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Автор Рэй Брэдбери
Ray Bradbury
Uncle Einar
«It will take only a minute,» said Uncle Einar's sweet wife.
«I refuse,» he said. «And that takes but a _second_. »
«I've worked all morning,» she said, holding to her slender back, «and you won't help? It's drumming for a rain. »
«Let it rain,» he cried, morosely. «I'll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes. »
«But you're so quick at it. »
«Again, I refuse. » His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. «So it's come to this,» he muttered, bitterly. «To this, to this, to this. » He almost wept angry and acid tears.
«Don't cry; you'll wet them down again,» she said. «Jump up, now, run them about. »
«Run them about. » His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. «I say: let it thunder, let it pour!»
«If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn't ask,» she said, reasonably. «All my washing gone for nothing if you don't. They'll hang about the house―»
That _did_ it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room.
He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. «Only so far as the pasture fence!»Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you'd say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and back-wash of his wings!
«Catch!»
Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she'd spread for their landing.
«Thank you!» she cried.
«Gahh!» he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.
Uncle Einar's beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch_fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moonsilvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.
Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he'd always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.
But now he could not fly at night.
On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. «I'll be all right,» he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then―crack out of the sky―
A high-tension tower.
