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:
“Here’s everything they’ll need,” she says, throwing it through the branches. “Let’s go.”
“Right,” Thumbkin says. He listens to the sound of the falling package and to his brothers’ voices as they howl like puppies at the moon. Then he jumps into the big pocket of the wife’s blouse and off they fly over the great forest, through the pale air, which slowly clears, lights up, bursts into flame.
Inside the pocket, Thumbkin doesn’t stir. Sometimes he very gently rests his head on the wife’s breast. The wife feels this pressure on her breast at the same time as she feels the thrill of flight in her legs and the warmth of the sun on her cheeks. How close her lover’s head is to her heart, how swift their flight, how vast and open the earth!
They stop at nightfall in a clover patch. Thumbkin comes out of her pocket, stretches his folded limbs, but he doesn’t leave the wife’s body. He settles in the other pocket, lays his head on the other breast, and his heat radiates softly through the wife’s body. They sleep that way. The next day, Thumbkin moves into the big pocket on her skirt, he stretches his legs in the hollow of her thigh, he rests his head and his open arms against the wife’s rounded belly. Come evening, he settles on the other side, and the heat in the wife’s body continues to grow.
They pass through the countryside, camping out wherever they like, leaping over borders, sight-seeing and visiting, always body to body. Thumbkin has moved from her front to her back, from one shoulder to the other, from one buttock to the other, he has stopped in the small of her back, beneath her armpits, at the bend in her arms, he feels her sweat running in rivulets around him, and the wife’s body continues gently heating up. One evening, they come to a great city spread out along a river. The river makes a bend downtown, a space full of gardens with bridges radiating out and a hotel at the back sparkling with lights and surrounded by multicolored flags trembling in the breeze. The place looks like a big butterfly at the heart of the city, and the wife lands on its back. They have a room in the shining hotel, with a bay window overlooking the river at the point where it forks. Thumbkin searches the wife’s body in the places he couldn’t reach when they were flying across the countryside in the seven-league boots. He places himself between her legs and gently spreads them, he spreads the great purple lips and lays himself down in the middle of that wet and odorous bed, his head on the little pillow at the top and his arms extended in the fur. The window is wide open, and the river waters flow with a strong and steady sound. They remain this way a long time, until all the heat that has been dispersed, forgotten, extinguished in the wife’s body rises to the surface, gathers into a compact, vibrant beam, and then Thumbkin starts to move, following the lines of force from that beam as it hesitates and casts about. In the dim undergrowth of her body, the Ogre’s wife hears a small noise like something gliding through leaves and branches; as she follows it, all the energy contained in her body rises into that vibrant beam and suddenly explodes, sweeping away her troubles, her memories, her fears, sweeping away all the vines and brambles and deadwood, flowing like the great river outside that shimmers and undulates at the center of the city.
She sleeps, and Thumbkin, who has brought this woman, so big and beautiful and strong, to climax—Thumbkin changes. He feels himself growing by the minute. Nothing will ever abandon him again. He thinks of his brothers, who are probably still following one another Indian file through some ravine with no sky, he thinks of the city with that big river he can see through the window, and the ancient hunger that has tormented him for so long changes inside him and flows throughout his body like a fine, placid water with which he will wash down big, sugary slices of the countryside, waiting while he rests.
Thumbkin's head lies by the wife's and his feet lie by hers. The wife dreams she is on the back of the world, which is a big, bright, velvety butterfly, flitting through space where it is king.
The seven-league boots fell under the feet of a passing mosquito, and, being enchanted, they immediately shrank to its modest scale and vanished with the tiny creature, fading into thin air like a mirage before dazzled eyes.