Читать книгу Smithereens - Terence Young - Страница 12

Woken from an afternoon nap, you rise only to descend your wood- butcher stairway, past the vaulted, multi-mullioned window on whose

other side now sits a bear, Buddha-like, on his backside, head concealed in the Rubbermaid garbage can he holds aloft between two paws.

In sixty summers, you’ve never seen such a creature anywhere near this place, found no scat, heard no tales of neighbours’ fruit trees

bent or broken, undaunted for all this time to ramble, kids in tow, down the remnant logging roads and deer paths that make a park

of these toy woods, so close to town now town has devoured all the land between. Yet here he sits, or she, for all you know, fur so black

it’s almost blue, only thin glass between you, so suddenly proximate you are pressed to say what you are seeing, this vaudeville act, ursine

slapstick Chaplin who invites you to forget all danger, to forget you are still one animal coming upon another. A single noisy tread, one

telltale stair, and you are busted, as the beautiful comedian detects your gaze behind the fifteen panes that transform bear to cubist

caricature, your clown of darkness, who regains all fours and turns literal tail to amble, not run, back into the maze of forest and con-

spiratorial salal, but not before you throw sense and caution to the wind, wrench open the back door and follow at a distance, axe in

hand, berating your bruin-buffoon for transforming forever this be- nign acreage into something less safe, if more magical, where visiting

spirits leave behind their perfect signature, which, to all who will listen over dinner and wine, you reveal with a flourish at the tale’s

end, the garbage can’s rectangular lid and four neat punctures, arranged in a fan, an arc, like a winning hand of poker, jokers wild.