Читать книгу Thrive - Mary Borsellino - Страница 13

She opens the paper bag in her bedroom that night, when there's not much chance of anyone disturbing her and seeing what she's doing. Her pulse is a nervous flutter as she takes the ancient, half-collapsed paperback out of its wrapping.

Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury. The cover is lurid, black and red, grey photos picked out in halftone dots and collaged with no sense or order.

Olivia begins to read and doesn't stop until her alarm clock goes off at 6:30am the next morning. She hides the book on the top shelf of her closet, behind her rarely-worn, most expensive formal clothes.

The stories in the book are little slivers cut with a sharp and gleaming knife — vampire families having happy reunions, scythes reaping fields of souls. Nightmares pinned down with ink, seeping blackly into Olivia's spongy brain and clattering heart.

The one she returns to time and time again, that haunts her through her days, is called The Small Assassin. It's about a mother who thinks her baby's trying to kill her. It cries at night to stop her from getting any rest, so she'll end up sick and tired and catch pneumonia.

When the mother falls down the stairs and dies, her doctor decides she was right all along, and the story ends with the doctor getting his scalpel out of his bag. Getting ready to kill the baby.

The story lingers like a taste in the back of Olivia's throat, like grit in her eye. She thinks it might be the saddest story in the world. The baby didn't ask to be born bad. Nobody can help it, being born however they're born. If a mother won't love it and a doctor won't care for it, what's left? Who takes care of the babies that are born wicked, the stepsisters and queens and black knights of fairy stories, the small murderers of horror fiction? Who makes sure they're fed and warm and safe?

Even the ones born strange need someone who loves them, don't they?

Sometimes she is very, very lonely.

Her mother is disappointed that she doesn't wear her contacts anymore. 'Your glasses make you look so plain. Ordinary.'

Her mother talks of disappointments and her father doesn't talk at all, preferring to punish her with silence and lack of attention. Olivia's always grateful to leave for school in the mornings, and lingers away from home as long as she can in the afternoons. At least at school she doesn't have to feel guilty about resenting the teachers that dislike her. When biting rage wells up against her father and mother, it always makes her feel she's failed at something important.

Sometimes her father doesn't speak to her for weeks on end, and then without warning he'll tell her all about his day over the dinner table. He makes it clear through this renewed attention that she has been forgiven for the C in History or the messy handwriting or the torn stockings at an important child's birthday party.

Olivia is so tired of being forgiven.