Вино из одуванчиков. Повесть и рассказы

The voice came from far away inside the grayness and the oldness, wrapped in the powders of pressed flowers and ancient butterflies.

When you are away I: from a city it becomes a fantasy. Any town, New York, Chicago, with its people, becomes improbable with distance. Just as I am improbable here, in Illinois, in a small town by a ’ quiet lake. All of us improbable to one another because we are not present to one another. And it is so good to hear the sounds, and know that Mexico City is still there and the people…

He wanted to say, “You’re still there, aren’t you?

And he heard a thousand people in another sunlight,

“This will be the last time?”

And now they were tampering with something more intangible—the memory; they were trying to cut the wires which led back into another year.

He slipped his brittle ivory legs down from the bed, marveling at their desiccation. They seemed to be things which had been fastened to his body while he slept one night, while his younger legs were taken off and burned in the cellar furnace. Over the years, they had destroyed all of him, removing hands, arms, and legs and leaving him with substitutes as delicate and useless as chess pieces.

cloaked with flies like a mantle of raisins;

and he was twenty-five years old again, walking, walking, looking, smiling, happy to be alive, very much alert, drinking in colors and smells.

with the little gray toad of a heart flopping weakly here or there in his chest from time to time.