"Harlan Ellison - Shatterday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

And we would sit in silence again.
“Would you like a nice piece of coffee cake?” Leona would say. “I made it fresh just
this morning.” Or deep dish green apple pie. Or milk and tollhouse cookies. Or a brown betty
pudding.
“No, no, thank you, Mrs. Kinzer; Jeffty and I grabbed a couple of cheeseburgers on
the way home.” And again, silence.
Then, when the stillness and the awkwardness became too much even for them (and
who knew how long that total silence reigned when they were alone, with that thing they
never talked about any more Flanging between them), Leona Kinzer would say, “I think he’s
asleep.”
 John Kinzer would say, “I don’t hear the radio playing.
“Just so, it would go on like that, until I could politely find excuse to bolt away on
some flimsy pretext. Yes, that was the way it would go on, every time, just the same... except
once.

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no
change, not one day of peace.”
Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He
bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her
graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s
all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on
the arms of the chair.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”
John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were
always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he
said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to
recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very
much.
I managed to get away quickly that evening. They didn’t want witnesses to their
shame. I was glad to go.

And for a week I stayed away. From them, from Jeffty, from their street, even from
that end of town.
I had my own life. The store, accounts, suppliers’ conferences, poker with friends,
pretty women I took to well-lit restaurants, my own parents, putting antifreeze in the car,
complaining to the laundry about too much starch in the collars and cuffs, working out at the
gym, taxes, catching Ian or David (whichever one it was) stealing from the cash register. I had
my own life.
But not even that evening could keep me from Jeffty. He called me at the store and
asked me to take him to the rodeo. We chummed it up as best a twenty-two-year-old with
other interests could... with a five-year-old. I never dwelled on what bound us together; I
always thought it was simply the years. That, and affection for a kid who could have been the
little brother I never had. (Except I remembered when we had played together, when we had
both been the same age; I remembered that period, and Jeffty was still the same.)
And then, one Saturday afternoon, I came to take him to a double feature, and things I
should have noticed so many times before, I first began to notice only that afternoon.

I came walking up to the Kinzer house, expecting Jeffty to be sitting on the front
porch steps, or in the porch glider, waiting for me. But he was nowhere in sight.
Going inside, into that darkness and silence, in the midst of May sunshine, was