Read Online infinities by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scott Nicholson, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Iain Rowan, Linda Nagata, Keith Brooke - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Scott Nicholson, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, John Grant, Anna Tambour, Kaitlin Queen, Iain Rowan, Linda Nagata, Keith Brooke
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shuffling as she hunted for the remote. She liked a good torture scene – I'd learned that much about her through the walls over the past few months. I wondered if she'd ever had any use for diaper cream herself, but came to the conclusion she hadn't. I couldn't imagine her husk-like body ever having borne children, ever having suckled them to her nightmarishly visualized breasts. She might have harbored the occasional pupa, but even that I doubted. She was, however, capable of the loudest farts I have ever heard from any man or woman. Sitting in front of her soap opera or cop show, presumably secure in the false knowledge that anything she did would go unheard because of the walls and the boom of the tv set, she not infrequently let rip with the most astonishing noises. The first time I heard her I assumed she must have started stripping wallpaper. I'd grown to know better.
I went over to the window – it required only about two paces – and looked out. On the other side of the road was a little park with swings and slides where kids were playing in the evening sunlight, their yells coming to me muffled through the glass. Their mothers were sitting on benches chatting animatedly to each other or sitting alone with books, some of them idly rocking a stroller or a baby carriage with a spare hand, soothing the next tidal wave of children who'd be playing on the swings and slides.
At any other time the scene would have appeared normal enough to me, but I was in a peculiar mood that evening, and something about it seemed subtly wrong – somehow unnatural, as if it had all been staged for my personal benefit, as if I were the sole member of an audience watching an enormous, worldwide play, a play in which everyone except myself was performing. I was the only one who, having been designated once and for all eternity "audience," wasn't permitted to take a role in this play. It was a curious feeling of dislocation from reality, and it took me a while to put my finger on what was causing it.
Then I realized. The scene I was watching through the rectangular frame of the window was in color . I had become so immersed in watching scenes in rectangular frames that were in black-and-white – and this after seeing only three movies this way – that now it was the mundane reality that seemed artificial, the flickering monochrome images on the Rupolo's small gray screen the true reality. I was more at home in a world where cardboard-faced actors with implausible British accents called each other Chips and Frobisher than I was here, where the kids were yelling names like Duane and Randy and where every vowel didn't have to be contorted before being uttered.
I shook my head irritably, but the sensation persisted of being on the outside of a performance in which all the rest of the world was taking part, and I couldn't prize it loose. In the end I gave up, and went to bed with a book while the sky was still full of twilight. Not long afterwards, I fell asleep, and stayed that way until my alarm clock woke me in the morning.
~
The following Monday the double bill consisted of two black-and-white movies – no color this week, thank heavens. The first one – and the better of the two, I then thought (and still do, in the eye of memory) – was called I Was Monty's Double , and it told of a cunning British plan to use an impersonator in place of their Field-Marshal Montgomery for public appearances and the like, thereby foiling any possible plot to assassinate him, while at the same time misleading the Axis concerning his whereabouts and therefore his doings. Montgomery was for once a historical figure I'd heard of, although I couldn't remember much about him save the name and that he was reputed to be a quite brilliant military general – the Allied equivalent of Rommel. I made a mental note as I hung on the edge of my seat, watching the story unfold, to go look him up in the library's encyclopedia the next day, to find out if he had
I went over to the window – it required only about two paces – and looked out. On the other side of the road was a little park with swings and slides where kids were playing in the evening sunlight, their yells coming to me muffled through the glass. Their mothers were sitting on benches chatting animatedly to each other or sitting alone with books, some of them idly rocking a stroller or a baby carriage with a spare hand, soothing the next tidal wave of children who'd be playing on the swings and slides.
At any other time the scene would have appeared normal enough to me, but I was in a peculiar mood that evening, and something about it seemed subtly wrong – somehow unnatural, as if it had all been staged for my personal benefit, as if I were the sole member of an audience watching an enormous, worldwide play, a play in which everyone except myself was performing. I was the only one who, having been designated once and for all eternity "audience," wasn't permitted to take a role in this play. It was a curious feeling of dislocation from reality, and it took me a while to put my finger on what was causing it.
Then I realized. The scene I was watching through the rectangular frame of the window was in color . I had become so immersed in watching scenes in rectangular frames that were in black-and-white – and this after seeing only three movies this way – that now it was the mundane reality that seemed artificial, the flickering monochrome images on the Rupolo's small gray screen the true reality. I was more at home in a world where cardboard-faced actors with implausible British accents called each other Chips and Frobisher than I was here, where the kids were yelling names like Duane and Randy and where every vowel didn't have to be contorted before being uttered.
I shook my head irritably, but the sensation persisted of being on the outside of a performance in which all the rest of the world was taking part, and I couldn't prize it loose. In the end I gave up, and went to bed with a book while the sky was still full of twilight. Not long afterwards, I fell asleep, and stayed that way until my alarm clock woke me in the morning.
~
The following Monday the double bill consisted of two black-and-white movies – no color this week, thank heavens. The first one – and the better of the two, I then thought (and still do, in the eye of memory) – was called I Was Monty's Double , and it told of a cunning British plan to use an impersonator in place of their Field-Marshal Montgomery for public appearances and the like, thereby foiling any possible plot to assassinate him, while at the same time misleading the Axis concerning his whereabouts and therefore his doings. Montgomery was for once a historical figure I'd heard of, although I couldn't remember much about him save the name and that he was reputed to be a quite brilliant military general – the Allied equivalent of Rommel. I made a mental note as I hung on the edge of my seat, watching the story unfold, to go look him up in the library's encyclopedia the next day, to find out if he had
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