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

scent of approach. Her own.
The sky's burden was shed by rain's work; sun cast a shadow, long and thin into
the straggly grasses. That shadow was unmoving in a way that nothing but the great
metal bridge above her was. She waited, as if she were not part of life, of the living.
The next morning, Jane cut school. School was a waste of time, anyway. A bunch
of teachers tried to "help" you in your "difficult" situation. Jane wanted nothing from
them but to be left alone.
The only way to be left alone was not to be there. So she walked the quiet streets,
beneath the towering trees. Followed them, stepping over the cracks in the sidewalk
because of the old childhood rhymes. She made a point of hitting all the lines,
though.
She even paused in front of her house, thought about going in; her mother was at
work at the office. No one would be there. She made it as far as the front door.
Turned the knob. Walked away.
Home was the last place she wanted to be.
I'd be Happy, she thought, if I never had to see this place again.
Done, someone said, and she turned at once. A small child, trying to escape the
grip of his mother's hand for an excursion into the sparse traffic, was the only thing
in sight that was talking.
Never mind. She shoved her hands into her pockets and began to walk.
She made her way from Arundel to the Danforth, and from the Danforth down
Broadview and into the Don Valley, following the bike paths beside the river that
nestled between the two sides of the highway. The trees here were green, when they
were alive, and the weeds were colorful enough, but the river was a dead one, and if
there was animal life other than the dogs that people walked, it hid very well.
As Jane maneuvered her way beneath the day branch of a stunted tree, light caught
her eye, flashing like reflected sun over rippling water. It came again as she lifted her
head, and she began to slowly wend her way toward it, leaving behind the smooth
asphalt of the newly paved bike path. Only when she was halfway there did Jane
wonder what she was doing, but by then she had no intention of going back until she
found the source of the light itself. She bet that it was probably the window of some
abandoned old wreck.
Good damned thing she didn't have two cents to rub together. She lost.
The trees seemed to grow darker and rougher as she approached the light; they
were tightly packed and harder to move around. There were thorny plants that
caught the hem of her pants-tearing it twice; there were burrs that caught her hair,
pulling at it rather than joining it.
I get it, I'm Prince Charming, and this is the forest of thorns. She had no intention
of kissing any sleeping woman, wasn't as if she didn't get abused enough by
moronic idiots passing themselves off as human beings, but she was damned if she
was going to give up before she managed to clear the trees.
And she forgot it all as she managed to peer between the forked trunk of a gnarled
old tree whose leaves she wouldn't have recognized had she carried an encyclopedia
with her. Because framed by the vee of that split trunk was a woman who was
shining with a hazy luminescence.
Her hair was a spill of silver that seemed to catch particles of the sun and reflect
them, wayward, back; her eyes were wide and dark and perfect, and her lashes, like
her hair, were silver. She wore a sleeveless summer dress that caught the breeze and
defined its passage. Her skin was white as ivory, and her arms were long and
slender; her fingers were smooth and perfect as she lifted her hands in greeting.