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:
This acclaimed series, winner of numerous World Fantasy Awards, continues its tradition of excellence with scores of short stories from such writers as K. W. Jeter, Karl Edward Wagner, Terry Bisson, S. P. Somtow, Charles de Lint, Kobo Abe, Jane Yolen and many others. Supplementing the stories are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantastic fiction, Edward Bryant's witty roundup of the year's fantasy films, and a long list of Honorable Mentions—all of which adds up to an invaluable reference source, and a font of fabulous reading.
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Hart Crane asked him
Nearly a century later whether he denied
The ticket, but how could he deny a thing,
He who was all things that day and none,
A multitude of beings and only one,
Leaning on a window, his forehead on the glass,
His eyes unfocused or focused deep within.
And yet he does see past Virginia
With blood on her blouse, past Elmira
Left behind in Richmond, jilted
Before she ever reached the altar,
Past even the bloated face of Edgar Poe
Reflected in the window, drawn and drawn out
In the wobbly glass, the sodden man
In a strangers threadbare clothes
With only Dr. Carters borrowed cane
Still clutched in that familiar hand,
Sees through the tortured glass
To a display of pewter and silver
Laid out within the shop, slick knives
With thin images of a singular man
Upon each blade, rounded shining cups
With a bulge-nosed alien face
In each curved surface, two large
Silver plates with his own desperate stare
Reflected plain in each, the brow,
The carved out cheeks, blue lips
Beneath the sad mustache.
But he
Looks beyond this olio of images,
These hard lies and harder truths
Displayed before him, to find
A large silver coffee urn, beknobbed
And crusted with handles and thick
Vines, blossoms and twisted ribbons,
Its surface flat and curved and rounded,
Concave, convex, and convolute,
And in its turbulent reflections
He sees a young mans face,
A young man with dark hair
And uneven eyes, a young man
Leaning on a cane with promises
To keep, a face he recognizes
But cannot name, knows but cannot claim,
That looks him steadily eye to eye.
His heart will soon calm down enough
For him to stutter on, reach Cooth &
Sergeant’s, fall onto a bench, he found,
Be carried to the hospital, lie there in fever,
Call Reynolds’ name, ease out of delirium
Only to say, gently, “Lord help my poor soul,”
And die, having for one moment on Lombard Street
Learned still another awful truth:
Pell mell or waiting just to die,
Art saves as often as it kills.
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