Вино из одуванчиков. Повесть и рассказы

They both stood looking at the merciless unclouded sky like a camera that has broken and stares, at a motionless and stricken town dying in a fiery sweat.

“Gosh, right down the main street we go, all four of us, you, me, Dad, the witch! Dad’s one in a million!”

I’ll live forever, or next thing to it.”

He looked at Mr. Black sitting there finishing off his bottle and cursing, not knowing how lucky he was, living in the arcade.

He struck the case. “Hey, in there! Come alive!” The witch sat unperturbed. “Costs me more to fix her each month than she earns.”

At the cowboy matinee last Saturday a man had dropped down dead on the white-hot screen.

Douglas’s teeth chattered, his heart pumped sludge in his chest.

There she sat in her glass coffin, night after night, her body melted by the carnival blaze of summer, frozen in the ghost winds of winter, waiting with her sickle smile

And in her case the witch raised up her glittery face to blind you with a single needle stare.

With the fireflies burning, dying, burning, dying, and his eyes glinting with three dozen fugitive bits of pale green color, he block printed for ten and then twenty minutes, aligning and realigning, writing and rewriting the facts that he had gathered all too swiftly during the season. Tom watched, hypnotized by the small bonfire of insects leaping and furling within the jar, until he froze, sleeping,