《The songbirds of pain_ stories 》作者：- Garry Kilworth【EPUB】

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THE SONGBIRDS OF PAIN By Carry Kilworth Tomorrow they would break her legs. At first, every morning there were songbirds in the fire trees outside her hospital window, and every evening the frogs sang in the storm drains with choirs of bass voices. (Not when she woke or went to sleep: In her twilight world of pain there was no real sleep, just a clinging to the edge of a dream, an intermittent misting of the brain.) Then there came a time when the birds and frogs seemed to be singing from within her, deep within her flesh, her bones. The pitch of their notes was, on occasion, as sharp as thorns; and at other times, as dull as small hammer blows on a hollow skull. Her world was fully of the agony of their music: The songbirds of Brazil entered her blood and swam the channels of her body with slow wings. The tree frogs, the ground frogs, they also filled the long, narrow passages of her limbs, her breasts, and her mind with their melodies. If snakes could sing they would have been there, too, accompanying the cicadas and the grasshoppers; the rhythmic, ticking beetles; even the high-singing bats and the clicking lizards. She tried to remember the time when these songsters, these choral wonders of an exotic lands, were not part of her, were separate from her. There was a man, somewhere, who led her to this state. If she could remember . . . * * * * Philip would indulge her, she knew, to the extent