"Molly Brown - Women On The Brink Of A Cataclysm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Molly)

Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm
a short story by Molly Brown

I felt like I was going through a meat grinder. Then there was a blinding
flash of light - bright orange - and I felt like I was going through a
meat grinder backwards. And there I was, back in one piece. Slightly
dizzy, a little stiff around the joints. Swearing I'd never do that again.

The digital display inside the capsule read: 29 April 1995, 6:03 p.m.,
E.S.T. If that was true, then I was furious. Toni promised she would only
set the timer forward by two minutes, and I'd gone forward by a year! A
whole year, wasted. Didn't she realise I had work to do? And then I
thought: oh my God, the exhibition! I was supposed to have an exhibition
in July, 1994 - if I've really gone forward a year, I missed my one-woman
show at Gallery Alfredo!
I opened the capsule door, bent on murder. And then I froze. This wasn't
my studio.
I live and work on the top floor of an old warehouse in lower Manhattan,
and I do sculpture. Abstract sculpture. I take scrapped auto parts and
turn them into something beautiful. I twist industrial rubbish into
exquisite shapes. I can mount a bicycle wheel onto a wooden platform and
make it speak volumes about the meaning of life. I once placed a headless
Barbie doll inside a fish tank and sold it for five thousand dollars, and
that was before I was famous - I hear the same piece recently fetched more
than forty.

I'd been working on a new piece called "Women on the Brink of a
Cataclysm": an arrangement of six black and white television sets, each
showing a video loop of a woman scrubbing a floor, when Toni Fisher rang
the doorbell. I've known Toni off and on since we were kids. We grew up in
the same town and went to the same high school before going our separate
ways after graduation, in 1966. I went to art school in California, she
got a scholarship to study physics at Cambridge in England. It would be
twenty years before we met again, at the launch party for Gutsy Ladies:
Women Making Their Mark in the 80s, the latest book by Arabella Winstein.
It was one of those dreadful media circuses; I remember a PR woman in a
geometric haircut dragging me around the room for a round of
introductions: "Hey there, gutsy lady, time to meet some other gutsy
ladies!" I was there in my capacity as "Gutsy Lady of the Art World" and
Toni had been profiled in a chapter entitled: "Gutsy Lady on the Cutting
Edge of Science".
I saw her leaning against a wall in the corner: a tall, stick-thin
character with spikey blonde hair, gulping champagne. I could see she was
a kindred spirit - we were the only ones not wearing neat little suits
with boxy jackets - but I had no idea who she was; in high school she'd
been a chubby brunette with glasses. She saw me looking at her, and waved
me over.
We leaned against the wall together, jangling the chains on our identical
black leather jackets. "I'm working on a calculation," she said, "that
will show density of shoulder pad to be in directly inverse proportion to