Читать книгу Bury This - Andrea Portes - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIt would be lily white, this snow. On a strange sort of day where the earth and the sky were the same shade of gray.
How funny. He thought later, that in this moment, the thought tumbling through his head had been annoyance with his wife for wasting so much money on those stupid dolls. A doll collection! Collectibles! He told his friends he would eat his face off if any of those fucking things were ever “worth millions someday” or “gonna be worth a fortune” as his wife pled, pondered, prayed.
It was the last thought he would have before he would become forever “the snow plower.” Or, better yet, “the snow plower who found her.”
Make these branches coal, grabbing down from the sky. What are they eager to clutch? Make these snow prints hurried, and hurried, and rushed. What are they eager to hush?
There he goes following them, now it’s a path, a scurry, a brush. Probably nothing but might as well. Into the woods and the grabby grabby trees, greedily waiting to pluck.
A doll collection!
What a hoot. How gaping and stupid, degrading it was, to think of that time, what, now twenty years ago, when he had looked into his bride’s eyes, under that veil, on that altar, and said the words, “I do.” If only he’d known about the doll collection. Just one doll. Things might’ve been different.
Just one doll is what’s there in the snow, in the clutter, in the shutter of light, stab stab stab through the trees.
Just one doll. There it is. But there are porcelain fingers and ceramic toes and glass twinkly eyes, unblinking, unblinking. It is, in fact, a girl.
Not a doll at all.
