"Barry Longyear - Dark Corners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

Gone.

Now I’ll cry, but just to myself. I can’t ever let Hicks see me cry.




When Hicks hits me in front of the other patients, or the nurses and doctors, he does it like he’s only
joking, kidding around. But the words sting. The slaps hurt. Sometimes he takes my left hand and forces
me to slap my own face.

“You don’t have a pencil,” Hicks explains with a sneer. “We don’t give sharp instruments to nuts. You
don’t have any paper and nothing is written on your palm. Look!” He punches my upper arm. I keep
writing. Hicks grabs my hand and shoves it into my face.

“Look at your palm, Nut! Can you read anything there?” Again he forces me to slap my own face.
“Look at it, you nut! Look!”

He smacks the back of my head with his open hand. Some of the patients in the rec room laugh. Most
don’t. Most have Hickses of their own.

“Look at it!”

I keep writing. I need to remember as much as I can. So much is gone. Like those three dead men and
the dead woman. Don’t remember killing them. That woman and those three men. Don’t even remember
who they were. I was told about the results of the trial, but I don’t remember the trial.

Sometimes I pick at these pieces of memory I have, then the feelings fill me, flattening me with that
burning, deafening, shock wave of rage. I can’t write like that, so I never find out what it is. Better to
leave it alone.

Hicks has stopped slapping my head. I look up to see why. Hicks is chunky with long, stringy dark hair,
a few strands of which come down to his shoulders. His eyebrows turn up at the ends and his nose is
lumpy and bulbous like some sort of mutant potato. He isn’t very big, but it doesn’t matter. The patients
can’t hit back. The last patient who hit back was taken into the storeroom behind the hospital kitchen by
half a dozen orderlies and beaten to death. That’s what they tell us.

Hicks is looking at someone across the room. I look and see her: Nurse Stover. She is shaking her head
and frowning at Hicks. The look says several things. He knows better than to abuse patients in the rec
room. That’s why they have the padded cells: secluded, sound proofed.

Bad form, Hicks, says her look.

All these witnesses.

Bad form.

Nurse Stover yawns and goes back to reading her tabloid, freshening up her fantasy of being abducted
and raped by giant grasshoppers.