S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 100.68KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Scanned by gojukai

From Tales of Fantasy, Elsewhere Vol. II

Edited by Terri Windling &

Mark Alan Arnold

v1.1: 2005-05-10 by reb – removed hard returns, corrected all obvious errors; unclear passages marked by [sp?]; not checked

against hard copy

The Fallen Country

Somtow Sucharitkul

He had blank, sky-blue eyes and confused blond hair. He had a wry, dry voice with just a lemon

twist of longing in it. He was small for his age, almost as though he had willed himself not to grow.

As I closed the door behind us, my hand brushed against his and he flinched away violently in the

split second before willing himself to smile; from this I pegged him as a victim of child abuse.

"Hi," I said, answering him. "My name is Dora Marx." I eased him into the brown, wombish chair

that faced my desk. "You may call me—" I sat down myself, with the stuck-record-in-a-groove

smoothness that comes from seeing a thousand children a year for twenty years, "—either Dora, or

Mrs. Marx. Whichever makes you feel more comfortable."

"I think I’d prefer Mrs. Marx," he said. "But," he added, "you can call me Billy." Touche.

He didn't look at me. I went to the window to slam out the eleven o'clock yelling from the

schoolyard. God damn it, they should never make you work under these conditions ...

I said, "You're the one who—"

"They found at five in the morning, dinging to the steeple of Santa Maria's. You read the papers?"

"Sometimes," I said, flicking the dipping out of his file.

BILLY BINDER. AGE 12—

"Where'd you get that scar?" —like an albino earth-worm, wriggling into the sleeve of his teeshirt.

"Fell off my bike." Sure.

—FOUND HALF-DEAD ON THE LEDGE, HIS ARMS AROUND THE STEEPLE ON THE

SIDE OVERLOOKING ANGEL PLAZA. FATHER EPSTEIN, SUMMERTIME PASTOR

STANDING IN FOR FATHER SANTINI, WHILE TRYING TO RING THE BELL—

"It says here," I said, "that you were suffering from severe frostbite."

"Yes. From the snow."

"It doesn't snow in Florida in the middle of August—" No point trying to argue with him yet. My

job was to listen, only to listen. I wasn't trained to root out traumas. It wasn't up to me to

pronounce the kid an attempted suicide either, or to solve the mystery of how he got to the topmost

turret of a locked historical monument, or to elucidate the medical wonder of frostbite in a

hundred-degree heatwave - I was only a counsellor in a parochial school too poor and stupid to

afford an expert.

I wouldn't get anywhere by questioning his story. Perhaps I should start with something else. "How

often do they beat you up?" I said.

"What?" Terror flecked his eyes for a second. Then they went dead. He said, "Almost every day." It

was in the same tone of voice.

"Who?"

"Pete, my Mom's boyfriend."

"What?"

He told me about it, never raising his voice. I had been doing this for twenty years. After a while

you grow iron railings round your brains. Nothing hurts anymore. I listened, staring at my hands and

wishing a ton of Porcelana on them. I knew I would sit there and endure until the catalogue of

beltings and poundings had dissolved into incoherence, into tears, into hysteria, and then I would

flow into the cracks in the kid's soul like epoxy glue and make him seem whole for a while ... but he

didn't give me a chance. He went on in that same monotone, detail after detail, until it was I who

was ready to crack. I held up

my hand. He stopped.

"Don't you ever cry?" I said.

"Not any more," he said. "I’ve promised."

"What do you mean, you promised?"

"The Snow Dragon."

"Tell me about him."

"I knew it!" he cried. Now he was exultant, taunting. I wasn't prepared for the change in mood; I

started most unprofessionally. "You're supposed to be trying to help me or something, but all you

want to do is listen to me lie!"

Shifting gears to accommodate his outburst, "Is that why he hits you?"

"Yes! Yes! But I won't stop!"

"It's all right," I said. "You can lie if you want. You can tell all the lies you want in this room.

Nothing will ever escape from here ..."

"Like a confessional? Like a black hole?"

"Yes." Imaginative imagery, at least. This kid was no dummy. "Like a black hole." He looked me in

the eye for the first time. His eyes were clear as glass; I could read no deceit in them.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: