"Somtow Sucharitkul - The Fallen Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sucharitkul Somtom)

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From Tales of Fantasy, Elsewhere Vol. II
Edited by Terri Windling &
Mark Alan Arnold




The Fallen Country
Somtow Sucharitkul


He had blank, sky-blue eyes and confused blond hair.
He had a wry, dry voice with just a lemon twist of longing in
it He was small for his age, almost as though he had willed
himself not to grow. As I dosed the door behind us, my
hand brushed against his and he flinched away violently in
the split second before willing himself to smile; from this I
pegged him as a victim of child abuse.

"Hi," I said, answering him. "My name is Dora Marx." 1
eased him into the brown, wombish chair that faced my
desk. "You may call meтАФ" I sat down myself, with the
stuck-record-in-a-groove smoothness that comes from
seeing a thousand children a year for twenty years,
"тАФeither Dora, or Mrs. Marx. Whichever makes you feel
more comfortable."

"I think IтАЩd prefer Mrs. Marx,тАЭ he said. "But." he added,
"You can call me Billy." Touche.

He didn't look at me. I went to the window to slam out
the eleven o'clock yelling from the schoolyard. God damn
it, they should never make you work under these condi-
tions . . .

I said, "You're the one whoтАФ"

"They found at five in the morning, dinging to the
steeple of Santa Maria's. You read the papers?"

"Sometimes," I said, flicking the dipping out of his file.

BILLY BINDER. AGE 12тАФ

"Where'd you get that scar?тАЭ тАФ like an albino earth-
worm, wriggling into the sleeve of his teeshirt.

"Fell off my bike." Sure.