"Barry N. Malzberg - Still - Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

IN BED, ASLEEP, HIS WIFE
He lies curled in a fetal posture, the joint of his thumb
enjambed against a cheek, his mouth open, emitting even curls
of breathe. In the darkness he thinks that he hears his wife cry
and turns toward her, one hand reaching to curve around the
fullness of her back; then he finds her flesh under his hands and
grips her as if he were holding a panel of wood. “You shouldn't
do that,” he groans, “you shouldn't do that, you upset me, I
don't know what's really going on here any more,” and then
runs his hands all the way down the length of her body,
lingering on her buttocks, moving around the cup of her

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 Still Life by Barry N. Malzberg



stomach and against her cunt. “Stop it,” she says to him, “what
are you doing? You woke me up, I was sleeping, you can't do
something like this every time you want to,” but he does not
hear; he is eager now, trapped in his own necessities, and even
though Control warned against activities of this sort during the
final days before mission, he finds’ himself quite helpless, quite
stricken, as he rises above to mount her. “Oh darling, darling,”
he cries, “the moon, the moon,” and plunges thickly into her and
she says again, “What are you doing?” her voice girlish, high,
suddenly pleading as if she were being pinned, against a fence
by a gang of strangers but it is too late, far too late for all of
that and he begins to work in her; two or three limpid pulls of
the prick and he is finished, the orgasm a seizure rather than a
culmination, and he falls from her body to his side of the bed.
Even though he is still alert, he decides that it would be best for

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him to feign passing into an immediate sleep and so he does
this, regularizing his breathing, hunching slowly into the pillow,
and the stimulation becoming the fact, he shortly does fall
asleep, leaving his wife lying quietly beside him, one arm
sprawled across his stomach in a gesture that might have had
more meaning a few moments ago but which, for her, gives her
a feeling of mute tenderness and she strokes the planes of his
cheek saying “all right, all right baby, it's all right, now” but for
all the good this does him at the present moment she might as
well be on the other side of the moon and he trapped in the
damned capsule.