"Benjamin Rosenbaum - The House Beyond your Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenbaum Benjamin)

Matthias browses through his library of worlds.
In one of them, a little girl named Sophie is shivering on
her bed, her arms wrapped around a teddy bear. It is night.
She is six years old. She is crying, as quietly as she can.
The sound of breaking glass comes from the kitchen.
Through her window, on the wall of the house next door, she
can see the shadows cast by her parents. There is a blow,
and one shadow falls; she buries her nose in the teddy bear
and inhales its soft smell, and prays.
Matthias knows he should not meddle. But today his heart
is troubled. Today, in the world outside the library, a pilgrim
is heralded. A pilgrim is coming to visit Matthias, the first in a
very long time.
The pilgrim comes from very far away.
The pilgrim is one of us.
"Please, God," Sophie says, "please help us. Amen."
"Little one," Matthias tells her through the mouth of the
teddy bear, "be not afraid."
Sophie sucks in a sharp breath. "Are you God?" she
whispers.
"No, child," says Matthias, the maker of her universe.
"Am I going to die?" she asks.
"I do not know," Matthias says.
When they die—these still imprisoned ones—they die
forever. She has bright eyes, a button nose, unruly hair.
Sodium and potassium dance in her muscles as she moves.
Unwillingly, Matthias imagines Sophie's corpse as one of


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 The House Beyond Your Sky
by Benjamin Rosenbaum


trillions, piled on the altar of his own vanity and self-
indulgence, and he shivers.
"I love you, teddy bear," the girl says, holding him.
From the kitchen, breaking glass, and sobbing.
****


We imagine you—you, the ones we long for—as if you
came from our own turbulent and fragile youth: embodied,
inefficient, mortal. Human, say. So picture our priest Matthias
as human: an old neuter, bird-thin, clear-eyed and resolute,
with silky white hair and lucent purple skin.
Compared to the vast palaces of being we inhabit, the