"Gene Wolfe - Green Glass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Or when I do.
Stroking her hair, he watched her, finding her as warm and real as ever. "I'd
had this green glass bottle when I was a kid. I guess it was an old wine bottle or
something. I'd put bugs and spiders in there so I could watch them. I told you about
all that.
"Then when I went up on the roof where the garden was, there was green all
around. It wasn't quite dark, but I think I might have seen one or two stars if I'd
looked for them. It was quiet and green everyplace. Very quiet, because there was
nobody up there but me. Nobody at all, Josephine, just me all alone."
Her breathing seemed to him to gave grown softer and more regular. Still
stroking her, he continued.
 "It was all green, because the flowers had closed. They're candy stores for
bees, really, but the bees had gone to bed and the flowers had closed their doors.
The plants had gone to sleep, and the birds had gone home, if there had been any
birds.
"I sat on one of the benches for a while, thinking about the trees and flowers
and how all those things would still be there when our building had been torn down
and nobody remembered it at all. After a while, I got up and sat on one of the
swings. I had walked all over the roof, and knew I couldn't get off it on any side.
There was the street on the east and the alley on the west. There were other buildings
north and south, but they were too far away for me to jump to. Too far, and a lot
lower than ours anyway.
"It reminded me of that old green bottle my mother had thrown away a long
time ago, and that reminded me that I had seen a green bottle up there on the roof
while I was walking around. So I went looking for it and found it pretty easily. It was
a soft drink bottle, some kind of lemon-lime drink. I don't like those--I like Pepsi or
Dr. Pepper. But someone else had liked them and had brought a cold bottle up to
the roof to drink, and then had put the bottle in one of the planters instead of taking
it back to his apartment.
"I took it back to the swing and sat down again and just sort of looked at it
and thought about my old bottle. How had the bugs felt in there? I had watched them
trying and trying to get out, but I had never thought at all about how they felt.
"Then I turned that bottle inside out, so that I was inside and the whole world
was outside. And when I did that, just an hour or so ago, here I was. Maybe we'd
be home if I could turn it the right way again."
His hand still stroked, but it seemed to him that it stroked nothing, that the
silky smoothness of her soft brown hair had slowly drained away as he spoke. He
looked down. His fingers were fading even as they moved, their tips vanished
already, the rest translucent, unsure, and unreal.
Copyright й 2007 Gene Wolfe