"Arinn Dembo - Sisterhood Of Skin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dembo Arinn)

was
sitting on his lap, very small -- small enough again to touch his hard cheek,
to
polish his glowing golden eye, and feel its heat through a chamois cloth. His
flesh eye never seemed as human or real as the other; it was nothing but a sad
brown relic. Just so, his flesh hand never seemed as gentle or skilled as the
cybernetic one.

My mother was in the dream as well.

My father came to us in the hogan. He walked in without speaking and sat
heavily
at the table; the chair croaked under him like an old woman carrying a load of
firewood. He opened his battered pectoral plate-- his chest split open like a
pinata. Candy showered onto the tabletop. He looked down on me, his daughter,
and smiled.

Mother stood by the stove, wrapped in blankets and ropes of silver. She was a
wealthy woman who married outside her own tribe; my father was a half-breed
Lakota before he became a god of destruction. She poured out a bowl of blue
corn
mush and set it down in front of him, her lips pressed tight. He looked down
at
the bowl and suddenly went still, shut off like an automaton.

It was too much for her. She went to the comer and bent to pick up his
portable
generator, because he didn't have a saddle and she had to throw something out
the door; I found out later that this is what the women on the reservation do
to
declare a divorce. He slept, sitting upright at the table with his head bent
slightly, as if he were studying his scorched armor. His chest did not move as
he breathed.

She dragged the machine to the door, bent nearly double by its weight, while I
sat eating my candies two at a time, heedless of the flavors mishmashed in my
mouth . . . afraid she would take them away from me. My mother grunted,
freeing
one hand to open the screen door. She threw the generator out into the red
dusty
yard. It exploded in a shower of sparks as it hit the ground, and my father
snapped upright in his chair, his movement so swift and well-oiled that it
could
never be mistaken for human.

I don't think he even recognized her. She had cut off his power when he was
weak
and exhausted; she was a threat. He fired two scissoring beams which plunged
into her belly and chest, and she burst into a hot, stinging cloud of
superheated red steam. Her four limbs were lost in four directions, and I lay