Nancy Kress - The Price of Oranges

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 40.1KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

======================

The Price of Oranges

by Nancy Kress

======================

First appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in April 1989

Fictionwise Contemporary

Science Fiction

---------------------------------

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the

purchaser. If you did not purchase this ebook directly from Fictionwise.com

then you are in violation of copyright law and are subject to severe fines.

Please visit www.fictionwise.com to purchase a legal copy. Fictionwise.com

offers a reward for information leading to the conviction of copyright

violators of Fictionwise ebooks.

---------------------------------

"I'm worried about my granddaughter," Harry Kramer said, passing half

of his sandwich to Manny Feldman. Manny took it eagerly. The sandwich was

huge, thick slices of beef and horseradish between fresh slabs of crusty

bread. Pigeons watched the park bench hopefully.

"Jackie. The granddaughter who writes books," Manny said. Harry watched

to see that Manny ate. You couldn't trust Manny to eat enough; he stayed too

skinny. At least in Harry's opinion. Manny, Jackie -- the world, Harry

sometimes thought, had all grown too skinny when he somehow hadn't been

looking. Skimpy. Stretched feeling. Harry nodded to see horseradish spurt in a

satisfying stream down Manny's scraggly beard.

"Jackie. Yes," Harry said.

"So what's wrong with her? She's sick?" Manny eyed Harry's strudel,

cherry with real yeast bread. Harry passed it to him. "Harry, the whole thing?

I couldn't."

"Take it, take it, I don't want it. You should eat. No, she's not sick.

She's miserable." When Manny, his mouth full of strudel, didn't answer, Harry

put a hand on Manny's arm. _"Miserable."_

Manny swallowed hastily. "How do you know? You saw her this week?"

"No. Next Tuesday. She's bringing me a book by a friend of hers. I know

from this." He drew a magazine from an inner pocket of his coat. The coat was

thick tweed, almost new, with wooden buttons. On the cover of the glossy

magazine a woman smiled contemptuously. A woman with hollow, starved-looking

cheeks who obviously didn't get enough to eat either.

"That's not a book," Manny pointed out.

"So she writes stories, too. Listen to this, just listen. 'I stood in

my backyard, surrounded by the false bright toxin-fed green, and realized that

the earth was dead. What else could it be, since we humans swarmed upon it

like maggots on carrion, growing our hectic gleaming molds, leaving our slime

trails across the senseless surface?' Does that sound like a happy woman?"

"Hoo boy," Manny said. "It's all like that. 'Don't read my things,

Popsy,' she says. 'You're not in the audience for my things.' Then she smiles

without ever once showing her teeth." Harry flung both arms wide. "Who else

should be in the audience but her own grandfather?"

Manny swallowed the last of the strudel. Pigeons fluttered angrily.

"She never shows her teeth when she smiles? Never?"

"Never."

"Hoo boy," Manny said. "Did you want all of that orange?"

"No, I brought it for you, to take home. But did you finish that whole

half a sandwich already?"

"I thought I'd take it home," Manny said humbly. He showed Harry the

tip of the sandwich, wrapped in the thick brown butcher paper, protruding from

the pocket of his old coat.

Harry nodded approvingly. "Good, good. Take the orange, too. I brought

it for you."

Manny took the orange. Three teenagers carrying huge shrieking radios

sauntered past. Manny started to put his hands over his ears, received a look

of dangerous contempt from the teenager with green hair, and put his hands on

his lap. The kid tossed an empty beer bottle onto the pavement before their

feet. It shattered. Harry scowled fiercely but Manny stared straight ahead.

When the cacophony had passed, Manny said, "Thank you for the orange. Fruit,

it costs so much this time of year."

Harry still scowled. "Not in 1937."

"Don't start that again, Harry."

Harry said sadly, "Why won't you ever believe me? Could I afford to

bring all this food if I got it at 1989 prices? Could I afford this coat? Have

you seen buttons like this in 1989, on a new coat? Have you seen sandwiches

wrapped in that kind of paper since we were young? Have you? Why won't you

believe me?"

Manny slowly peeled his orange. The rind was pale, and the orange had

seeds. "Harry. Don't start."

"But why won't you just come to my room and _see?"_

Manny sectioned the orange. "Your room. A cheap furnished room in a

Social Security hotel. Why should I go? I know what will be there. What will

be there is the same thing in my room. A bed, a chair, a table, a hot plate,

some cans of food. Better I should meet you here in the park, get at least a

little fresh air." He looked at Harry meekly, the orange clutched in one hand.

"Don't misunderstand. It's not from a lack of friendship I say this. You're

good to me, you're the best friend I have. You bring me things from a great

deli, you talk to me, you share with me the family I don't have. It's enough,

Harry. It's more than enough. I don't need to see where you live like I live."

Harry gave it up. There were moods, times, when it was just impossible

to budge Manny. He dug in, and in he stayed. "Eat your orange."

"It's a good orange. So tell me more about Jackie."

"Jackie." Harry shook his head. Two kids on bikes tore along the path.

One of them swerved towards Manny and snatched the orange from his hand. "Aw

riggghhhtttt!"

Harry scowled after the child. It had been a girl. Manny just wiped the

orange juice off his fingers onto the knee of his pants. "Is everything she

writes so depressing?"

"Everything," Harry said. "Listen to this one." He drew out another

magazine, smaller, bound in rough paper with a stylized line drawing of a

woman's private parts on the cover. On the cover! Harry held the magazine with

one palm spread wide over the drawing, which made it difficult to keep the

pages open while he read. "She looked at her mother in the only way possible:

with contempt, contempt for all the betrayals and compromises that had been

her mother's life, for the sad soft lines of defeat around her mother's mouth,

for the bright artificial dress too young for her wasted years, for even the

leather handbag, Gucci of course, filled with blood money for having sold her

life to a man who had long ceased to want it."

"Hoo boy," Manny said. "About a _mother_ she wrote that?"

"About everybody. All the time."

"And where _is_ Barbara?"

"Reno again. Another divorce." How many had that been? After two, did

anybody count? Harry didn't count. He imagined Barbara's life as a large

roulette wheel like the ones on TV, little silver men bouncing in and out of

red and black pockets. Why didn't she get dizzy?

Manny said slowly, "I always thought there was a lot of love in her."

"A lot of that she's got," Harry said dryly. "Not Barbara -- Jackie. A

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

Nancy Kress - The Price of Oranges.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！

Nancy Kress - The Price of Oranges

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: