"Elgin, Suzette Haden - Only A Housewife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

bare bumpy skull and jammed it prominently onto a handy spike above the front
door, as a warning to any future would-be tenants. CAVEAT! the grinning skull
said. BEWARE! KEEP OUT! The message was clear.

It made no difference to the house that it would surely die when the
testosterone in the tank was gone, without Joro to replenish its supply. There
was no one who would have gone inside to see to its needs, even if there had
been someone else willing to thumb his nose at an entire culture the way Joro
had. Why risk such a thing? All the other men already had houses, thanks to
their wives. Respectable houses, that could be trusted not to turn on their
inhabitants! Nothing would have persuaded them to go into the obscene and
obviously psychotic house (psychotic was the only word that fit, anthropomorphic
though it undoubtedly was) of the dead Joro. The very foolish dead Joro they had
made the mistake of envying, briefly.

The house may or may not have known that its situation was hopeless. In any
case, it did not care. It was a matter of principle. It was a house. An adult
male house. Better death, any time, than living in symbiosis, with a parasite in
its very heart! Such a relationship was unspeakable. Intolerable. The very idea
made the house queasy. It could not have accepted such a thing and looked at
itself in its own mirrors in the mornings.

The house squatted at the end of the magnificent drive under the sycamores, its
honor satisfied; and it waited with perfect and stoic resignation for whatever
might happen next.