"Ballingrud-SheFoundHeaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballingrud Nathan)

The woman was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, she spoke tentatively, as
though she were unused to expressing abstract thought: "It's solid," she said,
"good and solid. It feels like the earth, like roots and leaves and hard-packed
dirt. If you set it in your lap, it makes music, like drums, like oh, hundreds
of drums hidden behind the trees, and if you close your eyes it takes you away,
it lifts you right out of your body and brings you to where the drums are, and
there's dancing, and laughing, and the sound of bodies touching in the
nighttime."

She fell silent.

"Are you sure?"

"Oh yes. Oh yes, I'm sure."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Washington."

The others fared no better. She was cried to, cursed at, and begged, and when
she was through she collapsed to the floor, the receiver resting loosely in her
slackened fingers, and her chest burned with futility. She tried to cry, but
there were no tears to be had. She was exhausted. The light was growing dim; the
setting sun cast its red glow into her apartment.

She looked toward the closet, where the Heaven sat safely tucked into the
shoebox. She was afraid to go to it.

Somewhere between the sun's immersion in the sea and the moon's rise to its
zenith, where it hung like a cold stone, she drifted into sleep. When she awoke,
the stars gazed in through her window, and the sea was painted over with the
pale white color of bones. Someone was knocking at her door.

Sally pulled herself to her feet, grimacing at the aches that rioted in her
joints, and padded to the door. She glanced at the digital clock next to the
couch: 11:47.

"Who is it?"

"My name is Lucas."

"What do you want?"

"I'm here about the Heaven. Please. It's important."

Sally thought for a moment. She did not have a gun. She could not defend
herself. She should just turn him away and go to bed.

But she found that she did not have the strength to turn away another person.
Through telephone conversations she had denied Heaven to more people than she
cared to count, dangling it over their mined lives like a taunt, pulling it away
when they began to hope. She felt poisoned. She could not do it again.