C. S. Friedman - Downtime

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 98.25KB 16 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

DOWNTIME

C. S. Friedman

BY the time the messenger from the DFO came, Marian had almost forgotten about the

Order. You could do that if you tried hard enough. You just tucked the unwanted thoughts deep

into some backwater recess of your mind until the normal clutter of everyday life obscured it,

and then you pretended it wasn't there. Marian was good at that. She had her own special

places for hiding things, dark little crevices in her soul where one might tuck a fact, an

experience, or even a whole relationship, so that it never saw the light of day again.

She knew the day her sister died that a lot of new things were going to have to go in there,

and she'd done her damnedest to make them all fit. She'd done so well, in fact, that when the

door first chimed, there was a brief moment when she genuinely didn't know what it was about.

Who would be coming to see her in the middle of the day?

She was curled up with her children and her pets at the time: two boys, a girl, two cats and

a small dog, whom she collectively referred to as "the menagerie." They couldn't all fit on the

couch at one time, but they were trying. Only Amy had given up, and she knelt by the coffee

table now with her crayons laid out before her like the brushes of a master artist, her face

screwed tight with concentration as she tried to draw a horse exactly right. When you're the

oldest child, you have to do things right; the other children depend on you. Marian watched the

delicate blonde curls sweep down over the paper for a moment before trying to disentangle

herself from the others. With five bodies and two afghans involved it wasn't easy, and finally

she yelled out, "Coming!" at me top of her lungs, in the hope that whoever was on the other side

of the door would hear it and wait.

The dog didn't come with her to the door. Maybe that was an omen. Usually he was the

first one at the door, to welcome

strangers. But dogs can sense when things are wrong, sometimes even when their owners

don't. Marian walked past him, and ignored the complaints of both cats and children as she

looked through the peephole to see who was there. It was a woman, neatly coifed and with the

socially acceptable minimum of makeup, wearing some kind of uniform and holding a letter in

her hand. That was odd. You didn't get many real paper letters these days, unless it was

something important. For a moment Marian couldn't think of who would have sent her a

registered paper letter . . . and then memory stirred in its hiding place, and she was suddenly

afraid. She hesitated a moment before unlocking the door, but couldn't give herself a good

reason for not doing it. Trouble doesn't go away if you refuse to sign for it, does it?

As she opened the door, Marian noted that the woman's uniform didn't have any insignia on

it. That could be just an oversight ... or it could indicate that whoever had designed the

uniform believed that people wouldn't open the door if they knew what she was there for. Not a

good sign.

The woman looked up at Marian, down at her electronic pad, and then up again. "Marian

Stiller?"

Marian could feel all the color drain from her face as she just stared at the woman for a

moment. Maybe she should lie about who she was, and tell the woman Ms. Stiller wasn't

home? Shut the door, lock the problems outside, and stuff this memory down into the dark

places along with all the others. That would buy her a bit more time. But what would it really

accomplish? Sooner or later they'd find her, and then there would be fines to deal with on top

of all the rest. Maybe even jail time. The government was notoriously intolerant when it came

to people who tried to avoid their filial duties.

"I'm . . . I'm Marian Stiller."

The woman glanced at her pad again, as if checking her notes. You'd think the DFO

delivery folks would have their stuff memorized. "This letter is for you, Ms. Stiller." She

handed her the envelope, thick and heavy. Marian took it numbly and waited. "I need you to

sign for it, please." The pad was given to her. Marian hesitated, then pressed her thumb onto its

surface. The thing hummed for a moment, no doubt comparing her print to government records.

Confirmed, it blinked at last. The woman took it back from her, cleared her throat, and then

assumed a more formal position that she clearly associated with official announcements.

"Ms. Stiller, I have delivered to you an Order of Filial Obligation. You are required to

read the contents and respond to them in a timely manner. If you do not, you may be subject to

fines and/or imprisonment. Do you understand?"

She barely whispered it. "Yes, I understand."

"Do you have any questions?"

"Not. . . not in front of the children." She was suddenly aware of them not far away, and

heard for the first time how their chatter had quieted suddenly. They had to be protected from

this. That was her first job. Questions . . . the Department had places for questions to be

answered. Later.

"I understand." The woman bowed her head a token inch. There was no sign of emotion in

her expression or in her carriage. What did it feel like, to spend your day delivering messages

like this? "Good day, then." Or was she one of the people who believed in the Filial Obligation

Act, who thought it was a good thing? Marian didn't ask. She didn't want to know.

She watched her walk away from the house because that was one more thing to do before

opening the letter. When the woman rounded a corner and that excuse was gone, she turned

with a sigh and shut the door behind her. The envelope was heavy in her hand. The room

seemed unnaturally quiet.

"What? What is it?" She met the eyes of child after child, all gazing up at her with the same

worried intensity as the dog in its corner. Children, like animals, could sometimes sense

trouble. She looked at the letter in her hand and forced herself to adopt mat teasing tone she

used when they worried over nothing. "It's just mail. You've never seen paper mail before? I

swear."

She shook her head with mock amazement and curled up on fhe couch again. She couldn't

read it here, not in front of them, and she certainly couldn't go off to a private room now that

they were watching her. She threw the letter onto the far end of the coffee table, facedown so

that they wouldn't see the DFO insignia next to the address. It landed on top of a pile of

drawings, cover-lrtg over the lower part of a horse. Amy fussed at her until she moved it. By

that time everyone else was back on the couch, and she found some cartoons on the children's

net and turned up the volume and hoped it would distract them. Best to just pretend the letter

wasn't really important, until they forgot all about it. Then she could go off to the bathroom

alone with it or something, or say she had to start cooking dinner, or ... something.

She wondered if they could hear how hard her heart was beating.

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

C. S. Friedman - Downtime.pdf

共16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！

C. S. Friedman - Downtime

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: