（外文电子版资料）SK.RoseMadder.doc

PAGE PAGE 3 Prologue Sinister Kisses She sits in the corner, trying to draw air out of a room which seemed to have plenty just a few minutes ago and now seems to have none. From what sounds like a great distance she can hear a thin whoop-whoop sound, and she knows this is air going down her throat and then sliding back out again in a series of feverish little gasps, but that doesnt change the feeling that shes drowning here in the corner of her living room, looking at the shredded remains of the paperback novel she was reading when her husband came home. Not that she cares much. The pain is too great for her to worry about such minor matters as respiration, or how there seems to be no air in the air she is breathing. The pain has swallowed her as the whale reputedly swallowed Jonah, that holy draft-dodger. It throbs like a poison sun glowing deep down in the middle of her, in a place where until tonight there was only the quiet sense of a new thing growing. There has never been any pain like this pain, not that she can remember—not even when she was thirteen and swerved her bike to avoid a pothole and wiped out, bouncing her head off the asphalt and opening up a cut that turned out to be exactly eleven stitches long. What she remembered about that was a silvery jolt of pain followed by starry dark surprise which had actually been a brief faint?.?.?.?but that pain had not been this agony. This terrible agony. Her hand on her belly registers flesh that is no longer like flesh at all; it is as if she has been unzipped and her living baby replaced with a hot rock. Oh God please, she thinks. Please let the baby be okay. But now, as her breath finally begins to ease a little, she realizes that the baby is not okay, that he has made sure of that much, anyway. When youre four months pregnant the baby is still more a part of you than of itself, and when youre sitting in a corner with your hair stuck in strings to your sweaty cheeks and it feels as if youve swallowed a hot