"Koja-LadyLazarus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Koja Kathe)thought she heard her daughter sigh in the midst of a dream. Little girls are
born with dreams, cuffed needs inside like little eggs waiting to drop, fall fat like fruit, like the seeds of babies; but they don't need them. What they need are weapons, armies; they need to be armies, they need to be able to fight. Little boys are taught how to do that; it is a knowledge assumed as necessary as knowing how to point your penis when you piss. team how to fight, hit, throw stones, black stones like pennies on her eyes, she would lie m a grave like a trundle bed and who would care then? Not him. Her hand on the paper like automatic writing, like using the planchette, its little needle the pointy nose of some feared pet, grave weasel, ferreting out the damned: you, and you. And you, especially; you didn't think we would forget you. She had been writing, trying to write since midnight, since two; she had talked to her neighbor, his face swarming out of the light belowstairs like some bewildered god, a modern god left without magic in the normal miracle of electricity. She had wanted to borrow some stamps; he had asked her if she was all right: "You aren't really well, are you?" Are you? Did he see somewhere in her face the shadow of the stones, did he see black spots left behind, little cancerous spores like pits left burned by feet made of acid, what did he see? There on the paper before her, the word, spore; or was it spoor? How cold it was in here, it was hard to see the paper, harder still to hold the pen. I'm fine, she had said; don't call the doctor, I'm fine. So many doctors; this new one was not bad, he seemed to understand, so many pressures on her and he seemed to understand: work, and the children; the sympathetic, he was not unkind. Again and again he reminded her of her children, of her friends, her mother and brother, the people who cared: like an army of love, massed around her to give her strength. She needed strength, now more than ever; given at times to anger but at heart she was not a fighter; better, perhaps, if she had been. Little girl dreams; and flung stones; it was cold enough to freeze stones in here, sacks of ice split open to show like a pearl the motionless heart. She had always hated the cold. Little girl days, watching the ocean; the spray like the sparkle of weapons, tips of arrows shining in the sun. Her dead father underground, no light for him. She felt her hand move across the paper, felt the pen as if it were another finger, sweet and special deformity; it was her talent, her genius, it was what allowed her to write. Did everyone have something like that, some rich handicap that in paradox freed its host? Her husband, what was his deformity? A penis that hissed like a snake, a fat red snake with one hot eye? and hers, what was hers, patent-leather bitch with her heavy scent and her voice like a man's, what did she have that made her special? Besides him? Her hand distracting moving again and she read the line aloud to herself like honey on the tongue: read it again but softly, she did not want to wake the children, wake her neighbor below stairs; he needed his sleep. She needed sleep, too, but she needed this more. |
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