"Don Webb - The Shiny Surface" - читать интересную книгу автора (Webb Don)

The Shiny Surface
Don Webb

According to the National Geographic, the greatest density of writers
in the USA is not in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco,
but in Austin, Texas, which is where Don Webb, maven of the small
press magazines, lives. He has published dozens of stories, some of
them collected in The Seventh Day and After (Word Craft Speculative
Writer Series), as well as a unique collection of intense, metamorphic
prose pieces. Uncle OvidтАЩs Exercise Book (Illinois State University/Fiction
Collective). Records have always meant a lot to him: тАШI had a cousin who
had a singles player. When I saw him putting a record on that big fat
spindle, I had my first realisation of how sex must work - a twentieth
century moment.тАЩ In тАШThe Shiny SurfaceтАЩ, Don Webb magically realises
the notion that if Proust had been born into the latter half of the twentieth
century, he wouldnтАЩt have needed to bite into a madeleine; heтАЩd simply
have put on a record and danced.

****



I
t was something IтАЩd never known, never guessed. It changed everything.

The story begins in three times - in 1870, in 1966, in 1992 - but itтАЩs
probably a story that everyone partakes of whether they know it or not.

By my forty-third year I had achieved two lifelong dreams. I had
married the perfect woman ten years before, and our marriage had grown
with each day until we were filled with absolute knowledge and love for the
other. Twelve years before I had ploughed all the money I could tap into a
rusty dusty junk shop. By hard work and luck I had made it into the finest
antique store in the Dallas metroplex. Customers flew in from Chicago and
LA to see what I had to sell. Lately people wrote in from Paris and Tokyo.
My little shop was reaching around the world. My stock included a
nineteenth dynasty scarab from Egypt and a framed Jimmy Carter
campaign poster, so it pressed at the boundaries of human time as well.

My assistant Janet Brammer and I were opening a carefully packed
selection of American Victoriana from Normal, Illi-nois. IтАЩd visited Normal
once with its beautiful quaint homes and ugly modern university. Houses
were cheap there - very cheap by Texas standards - and I fantasised about
retiring there in Victorian elegance. I even dreamed up an outfit for her - a
special high-collared Victorian dress of red crinoline and black panels
appearing to be silk, but in reality on close inspection see-through silk. I can
see her in the parlour with her spinning wheel. . .

Reverie ends and we carefully cut into the case. The box of
someoneтАЩs great-grandmotherтАЩs things: a silver-and-enamel teapot made