Читать книгу Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles - Kira Henehan - Страница 21

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Binelli, it might be useful to mention at this point in the report, once had a sister. This was a sister who in her short time on this earth approached nothing so much as sainthood. She is certainly a saint now, at least, very much dead and gone as she is. This sister had the unlikely red hair of the devil, but red hair that—as Binelli is quick to point out when the subject arises, which it sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t, sometimes doesn’t for long stretches of time and then arises several times over the course of a day in rapid succession, and then perhaps might not arise for a month or two or six, even, and then arises and arises until we all wish this sister from high atop the grandest golden throne in whatever afterworld had admitted her would smite her brother in some way that would include but not be limited to the removal or crippling of his larynx, or thorax, or other crucial component of the general mouth-to-sternum region of his person where the apparati responsible for his talking are housed—so far surpassed my own red hair in terms of gloss, shine, hue, cascadability, volume, manageability, tossability, length, amplitude, and texture, that one would not even, if one were to see the two of our heads of hair side by side, refer to them both as red. Not even refer to them both as hair.

I cannot tell you what they would refer to the one not referred to as hair as. That will remain a question for the ages.

Ultimately, to get the snow shoveled at least in the general direction of the point for this is not after all a traipse through a meandering wood nor a lark through a bubbling brook but a report, in fact, digressions notwithstanding, Binelli and this sister made shoes. I am absolutely one hundred percent positive that behind this fact is an even longer story of a daddy on the dole or a mother in her cups, some manner of neglect and nursemaids and a kindly old manservant who let them polish the household ones-and-twos, a chore to which they against all odds took a shine and began noticing all the little ways upon which they might improve said shoes et cetera ad nauseum. Whatever the sordid story behind it, Binelli and this sister made shoes. They sketched designs for shoes and gathered the materials for shoes and procured the equipment one might need to put shoes together and even pressed their own leather labels into the soles of these shoes: RUSTY BINELLI. Now was Rusty a childish Binelli-issued nickname for his redheaded sister, or was it a reference to the scavenged nail that poked one or the other young cordwainer in the big toe and began a period of infectious infirmary that would lead to the necessity of finding a crafty activity to fill the long hours of bedridden days, an activity of which the children failed to tire, though strength returned; no by god, they never tired of this, the smell of leather, the meticulous stitching, the shodding of the people, the heady glamour, the creative juices stirring within pent-up loins, loins that hungered for the tickle of a stray red wisp tossed carelessly past a hollowed cheek—well, it is all conjecture and as such not for this report to contemplate. Shoes were made, many shoes. All women’s, only one pair of each style, and without exception every single one a clownish, nay freakish, size 9.5. All of which—but for a select and ever-rotating assortment Binelli trundled about in a battered valise like a sole-struck huckster—are housed in a room back at the main place, brown boxes stacked to the ceiling, like some sort of morgue or fallout shelter.

They are, I willingly admit, spectacular.

They are also an unending source of pain and fury for myself and The Lamb. We are neither of us even close to a size 9.5. Who is. A penguin. A clubfoot. A saintly redheaded sister with no need for shoes, not ever again, wafting about the clouds in her where-withal, no doubt, in her birthday suit, in the buff, with specially made size 9.5 wings erupting from giant shoulder blades to carry her wherever she might deign to go. An entire room filled with handcrafted, timeless, useless shoes.

One could go mad.

One does go mad, often, and then the other one, and then both for some time, and then some shoes get thrown about and the memory of the sister desecrated and defamed and then all are yelled at and then all get crappy Assignments next time around.