Read Online Bradbury, Ray - SSC 09 by The Small Assassin (v2.1) - Free Book Online Page B

and the watch ticked on her wrist, and time passed and she sat turning
pages, turning pages, hungrily seeing the framed people in the pictures, people
who lived in another land in another world where neons bravely held off the night with crimson bars and the smells were home smells
and the people talked good fine words and here she was turning the pages, and
all the lines went across and down and the pages flew under her hands, making a
fan. She threw down the first Post, seized on and riffled through the second in half an hour, threw that down, took
up the third, threw that down a good fifteen minutes later and found herself
breathing, breathing stiffly and swiftly in her body and out of her mouth. She
put her hand up to the back of her neck.
                 Somewhere,
a soft breeze was blowing.
                 The
hairs along the back of her neck slowly stood upright.
                 She
touched them with one pale hand as one touches the nape of a dandelion.
                 Outside,
in the plaza, the street lights rocked like crazy flashlights on a wind. Papers
ran through the gutters in sheep flocks. Shadows penciled and slashed under the
bucketing lamps now this way, now that, here a shadow one instant, there a
shadow next, now no shadows, all cold light, now no light, all cold blue-black
shadow. The lamps creaked on their high metal hasps.
                 In
the room her hands began to tremble. She saw them tremble. Her body began to
tremble. Under the bright bright print of the
brightest, loudest skirt she could find to put on especially for tonight, in
which she had whirled and cavorted feverishly before the coffin-sized mirror,
beneath the rayon skirt the body was all wire and tendon and excitation. Her
teeth chattered and fused and chattered. Her lipstick smeared, one lip crushing
another.
                 Joseph
knocked on the door.
                  
                 They
got ready for bed. He had returned with the news that something had been done
to the car and it would take time, he’d go watch them tomorrow.
                 “But
don’t knock on the door,” she said, standing before the mirror as she
undressed.
                 “Leave
it unlocked then,” he said.
                 “I
want it locked. But don’t rap. Call.”
                 “What’s
wrong with rapping?” he said.
                 “It
sounds funny,” she said.
                 “What
do you mean, funny?”
                 She
wouldn’t say. She was looking at herself in the mirror and she was naked, with
her hands at her sides, and there were her breasts and her hips and her entire
body, and it moved, it felt the floor under it and the walls and air around it,
and the breasts could know hands if hands were put there, and the stomach would
make no hollow echo if touched.
                 “For
God’s sake,” he said, “don’t stand there admiring yourself.” He was in bed.
“What are you doing?” he said. “What’re you putting your hands up that way for,
over your face?”
                 He
put the lights out.
                 She
could not speak to him for she knew no words that he knew and he said nothing
to her that she understood, and she walked to her bed and slipped into it and
he lay with his back to her in his bed and he was like one of these brown-baked
people of this far-away town upon the moon, and the real earth was off
somewhere where it would take a star-flight to reach it. If only he could speak
with her and she to him tonight, how good the night might be, and how easy to
breathe and how lax the vessels of blood in her ankles and in her wrists and
the under-arms, but there was no speaking and the night was ten thousand tickings and ten thousand twistings of the blankets, and the pillow was like a tiny white warm stove undercheek , and the blackness of