Kriana: переводы

→I have a lot of friends who love animals, but none are more knowledgeable than Will and Mary. The first time I met them, at a used record fair, they told me they’d spent a considerable part of the previous afternoon watching a wasp eat a bench. This pretty much set the tone for our friendship, which revolves roughly half around enthusing about early 1970s Greek progressive rock and half around looking at photos of owls and hares and saying, ‘Yep. That’s a good one.’ If I’m out in the countryside, I’m fairly unconditional in my mission to befriend any creature with four legs or some kind of fur or feathers on it, but I don’t have any of the facts at my fingertips.

→‘It’s true,’ said Will, nod-wincing in a manner that simultaneously managed to convey both his faith in Mary’s opinion and his distaste for the eating of vomit.

→‘Definitely. Foxes always eat my mum’s dog’s vomit. They love it.’

→‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure?’

→‘You don’t need to clean that up,’ said my friend Mary, gesturing towards Janet and his vomit. She and her boyfriend Will had been staying at my house the night before and, like me, had been woken up by another of my cats, Ralph, meowing his own name at 5 a.m. ‘Give it a couple of days and a fox will be along to eat it all.’

→It had nothing to do with the fact that he’d been ill for the last couple of years. He’d always been the same. Sometimes, sitting several feet away, I’d spot him apparently beginning to re-enact the moves from the video for the 1997 remix of Run DMC’s ‘It’s Like That’ single; then I’d be able to rush over in time to thrust a used broadsheet newspaper or cardboard box in front of his face and avert disaster. But a person couldn’t reasonably be expected to be on vomit stakeout 24/7. At least on this occasion he’d been considerate enough to puke outdoors.

→Reynardine

→My cat Janet had been sick outside my back door. Or, as it might have seemed to you, had you never met Janet before and arrived upon the scene as an innocent: a large tanker of vomit had swerved off the road and into my garden, shedding its entire load in the process, and now my cat Janet was inspecting its contents. I knew better than that. Ever since he’d first bounded clumsily into my life a decade earlier, Janet – who was actually a large man cat – had been a master puker, a veritable titan of regurgitation.