The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
Survival of the soul flies in the face of all known science. But Laurel can’t help but wonder if there could be something to the great journey. Whether the ancients could have understood life and death more completely than their confused and frightened progeny five thousand years later.
Dawn shifts through a leaden mist, and Laurel sees her first hummer.
She feels okay, not sick, not great, just compressed. Like she’s squeezed more tightly into herself; like how a trash compactor crunches down garbage. This image cracks her up; isn’t that the truth, this body such a piece of crap? She is laughing to herself when she sees a tiny presence flitting around the feeder.
It is the tiniest bird she has ever seen. It cannot be more than three inches from head to tail. In the dim morning light, she can see a glint of scarlet wreathing its throat, a gleam of green sliding down its back. Its long, slim beak dips into the hole at the center of one red plastic flower atop the feeder. She is so close she can see the tendril of its tongue extruding from the tip of its beak, lapping up the sugar water. It dips, sips, levitates and hovers, beady bird eyes casting quick glances about. It darts down and around to the next plastic flower, hovers, dips, and samples the same sugar water from a different hole. She can see the blurred upbeat of its wings simultaneously with an image of their downstroke, so that the hummer appears to be transported by four ghostly wings. The tiny tail beats furiously up and down, forming a fan of optical illusions.
She is still catching her breath when the hummer darts away, disappearing like magic into the morning mist.
She scrambles through the pile of death books, finds her tiny, hand-printed book. No, he could not have been a ruby-throated hummingbird; they live only east of the Mississippi. He must have been a male Allen’s hummingbird; the scarlet gorget, the green back, the neat fan tail. A California coastal hummer, all right.
Laurel goes out on her deck and sits, despite the chill. Mr. Oake jogs by, waves. God, he jogs at six in the morning and six in the evening? The creaky old bastard, what did he ever do to deserve . . . but she finds herself swallowing her bitterness. She doesn’t exactly return his wave, but she nods, and he nods back. A gonzo jogger at eighty-two, with twenty-twenty vision, too.
She sits there for hours, shivering in the morning mist, and no more hummers come. But she is not distressed. They will. More hummers will come.
Jerry gets all concerned about the sudden wallop of pain. Laurel realizes right away that her big mouth and her bitching have gone too far this time, and she tries to soft soap it. No big deal, Jere, she tells him; so what else do you want to hear from me? I’m fine, I’m okay, just leave me alone.
But he doesn’t leave her alone. He drags her off in an ambulance and throws her to the doctors at San Rafael Cancer Clinic.
As usual, the doctors strap her down and peer into her and intrude on her dignity. No, her bowels have not been irregular; her bowels have not been functioning at all, why the hell should they? She hardly eats.
It turns out the cancer has metastasized into her colon. She asks, does this mean I can smoke again? The poor young doctor, some kid she’s never seen before, looks at her with such pity that she laughs out loud. No, I’m not kidding, she says. I loved to smoke; can I smoke now?
And believe it or not, she forgives the poor young doctor. She forgives all the fucking doctors. Yes, she really does. What percentage of doctors will wind up with shit for guts some day? The bastards have no special guarantee, now do they? Radon gas could infiltrate your house for years, the electric blanket could tear apart your white blood cells, electromagnetic radiation from a PC could devour your mucous membranes.
Or you could smoke and drink and be merry until you’re eighty-two years old.
On the way home—Laurel demanded they let her go home—the only thing she can do to make Jerry smile is tell him about hummers.
“The Portuguese call them flower-kissers. The color at the gorget—the throat area—is due not just to actual pigmentation of the feather, but to structural color, iridescence reflecting off facets of the feather itself. Like a gemstone, Jere. Hummer homes in zoos worldwide are called jewel rooms. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“I know you don’t like the clinic, Laurel ...”
“I hate the fucking clinic. Did you know hummingbirds strip abandoned spider webs for nest material?”
“You refuse another try at surgery, refuse another try at chemo. That’s your choice. I respect your choice. But there is more they could do for you, and I’ve got to say it: you’re wrong to reject help, Laurel.”
“They eat half their weight in sugar a day. When they get excited, their heartbeat doubles to over a thousand beats per minute!”
“Laurel, please. You’re very sick. Much sicker than before. Do you know that?”
“Jerry, I know. Don’t make me say more than that, because I can’t. I’ll deal with being sicker. Okay?”
“Not okay. I worry. You’re so alone in this place.”
“I’m not alone, Jere. I’ve got hummers.”
She gets to know them.
There is the gorgeous male Allen’s hummer. His mate is plainer, but no less thrilling in her aerial acrobatics, her negotiation of the feeder, her sheer delicacy and verve. As days go by, Laurel notices she carries two jelly bean-sized eggs in her lower abdomen. This gives Laurel such irrational joy that she gets out her sketchpad and pastels and starts to draw for the first time in months.
There is an aggressive Anna’s hummer with a brilliant rosy-red head. He goes chup-chup-chup! when he sees other hummers at the feeder, the tiniest, tinny chirp she’s ever heard, but unmistakably macho, territorial. If the other hummers don’t dart away, he swoops down and chases them in frenetic loop-the-loops back to the arbor.
There is a laid-back black-chinned hummer who perches atop the brass ring from which the feeder is hung or lazily sits on the rim of the feeder itself and sups on sugar water.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead is replete with elegant hieroglyphs of birds. The solar hawk of Horns, Thoth’s sacred ibis, vultures, and buzzards signifying the terrible aspect of divine power that purifies putrefactions of the world.
Laurel shivers, riffles the strange pages. Other fragments of myth, other images: Isis, that enigmatic goddess who is the mother and the sister and the lover of God, loses her husband Osiris to a spectacularly painful death, seeks him through the world and underworld, and finds—in a peculiar twist of mythic plot—his dismembered corpse embedded inside a living tree.
The eucalyptus with their translucent trunks; whose heart beats there, sends brown blood into the branches? Whose arms reach to the sky within the fronds of palms?
And more: the ceremony of Opening the Mouth and the Eyes during which oxen or fowl were beheaded, their sacrificial blood daubed upon the mouth and eyes of the body of the deceased, signifying renewed wholeness, magical restoration. Restoration in the Land of the Dead.
But this too is shocking, reminiscent. Of what? Laurel recalls the recurring morphine dream, the great sacrifice. Her own horror; why?
Why: because the death is not the poor dumb ox’s; it’s hers. Because the sacrifice is hers. Can she accept that?
Evening: rose gold shafts of sunset, scents of eucalyptus and fireplaces. Laurel goes out on her deck, with sketchpad and pastels and a bottle of good fume blanc. Cars careen over Highway 101 from San Francisco, seeking solace in Mill Valley, if they can find solace without a fatal crash. They are like ants, all these cars, scurrying to some blind instinct of survival.