"Michelle West - Under The Skin" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

Rain.
Beneath it, a stirring. She finished her work and waited, thinking it odd to have
traveled this far. She had no kin. And perhaps it was time, after all.
It wasn't that Jane didn't have friends; she had them. It was just the only two that
she'd ever really given a damn about were now living in Arizona and Quebec. They
wrote, and she wrote; after her father left, she wasn't allowed to make long distance
calls anymore because it was too expensive. But it didn't matter. The letters had
become few and far between, and she knew that Tracy and Corinne had gone on
with their lives, meeting new people and learning to fit into the new places that had
called them away.
Rain fell, unbroken; the air rumbled as if the skyscape of cloud were the victim of a
quake; white light illuminated the sky above, and she tried to catch sight of the
heavens in the fading afterimage.
It was hard to believe that at some time in the early 1900s Arundel Avenue and the
streets that surrounded it were considered the very outskirts of the city. Now, buried
beneath the network of parkettes and parking lots that paralleled the Danforth, the
subway trains rumbled like living metal worms, and a mere fifteen minutes took you
right to the heart of the city.
The trees that lined the streets here towered over the rooftops; they were huge old
maples for the most part, and they had always been huge and old. Their roots were
sunk well past people's basements, just as the leaves were well above their
bedrooms; they twisted and broke old pipes as they grew, and every so often-in a
storm like this-they dropped the heavy burden of their branches on the power lines.
Still, the city hadn't seen fit to cut them down or rid the neighborhood of them, and
Jane walked beneath leaves which were lit on the underside by street lamps, and
above by lightning's occasional flashes.
Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?
Some people went to cafes, and some to dance clubs; some to bars and some to
parks, some to the islands in the harbor and some to bookstores along the
Danforthothers with cars went to stretches of empty wilderness where one could be
alone by one's own choice and not the choice of everyone else around you. Alone,
rather than lonely.
Jane Thornton had no car. She had a license, it was fairly recent, but her dad had
taken the car because her mother lived close to a subway. And besides, really, her
mother didn't have money for anything that was comfort: alcohol, food.
The city had wild patches, but no wilderness, no wildness.
Except in storms like this. Jane looked down and realized that the streets were
empty; even the headlights of cars were gone. She closed her eyes and the rain hit
her face. Thunder roared, and she roared back; the roar held no words, but then,
words were not needed.
"Where were you?" Her mother's voice, slurred only a little. Later in the evening, it
would probably be slurred a whole lot more, Jane gave it fifty-fifty. Her friends
wondered why she didn't drink. Well, they had; she didn't see much of them now.
She didn't bother to answer the question, but her mother didn't expect an answer
by now; it wasn't so late that she'd been worried. "Your father called."
"So?"
"So call him back or he'll blame me for not delivering his message."
She mounted the stairs two at a time as the rain's momentary clarity was destroyed
by her life.
"...anyway, Pat and I were wondering if you'd like to come over for Sunday dinner