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

accustomed to their clothes and their bodies, and I feel young, almost too young, Iike a little gtl on her
first voyage alone (and it has been a long time since I went anywhere so it does seem like a first voyage).
That Rorne plane looks slow from here, but I know how fast they're really going, md then, the larger you
are, the slower you seem. I think they are already noticitrg how huge they are getting now. Once up, they
may not be able to come down at all. They may sit looking out

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the windows, circling forever, dizry at their o\&,n size compared to earth, unable to risk a landirrg.

But I'm going back. (I don't call it home an).rnore since I've been here so long.) I'm going back, but once
I get up in that plane I don't think anything will matter. I'll see the world as it really is then and f won't
mind not ever coming down at all.

I have a seat here by this wall of glass and I don't think anyone is noticing me. I have been here quite
some time, but others come and go. They don't keep track of how long I've been sitting here. And, as I
glance do.,rrn at myself, f think again that I look quite as ordinary As anyone else. Why should they
notice me with either criticisrn or admiration? I don't think it is at all evident that all my clothes are new.

I have a little black satchel on the floor beside me. In it I have my glasses, my newspaper, a cantaloupe,
and a little bug of peanuts. The cantaloupe is certainly very ripe. I think I can smell it now and then, a
sweet, good smell.

]ust now I noticed a woman who came up near me and then moved away to take a seat farther on. I
think I know why that was. It could have been the cantaloupe, that strange (to her) pungent sweetness,
but I think not. In my haste to come here in time (it's true I arrived unnecessarily early) I put on all my
new clothes without washing. I might say that washing in my apartment was never easy, and I may not
really have washed very well for quite some time. I might as well have feet like a fat man, a very fat man,
I should say. My feet are not fat, I mean, but they have a certain fat quality. That woman has found me
out, and that is why she is sitting over across the way.

So I am not really at all like the others under all rny nice clothes.

Yet is it a crime to be dirtyP I can see very well that it is in a place like this though I never noticed back in
my own room. Here it is certainly a crime, or certainly
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outstanding in one way or another, different, eccentric, extraordinary, and, I do think, a crime. Well,
there's nothing to be done about it now, though it makes me feel quite shrunken, new clothes or not. How
will it be in the plane, how will it be to be shrunken and expanded at the same time, for surely in the plane
someone will have to sit next to me whether they like it or not. Perhaps the cantaloupe will help. Perhaps
I will keep my satchel on my lr.p.

Think if I should drop it somehow up there and this elephantine cantaloupe, still swollen with altitude,
should squash down on some tiry builditrg, covering it with its cantaloupe-colored pulp, spreaditg its rich,
sweet smell over everythitg, a cantaloupe large as the moon, ripe and ready, squashing them all in too
much sweetness and too much iuice. Too much, they would cry. It's too much.

Flight 35o, Flight J2L, Flight zSS, Flight 2l6. I wonder if my feet together with my cantaloupe are capable
of permeating the air of this whole interior as that voice does. Perhaps they already have and I am