"Scott Thomas - Marcy Waters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thomas Scott)

years had forgotten so much. Her lips were bitter from the wild
strawberries -- like half-formed hearts -- that we found coiling and
trembling along the ruined boards of old Whitney's fallen barn. We were
fifteen summers out of the womb, gangly and white in the darkness, our
bodies shivering and brittle-seeming without clothes. I felt the bones
through her back and the press of her budding chest against my own hard
ribs.
She laughed and lied and I believed her and told her that we were over
dead Indians' graves, and that they had killed old Whitney with his own ax
and she pretended to believe. Then we lay down like birch branches on the
grass.
They all knew the baby was mine -- but didn't it look like an owl,
feathery-haired, and round-eyed and with strange arms that should have
been wings. Marcy never spoke to me after that and they say her father
sent her off to live with an aunt in Connecticut, but I saw her sometimes
when rain made the river high and the dark waters shaped her face briefly
and broke it up again. Maybe her father drowned her there where she used
to dream and where she lost the box to the eastward current and cried as
the crying birds gurgled. They were the souls of Indians, she said, and
they cried for their land and their graves where we raised our corn.
I blame myself now and picture Marcy Waters with her freckles and the
quick green of her eyes. In spring I imagine her laughter and in autumn I
imagine her grief. I found the box three miles down the river, the wood
dark and soft and the latch a blur of rust. I could tell by its weight
that it still contained the bones that old Whitney had dug up out of his
field and stashed behind his woodpile. I broke it open and waited for the
sound of birds, but there was only the sound of a river squirming past the
muddy banks and the half-remembered screams of old John Whitney that day
that I smeared my face with owl blood, like war-paint, and killed him with
his ax.

й Scott Thomas 2001.
This story also appears in Scott's collection,
Cobwebs And Whispers (Delirium Books, 2001).
Delirium Books can be contacted at
PO Box 338 North Webster, IN 46555, USA.

Elsewhere in infinity plus:
non-fiction - Scott Thomas interviewed by Forrest Aguirre.
Elsewhere on the web:
Cobwebs And Whispers is available for US$36 + shipping from Project Pulp
or through the publishers Delirium Books.




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