Elizabeth Hand Last Summer on Mars Hill

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grew
dim and disappeared. One by one all the other gilded coins blinked into
nothing,
until the altar stood as it had minutes before, a dusty collection of things,
odd and somewhat ridiculous. Jason's head pounded and he felt faint; then
realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out, shuddering, put his pen
and notebook on the floor and walked to the altar.
Everything was as it had been, roses, cloth, paper, tomatoes; excepting only
his
father's offering and Ariel's. Hesitantly he reached to touch the book Martin
had left, then recoiled.
The cover of the book had been damaged. When he leaned over to stare at it
more
closely, he saw that myriad tiny holes had been burned in the paper, in what
at
first seemed to be a random pattern. But when he picked it up -gingerly, as
though it might yet release an electrical jolt or some other hidden energy --
he
saw that the tiny perforations formed an image, blurred but unmistakable. The
shadow of a hand, four fingers splayed across the cover as though gripping it.
Jason went cold. He couldn't have explained how, but he knew that it was a
likeness of his father's hand that he saw there, eerie and chilling as those
monstrous shadows left by victims of the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With a frightened gasp he tossed the book back onto the altar. For a moment he
stood beside the wooden table, half-poised to flee; but finally reached over
and
tentatively pushed aside his roses to fully reveal the camisole.
It was just like the book. Thousands of tiny bum-holes made a mined lace of
the
pastel silk, most of them clustered around one side of the bodice. He picked
it
up, catching a faint fragrance, lavender and marijuana, and held it out by its
pink satin straps. He raised it, turning toward the light streaming through
the
chapel's picture window, and saw that the pinholes formed a pattern, elegant
as
the tracery of veins and capillaries on a leaf. A shadowy bull's-eye --
breast,
aureole, nipple drawn on the silken cloth.
With a small cry Jason dropped the camisole. Without looking back he ran from
the chapel. Such was his hurry that he forgot his pen and notebook and the
half-written letter to Moony, piled carefully on the dusty floor. And so he
did
not see the shining constellation that momentarily appeared above the pages, a
curious cloud that hovered there like a child's dream of weather before
flowering into a golden rain.
Moony sat hunched on the front stoop, waiting for her mother to leave. Ariel
had
been in her room for almost half an hour, her luncheon date with Diana and
Mrs.
Grose notwithstanding. When finally she emerged, Moony could hear the soft
uneven tread of her flip-flops, padding from bedroom to bedroom to kitchen.
There was the sigh of the refrigerator opening and closing, the muted pop of a
cork being pulled from a bottle, the long grateful gurgle of wine being poured
into a glass. Then Ariel herself in the doorway behind her. Without looking
Moony could tell that she'd put on The Skirt. She could smell it, the musty
scents of patchouli and cannabis resin and the honeysuckle smell of the
expensive detergent Ariel used to wash it by hand, as though it were some
precious winding sheet.
"I'm going to Adele's for lunch." Moony nodded silently.
"I'll be back in a few hours."
More silence.
"You know where to find me if anyone comes by." Ariel nudged her daughter
gently
with her toe. "Okay?"
Moony sighed. "Yeah, okay."
She watched her mother walk out the door, sun bouncing off her hair in glossy
waves. When Ariel was out of sight she hurried down the hall.
In her mother's room, piles of clothes and papers covered the worn Double
Wedding Ring quilt, as though tossed helter-skelter from her bureau.
"Jeez, what a mess," said Moony. She slowly crossed to the bed. It was covered
with scarves and tangled skeins of pantyhose; drifts of old catering receipts,
bills, canceled checks. A few paperbacks with yellowed pages that had been
summer reading in years past. A back issue of Gourmet magazine and the Maine
Progressive. A Broadway ticket stub from Prelude to a Kiss. Grimacing, Moony
prodded the edge of last year's calendar from the Beach Store & Pizza to Go.
What had her mother been looking for?
Then, as if by magic, Moony saw it. Its marbled cover suddenly glimpsed
beneath
a dusty strata of tarot cards and Advil coupons, like some rare bit of fossil,
lemur vertebrae or primate jaw hidden within papery shale. She drew it out
carefully, tilting it so the light slid across the title. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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