"Carrie Richardson - The City in Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richardson Carrie)

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The City in Morning
by Carrie Richerson
“The City in Morning” was first published in Bending the Landscape: Science
Fiction, The Overlook Press, 1998.
Author’s Note: “I’ve been told often that landscape appears as a character all its
own in most of my stories. Well, here I certainly made the City a character. Also,
Mileva Maric, a Serb mathematician who was Albert Einstein’s first wife (and may
have helped him with his theories; his letters to her refer to “our work on relative
motion”), quantum physics, and the watershed political event of my generation.”
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TODAY, for the first time in weeks, the fog has lifted from the valley below and the
city’s towers rise like silver and gold blades above the river’s bright blue swath. I
stand in my garden, the morning’s icy dew soaking through my sneakers,
surrounded by a vegetable certainty, and feel a familiar attraction. It has been a long
time since I visited the city.
I pick a blushing pair of McIntoshes for my basket, then gather the last of the
tomatoes. The green ones I will fry or pickle, but the last of the vine-ripened ones are
dense, scarlet globes of infinite possibility, like Baby Bangs waiting to happen. My
teeth tear through the tender skin of one, and ruby juice explodes over my lips and
trickles down through my beard. I am still picking seeds out of my chin hairs as I
return to the house.
As I slice a tomato onto Donald’s plate and freshen his coffee, he does not
look up from the newspaper, but he is aware of my every move and his hand
unerringly finds mine as I put his cup down. A quick squeeze and release, a smile of
thanks, meant for me but directed at the newspaper.
I sit in the chair across from his and push the remains of my breakfast around
on my plate. “It looks like it’s going to be a nice day,” I offer. Donald hums a
question mark without lifting his eyes from the page. I will get his full attention when
I say or do something that requires it, not before. I am not offended. I smile at the
long, dark hair that spills unbound down his cheek and hides all but the profile of his
long nose from me. I know the morning ritual; I find it comforting. After so many
years together it is not necessary for us to speak aloud to say much.
I drain my cup and examine the sediments at the bottom. I wonder if coffee
grounds can be used, like tea leaves, to tell the future. If so, is it a determinate one,
or only one of many possible? A decision crystallizes, even as I realize I made it
minutes ago. “I thought I might go into the city today. Is there anything you need?”
My voice is a shade too casual. For a moment longer Donald does not raise
his head, but I see his nostril flare with a deep, silent breath. Then he looks at me at
last, fastens his liquid, dark eyes upon my face and examines it as though
memorizing every detail. He raises his hand, the strong, callused artist’s fingers
starting to reach for mine, then changes his mind and sweeps the hair back from his
face instead. He wants to ask me not to go. I wait. His lips thin with the effort to
hold back the words, but he does not ask. He knows that I would refuse his request,
and then my refusal would lie like a dead thing between us, here at the table, at night
in bed.
Finally he looks away from my sympathetic, unhelpful gaze. “Some pastels,”
he says, so softly that I have to strain to hear. “I’m almost out.” He is sad, proud, a