"James Patrick Kelly - The Edge of Nowhere" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

so it called her little girl which she didn't like because she was seven already, and the museum had
escalators that whispered music, and there was one really, really big room filled with pix of all blurry
water lilies, and outside in a sculpture garden there were statues made of metal and rocks but there were
no flowers because it was cold so she and Dad didn't stay out there very long and inside again were lots
of pix of women with three eyes and too many corners and then some wide blue men blocked her view
of the Mona Lisa so she never really saw that one, which everyone said later was supposed to be so
special but one she did see and remembered now was a pix of a grid that had colored rectangles and
with ribbons of red and yellow separating them, and she asked her Dad if it was a map of the museum
and he laughed down at her because her Dad was so tall, tall as any statue and he said the pix wasn't a
map, it was a mondrian and she asked him what a mondrian was and then he laughed again and she
laughed and it was so easy to laugh in those days and Will was laughing too.

"I want to go down there." He laughed as he pointed down at the mondrian which stretched into the rosy
distance.

"There?" Rain didn't understand; the best part of her was still in the museum with her father. "Why?"

"Because there are people living there. Must be why Chance won't give out binoculars or telescopes." He
let go of her hand. "Because it's not here."

"You're going to step over the edge?" Her voice rose in alarm.

"No, silly." He leapt up, stood on the tabletop and raised his arms to the sky. "I'm going to climb down."

"But that's the same thing."

"No, it isn't. I'll show you." He slid off the picnic table and started toward the thicket of scruffy
evergreens and brambles that had overgrown the edge of Nowhere. He walked along this tangle until he
came to a bit of blue rag tied to a branch, glanced over his shoulder to see if she was still with him and
then wriggled into the scrub. Rain followed.

They emerged into a tiny clearing She sidled beside him and he slipped an arm around her waist to brace
her. The cliff was steep here but not sheer. She could make out a narrow dirt track that switched back
through scree and stunted fir. Maybe a mountain goat could negotiate it, if there were any mountain
goats. But a single misstep would send Will plunging headlong. And then there was the Drop. Everyone
knew about the Drop. They traded stories about it all the time. Scary stories. She was about to ask him
why, if there were people down there, they hadn't climbed up for a visit, when he kicked a stone over the
edge. They watched it bounce straight down and disappear over a ledge.

"Lucy Panza showed me this," said Will, his face flushed with excitement.

Rain wondered when he'd had time to go exploring the edge with Lucy Panza. "But she stepped over the
edge."

"No," he said. "She didn't."

She considered the awful slope for a moment and shuddered. "I'm not going down there, Will."

He continued peering down the dirt track. "I know," he said.