"Carol Emshwiller - Woman Waiting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

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by Conol Emshwiller

There goes the plane for Chicago. They're up safely. In here you can't hear any of their racket.

There they So, climbing in a trail of black srnoke, engines screamirg, but we can't hear it.

For us, they're silent as birds.

For them, we here below are diminishing in size. We are becoming doll-like and soon we will be like
ants, soon no more than scunying gnats and, later still, bacteria perhaps and fungl, f, too, nothing but a
microbic crea* ture. I might be the size of a camel or a mouse, it's all the same to them up there. Even if I
were to stand in the center of the landing field (ur camel or mause) they couldn't see me at all.

There they go, swelling towards the sun. Only the sky will have room enough for them now. This landing
field lvill seem infinitesimal. There will be no place on this whole planet, not a bit of land anywhere, unless
some gigantic desert, that will seem to them large enough to Iand on. There, they have already swelled
themselves up out of sight.

But now I see they have begun to board the plane for Rome. In a moment they will fly up as the others
did, like a great expanding bird, starting out at our size, but growing too big for rrs. Behind this thick glass
I hardly hear those Rome-bound engines begin, one by one, to scream out their expanding powers.

How nice it must be for all those people to enlarge themselves so. How condescendingly they must,
sometimes, trook down upon us here "

I have a ticket.

I am not unlike those others boardirrg their planes for Chicago, Rome, Miami, and so soon to be
transformed.
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And I am not unlike these who sit here waiting too. I am, in fact, quite a bit like them, for I have noticed
that within my view there are acfually three other coats of almost exactly the same brown as mine and I
see two other little black hats. I have noticed myself in the ladies' room mirror, though not so that anyone
knerv I was watching myself. I only allowed myself to look as I combed *y hair and put on my lipstick,
but I did see how like them I am in my new clothes and from a certain distance. If I could just keep this in
mind, for my looks, when I can remember them, influence my actions, and I am sure if I could see myself
in some mirror behind the clerks, I would feel quite comfortable approaching them. tsut then there will be
no more need of that.

But I know rest room mirrors are not quite trustworthy. They have a pinkish cast that flatters ffid, for all I
know, a lengthening effect to make us all think of ourselves as closer to some long legged ideal. I must
remember that and be careful. I mustn't fantasize about myself. I must remember I am not quite what the
mirrors show me" They are, in a w&/, Iike subway windows where one sees oneself flashing by along the
dark walls and one looks quite dashing and luminously handsome, needing, one thinks, only red earrings
or a modish hat to be a quite extraordinary person, even standing otrt from the others.

There go those Rome people. Soon I will be off up there too. The thought is enough to make me feel
dashingly handsome again, as handsome as all these clean-cut people so comfortable in themselves, so