"Bruce McAllister - Poison" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcallister Bruce)

POISON
by Bruce McAllister

Golden Gryphon Press will bring out a collection of Bruce
McAllister’s science fiction stories entitled The Girl Who Loved
Animals and Other Stories this fall. The author’s latest tale, however,
is a fantasy. This past summer, he traveled to Italy to revisit, after
forty-five years, the world (village, witches, and lizards) of “Poison”
and to trace the medieval itinerary of the hero of a fantasy
novel—The Dragons of Como—that’s almost finished.

****

In school that day the American boy, whose twelfth birthday was
approaching, did just as well as his friends on the Roman history recitation
and the spelling test, which included the word stregheria—witchcraft
—which could, if you weren’t careful, easily be confused with straggaria, an
old-fashioned word for respect.

After school let out, he and his friends celebrated their good fortune
by buying new plastic blowguns at the toy store in the fishing village and
spending an hour making dozens of little paper cones with sewing needles
taped to their points. Every boy in this country had at least one
blowgun—they were cheap and no longer than a ruler—so the American
boy had one too.

When the cones were finished, they went back up the hill and there,
on the convent wall, not far from his family’s villetta, hunted the lizards all
boys in this country hunted. It wasn’t easy hitting them. The bright green
lizards weren’t big and they moved like lightning, but he and his friends had
gotten good at it. To keep things equal, they each stopped at six, leaving
the bodies—which made the American boy sad if he looked at them too
long—at the foot of the wall, where the convent cats might eat them if they
were hungry enough.

The next night, after dinner, the American boy watched as his own
cat—which he’d had for a year, slept with every night, and named “Nevis,”
the Latin word for “snow”—died in his bathtub, making little pig-like sounds
until he couldn’t stand it any longer and he went outside to the flagstone
patio to wait in darkness for the terrible sound to stop. When it finally did, he
went back in, saw a strange shadow hovering over the tub, held his breath
until it was gone, and then picked his cat up. When the limp but still-warm
body made him cry, he let it. His parents were next door at their landlord’s,
the Lupis, and wouldn’t be back for a while. No one would hear him. No one
would say, as his mother sometimes did, “You’re too attached to your pets,
John. Even your dad thinks so.”

He knew who had done it. The three witches who lived in the olive
groves that covered the hills around their house always put out poison for
cats. If a cat died too suddenly for a doctor to help, and in great pain,