"Gene Wolfe - Bea and Her Bird Brother" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Preemies, the doctors would've called you. You could nurse, though, and you got bigger every day.
When he was bigger, I could see he was mine after all. It was the same face I'd had, the face I'd seen in
pictures my mother took, and he had my eye color.

"Bright blue."

"That's right. Their eyes are dark, or Ava's were."

"Like mine, Dad?"

"That's right. Just like yours, because it was you, Bea. You were that girl. I know you don't remember,
but you were, and you didn't have any more wings than I did. Ava pretended she was happy with it,
when it tore her up something awful. I could see the hurt under the smiles, and it just broke my heart."

"Benjy doesn't have wings, Dad." She tried to make her voice and words as gentle as she could. "I've
seen him with his shirt off, seen him like that a lot of times, and he doesn't."
"'Course not, Bea." The old man in the bed sounded a trifle impatient. "Benjy's Elsie's. Elsie's and mine.
This's your full brother."

"My full brother?" She almost felt that she and her father were conversing in a dream.

"What I just said." The old man's eyes shut, one and then--perhaps five seconds after it--the other. She
took his hand, warming it between her own and listening to his rasping breaths. Half an hour later, when
she had nerved herself to speak, there was no reply.

She was still holding that hand when Raeburn came in with little Megan. Raeburn said, "How is he,
honey?"

She sighed, and Raeburn repeated his question a trifle more loudly, this time without honey.

"He's gone," Bea whispered.

Raeburn looked at Megan, then back to Bea.

She sighed again. "She has to learn, and this is the lesson time. Megan, do you remember the toad you
found in our yard?"

"All stiff." Megan nodded, her guarantee of her own truthfulness.

"Well, what happened to that toad has happened to Granddad. Come take his hand. He won't hurt you."

"He never done." The old man's cold hand was three times the size of Megan's warm and chubby ones.

"That's right," Bea said. "He never has and he never will. He's with the angels, darling, where he can tell
God what a good girl you are."

Megan nodded again.

That night Bea--younger than Megan again--hid among leaves once more. Something huge paced the
limb; footfalls more silent than sighs thundered over her mother's screams. Soon, very soon, it would find