Рэйчел Свирски «If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love»

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Автор Рэйчел Свирски

Rachel Swirsky
IF YOU WERE A DINOSAUR, MY LOVE
and Other Stories

Black, Red, White

On her wedding dayshe is red and black and white:cheeks flushed with desire,dark hair spilling over bridal gown. She sits before her mirror,toasting the best man. He smiles, tips scarlet tabletsinto her ruby wine. “To celebrate,”he says. He is the huntsman, darkburning before her wild, confused brain. Slashes, wails — now, he is dragging herthrough black forests of lamp-poststoward a white-walled hacienda,skylights shining down onalabaster vases, cement sculptures,carpets pale as innocence. Into her ear he whispers desirefor her secret, inevitable rubycut from her chest and stowedin a box beneath his pillow. Drugs distort his face:huntsman, dwarf, neglectful father,he could be any of the men who’ve trailedblack wounds across her soul. Her prince was a miragedreamed between bloodthirsty men. This story is red with her own blood. To live it is to bleed. He pulls away, drags herto a bedroom lined with mirrorsglittering colorlessdiamond facets like coffin walls. She hallucinates witchesblack in mirrored depths,cackling at her and her and her and herin a thousand refractions. She is fairest of all.

She is white as diamond. She hitches her wedding gownand runs into the mirrorsto shatter the coffinto slip into a taleof beige and pinkand grey.

May 17, 2011

Decomposition

PART ONE: LIVING

New Year’s celebrations crashed through the streets of Whitcry in a din of masks and swirling petticoats. Pottery smashed against cobbles, women’s shouts echoed from garrets, men groaned and fought and pissed. Sour smells of alcohol and vomit mingled in chill air. Revelers danced through alleys, tripping over each other’s feet and smashing into walls, laughter constant beneath the chaos.

In its midst, Vare stood solitary and composed, leaning against a small but expensive townhouse. It was the kind of home owned by the kind of man who wanted others to believe that instead of squandering his wealth, he was using his privilege over the poor for some noble purpose, the kind of man who used the phrase “noblesse oblige” without a trace of irony.

The owner was Berrat deLath, known to those who’d fought beside him as Berrat the Just, again without a trace of irony.

Berrat was the scion of a merchant house who, as a young man, had set out to prove that despite his lack of title, he still epitomized the ideal of “nobility. ” He’d funded his own division of the church’s army, the Eagles and Hares, and used his own resources to fund the investigation and cleansing of villainous dens where other men flouted church law.

One such den had been a large and prosperous magitorium in the nearby city of Bitterbite which trafficked in the mundane, if illegal, business of charms, as well as darker things. Vare had been a procurer for the magitorium, one of a few hundred men who earned status and riches by supplying the needs of the dozen mages who were too busy casting and carving to gather their own metals and blood.