"Carol Emshwiller - At Sixes and Sevens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

When I take a rest from housework I take my tea up and watch her out
my east side upstairs window. I can see her best when she’s in her weedy
vegetable garden. She talks as she works ... or at least I see her mouth
moving. Singing would be one thing, but this looks more like jabber, jabber,
jabber. What in the world can she be jabbering about? and who to?

She’s done that since she was a little girl—yapping to herself.
Jumping about so you’d think she was a baby goat.

I say it’s her own fault if everything goes wrong. Though she wouldn’t
tell us if it did or didn’t, and now that there’s a drought things are going
wrong for everybody.

Though why should we care? I’ve only talked to her, face to face, a
couple of times. She’s one of those people that doesn’t look you in the eye.
All these years, I’ve lived next door, and I don’t even know what color her
eyes are. I can guess though. You can’t have hair that light and fine and
have dark eyes.

We’re the ones took her to the clinic to get a cast on her leg. We
stayed the night in town and brought her back the next day. She had us ...
let us, that is, set her up in her so-called living room on the so-called couch.
(I wonder how many generations of cats have scratched at it. The one now
is a marmalade tabby. A nasty male. He arched his back and spit at me. I
can’t help thinking that’s what she wanted to do to me, too. Iris. Her name,
not the cat’s.)

She actually did thank us. At least that. Though she didn’t even look at
me then. I left her with plenty of food and water. I didn’t feed the tabby.

I might not have seen her at all, down there behind her lilacs. She’d
climbed up to fix an attic window. She didn’t yell out for anybody. She just
lay there. I went upstairs to my window to see what in the world she was
doing now, and there she was, her legs sticking out from the bushes. And
later that afternoon when I went up to see again, there they still were.

I sort of wanted her to fall but I didn’t think somebody like her, who
used to climb everything in sight, ever really would.

When I saw she had, I thought, well, she can’t object to me going
over to see what’s wrong, so I did, and a good thing, too. But, as I keep
saying, helping people is a thankless task.

****

There’s something wrong with her. All her dad’s fault no doubt. I’ve
been watching her more and more. Daniel says I’m not getting my chores
done, but I want to see what she’s up to. I tell him it might be important. I
say, “What if she’s a witch? What if this drought is her fault? What about
that she dances in her backyard at midnight when there’s a full moon?” (Or