Читать книгу Jane - Мэгги Нельсон - Страница 11

She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying. The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.

Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.

Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?

So I was a genius after all! The thought made her smile, but then she wondered, Why had the light always been invisible? I must have been squandering it, I must have felt only its vaguest rotations. Now what can I do with it? If I could find a lampshade, someone could read by it. I might illuminate entire rooms, entire dungeons, I shine so bright.

But in fact she was losing the light; it leaked everywhere, unstoppable.