"Suzette Haden Elgin - Only A Housewife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

by
imposing great oaks and sycamores. He even had a sizable hill, and a small
pond.
Let Elizabeth, her of the twin towers not yet five feet tall, try to match
that!

The house was strong. It was imposing. It was his. Joro sat inside it and
laughed at the memory of his recent despair. He was a happy man now, a man of
property, a man who had crossed new frontiers and made his mark in the world.
A
man who was proud, and with good reason. He looked forward to a long and happy
and supremely comfortable life. He was actually grateful to his little sister
now, because he realized that if she had not given him the final intolerable
shove he would still have been a legal child in the house of his parents,
drifting along in a rut he had almost stopped being aware of. He went to see
Elizabeth, who had only recently chosen among her many suitors and was now
engaged to be married, and he took her a handsome gift to mark his
appreciation.

Just eating Joro Belledarien was not enough for the house, although it was
satisfying. Once it had removed all the meat from the man's bones it took his
bare bumpy skull and jammed it prominently onto a handy spike above the front
door, as a warning to any future would-be tenants. CAVEAT! the grinning skull
said. BEWARE! KEEP OUT! The message was clear.

It made no difference to the house that it would surely die when the
testosterone in the tank was gone, without Joro to replenish its supply. There
was no one who would have gone inside to see to its needs, even if there had
been someone else willing to thumb his nose at an entire culture the way Joro
had. Why risk such a thing? All the other men already had houses, thanks to
their wives. Respectable houses, that could be trusted not to turn on their
inhabitants! Nothing would have persuaded them to go into the obscene and
obviously psychotic house (psychotic was the only word that fit,
anthropomorphic
though it undoubtedly was) of the dead Joro. The very foolish dead Joro they
had
made the mistake of envying, briefly.

The house may or may not have known that its situation was hopeless. In any
case, it did not care. It was a matter of principle. It was a house. An adult
male house. Better death, any time, than living in symbiosis, with a parasite
in
its very heart! Such a relationship was unspeakable. Intolerable. The very
idea
made the house queasy. It could not have accepted such a thing and looked at
itself in its own mirrors in the mornings.

The house squatted at the end of the magnificent drive under the sycamores,
its
honor satisfied; and it waited with perfect and stoic resignation for whatever