
wild thing, silent. Baltasar, searching, could never quite catch sight of her. Always, it seemed, she was in
the corner of his eye, then gone. But she was obedient. She came to Baltasar whenever his need was
upon him, and in silence, she did as he required. Even when the leaves fell, when the last apples came to
earth, when the snows began to descend heavy and wet, she remained among the trees and was with him
only when he summoned her.
***
 And when the first snows turned to ice and the later snows began to fall soft and deep, something
again began to gnaw at Baltasar. He called the golem, and she came to him. He looked at her, standing
warm and naked in the brittle cold of his doorway. Her skin was green and supple as spring buds. Her
eyes met his plainly, frankly. She would do anything, anything at all that he commanded. This is not