"George Alec Effinger - Maureen Birnbaum in the MUD" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

"So," she goes, making her mouth into a big open

O and stretching her right eyebrow upward with her pinkie, "where was I?"

Damn it I was, you know, praying that she'd forget about telling me the rest of her most
recent thrilling exploit. "You whooshed out of New Orleans and wound up in this bitty little
medieval village."

"Uh huh," she goes, hastily daubing Azul Jacinto like a muralist rushing to met the NEA
grant deadline. "Well, be a darling and open that other box of Frango chocolates, the raspb
ones, and I'll just finish up here."

Comment d├оtes-vous en fran├зais "Yeah. Right." What follows, I swear, I am not making
should only be so clever.



I shouldn't even be like talking to you anymore, Bitsy, the way you left me standing there
the sidewalk in New Orleans. Do you mind if I tell you that I thought you were just too
R-U-D-E for words? Still, all that's forgiven, because we've been best friends forever and
can see what a wretched life you've carved out for yourself, but didn't I warn you about Jos
And didn't I point out-

All right. Never mind. I'm sorry I brought it up. So there I was, like simply abandoned in
strange city, thank you very much. They call New Orleans "The City That Care Forgot," but
they've forgotten other things, too. Like the past participle. All over town, I kept running int
"ice tea' and boil shrimp" and "smoke sausage." I really wanted to sample that smoke sausa
just to see if it was like my Nanny's shadow soup. She said when they were too poor to buy
chicken, she'd, you know, borrow someone else's and hold it over her pot of boiling water.
That's how you make shadow soup. Cossacks were involved in that story somehow, but I ca
exactly remember how.

I've lost my train of thought, I must be getting old. Oh, for sure, the village. You know th
can whoosh through time and space with ease, but that I don't always end up exactly where
planned. Believe me, sweetie, I hadn't planned to visit this-well, I hate to call it a town,
exactly, because it was made up of just five horrible tiny shops and no houses at all. Don't y
think that's a little odd?
 Sure, the merchants must've lived in the back of their shops, except I didn't see any back
Just these one-room huts made out of sticks. They could've learned some important and use
things about architecture from a Neolithic tribe in New Guinea or somewhere.

So here's Maureen Birnbaum, Protector of the Weak, ankling into this dinky place. It loo
like a strip mall of outlet stores during the reign of King Albert.

Albert. King Albert. The one who burned the cakes. You remember. No, that wasn't
Charlemagne. It was King Albert the Great. Or somebody. Hey, Bitsy, it's not even importa
all right? Jeez!

So guess what the name of this village was? No, not Brooklyn. Ha ha, too amusing for
words, Bits. No, they called the place Mudville. As in "There is no joy in." I thought, "Like