"Lisa Tuttle - Honey, I'm Home!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

Honey, I’m Home!
Lisa Tuttle

A transplanted Texican now living in a cottage above a sea loch in
West Scotland, Lisa Tuttle has made the domestic sphere her arena for
horror, producing fictions which focus on the terrible things people do to
other people. Her collection of short stories, A Nest of Nightmares, was
selected as one of the hundred best horror books of all time, and her
novel Familiar Spirit is unforgettably creepy. In ‘Honey, I’m Home’!, as in
much of her recent work, domestic concerns are overlaid with a bizarre
and surreal touch of humour. She has spent her whole life running away
from the scenarios of I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver, but recently
acquired a house, a husband and a daughter. She knows all the words to
‘He’s a Rebel’ and ‘The Boy I Love’, has watched every episode of the
late lamented Miami Vice, and wants to know when it’s going to be
repeated. And so do we, but perhaps not for the same reasons . . .

****



A
s soon as she got home Gina turned on the television for company. She’d
started doing it while living alone in New York, and although she wasn’t as
paranoid about living alone in London - that was the idea of the move - the
habit persisted. She watched it hardly at all; it was wallpaper. Last week
she’d succumbed to a salesman’s spiel and had a satellite dish fixed to the
side of her building. The new channels she paid for offered more to
choose from, but little of it choice.

Much of the ‘entertainment’ was imported from America or Australia
and distinctly past its Best By date.

Standing in the kitchenette slicing chicken, mushrooms and zucchini
for her dinner, feeling her usual faint regret that there would be no one to
share it with her, no lover or husband soon to walk through the door, Gina
was aware of the television playing in the lounge behind her, and heard it
call, in a voice from her childhood:

‘Honey, I’m home!’
 Memory tagged it instantly: Hugh Beaumont as Ward Cleaver in
Leave It to Beaver. She marvelled at time’s magic which turned any boring
old sitcom into a cultural classic.

Then somebody grabbed her by the waist, and she screamed. At the
same time she twisted in his grasp, half-turned and drove her fist straight
into his midriff. It was a response drilled into her by years of self-defence
classes, but this time, the first time she’d done it for real, in her fist was a
long, very sharp kitchen knife, and it went straight into the living body of
Ward Cleaver.