Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ think of it, even now, my skull roars like a blast furnace. Didn’t happen, didn’t happen, no no no no no no no! Over and over I speak words ablaze with righteousness. Over and over Hopsalot spills new-smelted from the flames: sleek, shining, whole. But that ingot is fairy metal, it melts. Probably there was nothing I could have said to avert what was coming, but I will never know. Silver-tongued Demosthenes did not rise again in me. I stood there, my fingers plucking at my father’s arm, and choked on my assassin silence.

      My father regarded me with smiling contempt. “Did you wish to raise an objection? No? Nothing to say? My mistake!” He flipped Hopsalot upside down and waggled the blade violently around in his mouth. “We cut the mouth veins so as to drain the body of blood,” he said in a neutral tone (barely audible under the terrible screaming, as if addressing nobody, or his own conscience). He ran a wire a few turns around the kicking feet, one of which got loose and broke, I hoped, his nose—then, cursing, strung him up from the roof beam while I kicked him as hard as I could in his shins, Hopsalot jerking, twisting, screaming, and flicking drops of blood all over my father and myself that were indistinguishable from the blood streaming now from my father’s nose as well.

      Language is a terrible, cold thing, I think. One may recount an event, calmly selecting the most suitable words, that to remember without benefit of ink is almost beyond bearing. We accept the counterfeit and are thankful, for it spares us the awful weight of our lives.

      My father thrust me from him and, jamming his finger crosswise under his up-tilted nose, from which black-cherry blood was flowing, strode out of the shed. He left me pretty well frantic, leaping up to catch at the roof beam, though I was too short. I wasted a moment or two in this pointless activity before I thought to pile up the hutches and though I put my foot through one of them, to the stupid consternation of young Gundred, Countess of Furry, I did then manage to reach the beam and, weeping, unwind the wire that bound Hopsalot, paying no mind to his claws raking my cheeks. But when I bore him down to the heap of straw where the escaped but unmoved Gundred, against whom I conceived an immediate dislike, was hopefully sniffing (for concealed carrots, perhaps), he lay listless on his side, paws twitching a little, blood rouging his muzzle, and died.

      “Oh, please—don’t go—don’t leave me—” is what I tried to say, and more to this effect, but it came out very broken under the press of my emotion. Indeed I had possibly never stuttered so violently.

      This is how I made the first of my great discoveries, which I therefore owe to my father’s cruelty. You can read about it elsewhere. The result was that I brought him back, I mean Hopsalot. Alas, I brought him back, not to healthy indifferent life, but to that moment in which he lay dying, in pain, terror, and incomprehension, perhaps not even trusting, now, my own hands, since they had taught him a lie, that he was safe. I kept him dying for hours, or so it felt, and then in hot, banging shame for my cruelty I shut up and let him be. Be dead. Die.

      Gundred took belated fright and fled. I believe that she accounts for the great number of feeble-minded rabbits that presently inhabit Cheesehill and regularly fling themselves under one’s wheels.

      I rose from the soft mound that had been Hopsalot—the pluperfect was making its fitness felt—and went meditatively into the house, repeatedly spreading and unspreading my fingers to feel the blood that was drying on the webbing between them stick and unstick. My father was languid on the divan in a smoking jacket, a healthy flush in his cheeks, a fine crust of black rimming his nostrils, poring over a pamphlet and mumbling, “Deranged condition of the whole system . . . innervated . . . dyspepsia. Beef tea?” Without looking up, he added in the same tone of voice, “Where have you been?”

      I could not call my mouth back from wherever it had been. “Sh-sh-sh . . .”

      He swung his feet to the floor and swatted the pamphlet down onto the cushion beside him, which bounced a little. “Damn it,” he ejaculated lazily, “you will regulate your speech!”

      I gazed dumbly at him, my fingers spreading and unspreading.

      “You are my creature,” he said. His tone was sonorous, he seemed to taste his words; I perceived that he was calling on his elocutionary skills. “My qualities appear in you, although warped and weakened by the deleterious influence of your mother’s line. I will not allow that minuscule portion of myself that survives in you to appear before the world with disordered speech and—” he sat back, perceiving only now that my dress was fouled with blood and rabbit fur “—appearance.” His tone was disbelieving. “Why, in some vitiated fashion, you express me! You bear my signature, although the text is corrupted. The fault for that is mine, and I accept it, but I cannot accept that even in dilute form my gifts are not equal to or superior to those of a lesser man’s child, and you will make yourself the mistress of my legacy, however diminished. Come here.” He smiled grotesquely, patting a cushion. “Let us hear you say, ‘I will regulate my speech and impose harmony on my disordered senses.’”

      I took a few steps toward him and attempted to force the air between the commissures of my lips. Only a grinding sound ensued, like that of a motor failing to start.

      His face twisted in a grotesque imitation of kindness, though the time for kindness, I thought, was past. He had perhaps forgotten what reason he had lately given me for resentment; or I was wrong and he had never understood in the first place what my rabbits were to me. “Shall we try again? ‘I will regulate . . .’”

      “Grr-grr-grr.”

      The suppressed impatience roared back into view. “Are you being deliberately obtuse? This is the nineteenth century!” He leaned forward, employing the Horizontal Oblique gesture, Fig. 28, A Practical Manual of Evolution. “When industry and the applied sciences break mighty rivers and the power of the lightning bolt to the harness, shall one little girl’s tongue idle in a state of nature, as lawless as a catamount? I say nay! We squeeze lemons until they express their juices, and make no doubt of it, Sybil Joines—” he caught my shoulder in a pincer-like grip, forgetting oratory “—I will juice you.”

      I turned my face away. I pressed my hand to my thigh. I moved my hand and felt that my dress was stuck to it.

      How real I was, and solid as a ham. It is distasteful to look back on it, now that I am scarcely here at all. Now that I am little more than a corset through which an interesting wind blows, and the other world is more real to me than this one.

      My father had a pedagogical theory (original to him, as far as I know) of the proper sequence of childhood attainments, from the diaper right on up to higher mathematics. Every art was erected on the foundation of the last; each had its numbered place, and although he periodically revised the list, promoting, say, the study of counterpoint from #164 to #158, while demoting the trimming of bonnets from #174 to #193, the spoken word (#13) invariably preceded the written (#37), and as we know, I stuttered. So there I stuck, at the first landing.

      Thus it was with the fearful, forbidden relish of an Eve (whose attainments, I noted, would have ranked her in the low teens) that, one afternoon, when he was at the factory, I crept into my father’s study, abstracted a book from a low shelf, took it into a corner where a little warm, dust-spangled sunlight fell sidelong between curtain and wall, and seated myself in that bright angled stripe, which etched with crisp shadows the blind-stamped decoration (oak leaves, an acorn) on the front of the object in my lap. Sliding between my thighs, the book presented to me its fore-edge, which was smooth and gilt, and I ran my finger down the golden channel between the boards, consciously dawdling. I had conceived a sort of dread of books, which had supplied my father with so many notions disconcerting to the tranquility of our home, and yet I was determined to make their acquaintance. It seemed to me that if I piled up enough books I might mount high enough that I could leave #13 for a more auspicious time, or forever. At last I parted the willing СКАЧАТЬ