"KW Jeter - Black Nightgown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

he'd sit at the bare kitchen table and sort out the bit that would be
placed inside a simple white envelope, to be left on top of the shop's
counter. The widow's husband used to come in to pick it up, with a smile
and a nod and a few overly polite words that the butcher had acknowledged
with a simmering anger in his eyes. Now one of the other Cracow dandies
came in every week to pick up the money.
His father called his name again, louder. He drained the last weak taste
of beer and pitched the empty bottle in among the waste bin's red bones.
He pulled the apron down from the hook and walked inside with it in his
hand.

"You were thinking about that silly animal, weren't you? That toad." She
sat on the other side of the table from him, her bare elbows on the white
cloth, holding a glass of wine in her hands, rubbing the corner of her
brow with it. Her face was shining, the loose curls of her tied-up hair
dampened against her neck and by her ears, from the steam off the pots on
the stove. "That was stupid, it spoils your appetite." The widow smiled,
eyes half-lidded, as though there were some indefinable pleasure in
watching him eat. "Think about things like that, a frog will grow in your
belly and your eyes will bulge out. All the time." She lowered the glass
and sipped from it.
He looked up from the plate, not sure -- never sure -- if she was joking
or not. They knew so many things, all women did; maybe that was one of
them, a true thing. How would he know? Then he caught the lifting of one
corner of her mouth. "Bullshit."
"Bullshit, he says." She gazed up at the ceiling. "I fix him dinner, he
picks at it like I'm trying to poison him, then he says bullshit to me."
Her gaze, still smiling, settled back upon him. "What would your mother
say if she heard you talking like that?"
He had to wonder. Not about what his mother would say, but about the
possibility of some conspiracy between her and the widow, a dealing in
confidences that ran beneath the little feuds and hushed glares on the
ordinary world's surface.
"I don't know." No man did. He laid down his fork, a garlic clove and a
bite of mutton -- it hadn't come from his father's shop, he knew that at
least -- speared upon it. What they told each other, what all women shared
amongst themselves, even the little girls with their jump ropes and
knowing laughter. "I mean, I don't know what she'd say."
He looked down at the plate, at the speckled grease congealing, a scrap of
bread as white as the underside of her breasts. As dark as she was, how
shining black her hair and eyes . . . he'd laid his hand upon skin as pale
as glass, beneath which the trembling of her veins could be seen, blue ink
written on milk. He'd been rendered wordless by how that soft curve had
fitted its cloudlike weight into his palm, an event foreordained by
dreaming prophets.
Now he bit and chewed, laying the emptied fork back down, the motion of
his jaws massaging the brain. To thoughts unbidden, still the blasphemous
toad. He hadn't even been in the church that day, but he'd heard --
everyone had; they all knew -- and he could imagine the woman's cry as
she'd fainted from the rail, the chalice rolling through the blood of