"Lisa Goldstein - Lilyanna" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

LILYANNA
by Lisa Goldstein

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“Asimov’s bought my first story, ‘Ever After’ (December 1984). I’d already
published two novels by then, and I was beginning to think I was going to be one
of those authors who could only write novels. Since then, of course, I’ve given you
almost all of my short stories. Best wishes on your thirtieth birthday.”—Lisa
Goldstein

Lisa Goldstein has published eleven novels, the most recent being The
Alchemist’s Door from Tor Books. She has spent the last four years as Isabel
Glass, and has written two books under this name; the latest is The Divided
Crown. Her novel The Red Magician won the American Book Award for
Best Paperback. Her novels and short stories have been finalists for the
Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. She has worked as a proofreader,
library aide, bookseller, and reviewer, and she lives in Oakland, California,
with her husband and their cute dog Spark. Her website, which includes
pictures of Spark, is www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein.
****
Sometimes after the library closes I walk through the dim rooms, savoring the
quiet. I put books back in order, and straighten the displays, and take down the
outdated fliers on the community bulletin board. Then I put on my coat, turn out the
last light, and go home.
Today the disorder the patrons had left was worse than usual, books scattered
on tables and counters and across the floor. The days when libraries were havens of
silence, the only sounds a muffled cough and a scratch of a pen on paper, are long
gone, I’m afraid. People talk and laugh as if they’re at a ball game, or answer their
cell phones, or call out to one another when they see a book they recognize. Around
three-thirty the after-schoolers come in, looking for something to do until their
parents get off work and pick them up. Mostly they gossip, or sit at the computers
and play games; occasionally one of them will read something, but it’s usually a
comic book.
I picked up the books and stacked them into piles. It’s a small library I work
in, in a small town down the peninsula from San Francisco, just two rooms for adult
fiction and nonfiction and two for the juvenile sections. The clean-up took only a
few minutes. Then I put the books into the bin to be checked in the next day, in case
a patron had checked them out and forgotten them.
A piece of paper fluttered out from one of them and fell to the floor. I picked
it up and turned it over. It was a photograph, black and white, a picture of a woman.
She looked like a movie star, with the sort of beauty they used to have when they all
looked like kings and queens, distant and regal. Perhaps she really had been a star,
but if so I didn’t recognize her.
I studied her a while longer. Her hair was light brown, and her wide-set eyes
could have been the same color, though the black and white of the photograph made
it hard to tell; they could just as easily have been gray. Her mouth was that bow
shape that had been popular generations ago; it looked dark in the photograph, and I
thought she might have been wearing red lipstick.
None of this explains why I thought her beautiful, though. It was something