"Alexander Jablokov - The Fury At Colonus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

"Well, fine. If you want to go, I can't stop you. As you obviously know. But...well, I do have to mention.
There's no free money left in the travel budget. None at all. I don't know how it happened, something to
do with how we calculate the quarter --"

The Fury turned and left the office. She could walk.
 #

Most of the storefronts were boarded up, the fiberboard panels bearing the spray painted names of their
suppliers, the only businesses thriving in the neighborhood. Behind the stores were endless rows of
apartment blocks, curtains hanging dispiritedly out the windows. Children peered out of the darkness,
momentarily distracted from TV screens by the false promise of the world outside. A hand dangled a
one-armed doll over a dangerously low sill, as if checking its urge to suicide.

One entire block had been torn down for an optimistic parking lot, now abandoned, grass coming up
through the cracks, ailanthus trees growing against the wall of windowless brick next door. The Fury
stared across it and imagined it covered with trees. She could see the roots shoving their way through the
asphalt, cracking it and revealing the old soil beneath.

The Fury turned away, disturbed by this image of retirement, and crossed the car-tormented street. The
funeral home had once been a comfortable mansion, from a time when people had lived here as a choice.
It was the only structure preserved from that time. With its white columns and high windows it was
solemnly beautiful. Its porch wrapped around two sides. Bright red awnings had been unfurled against the
summer sun.

Right next door was a garbage-strewn vacant lot. Men in brightly colored warm-up suits squatted there,
injecting drugs through disposable syringes from a pink box stolen from some hospital store room. The
fat one in the canary yellow, his sneakers as clean as if he had been carried into the lot by slaves, seemed
to be the leader. The others aped his gestures, desperate for his approval. The vacant lot ended in a
corroded and half-toppled wrought-iron fence, beyond which was the overgrown cemetery.

Inside, there were no mourners, no sign that anyone knew that Clytemnestra of Argos was dead. After
she finally managed to pry the front door open, the Fury found herself there alone. She walked to the rear
of the room, undid the catches, and slammed back the lid of the massive bronze coffin.

The embalmer had been careful to restore Clytemnestra to her appearance just before her death. Her
gown was fine and looped with silver, jewels glittered around her neck and in her ears, her hands were
raised up to ward off the blows, a look of terror deformed her face.

The Fury undid the gown and slid her fingernails into the body through the wounds. It took only a few
minutes to determine that all relevant information had already been removed from the body during
autopsy and embalming. The liver was a plastic child's purse filled with colored seahorses. The heart was
a can of spackling compound. The ovaries, in a cruel joke by one of the male Olympians, were charcoal
briquettes.

The actual autopsy results were closed to the Fury by the new regulations. The Olympians meant for her
to be stymied, to scream out her impotent rage here, tear this irrelevant place apart.

But the Fury was not entirely without resource. She stood for a moment until the air from her nostrils no
longer smelled like burnt hair. She stripped Clytemnestra's dress away completely, to reveal the knife
slashes through her sagging skin, so tattered that the embalmer had been forced to attach it to the