"Kelley Eskridge - Alien Jane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eskridge Kelly)

Alien Jane
KELLEY ESKRIDGE
Kelley Eskridge's short fiction has appeared tn Century, Pulphou,se, The Maga:,ine of Fantasy b Science Fiction and
Little Deaths, &r antholog,, of erotic horror edited by Ellen Datlow. Her work has also appeared in The Year's Best
Fantasy and Horcor. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her partner, writer Nicola Griffith.

"Alien jane, " a finalist for the Nebula Award, also won Kelley Esk-ridge the Astraea National Lesbian Action
Foundation Writer's Award, an $11,000 pnze. About this story, she writes:

"Congenital insensitivity to pain is a real condition. When I was young, I saw a feature on 60 Minutes or one of its ilk
about a family with three CIP kids. They had to be watched all the time because everything in the worldтАФincluding
themselvesтАФwas dangerous to thern. They never knew that they needed to be healed.

"When I sat down to write 'Alien fane,' I wanted to invert the idea of pain. I wanted to create a woman who needed to
be healed because she did not hurt. And I wanted to think about what pain really means. We use physical pain as a
barometer of so many things: self-worth (how well we resist pain and its debilitation); justification for attention (it's
okay to ask for it as long as you really need it); how hard we've tried to achieve a physical goal (do you feel the burn?).
But there are other kinds of pain, and they, too, have their function as a warning signal, a sign that we need to be
healed: rage, loneliness, Brief, helplessness, humiliationтАФall things that ]ane has felt, that have led her to a place
where the best option is to cut herself open to show that she is not, after all, so different from anyone else.

"The original story was full of horror and grue. I wrote from Jane's point of view and, as the writer, got caught up in the
power of being able to hurt this character who couldn't feel it. I wrote enormous monologues, litanies of abuse. Wow, I
thought, now I'm really exploring pain.

"Well, what a bunch of crap that was. What I was really doing was indulging rnyself in no-pny victirnizationтАФit was
'okay' because nobody got lrurt. It upset me to reatlrze rtтАФand so, of course, back it went into

Alien Jane тАв 75

the story, and emerged as all those people in the lab who turn the test dial all the way to the right just to see jane burn
without her knowing that she is being injured.

"It seemed such a strong image of alienation to me that I took from it the title of the story. Writing 'Alien Jane' gave me
a more clear notion of my own definitions of science fiction and speculative fiction. For ffie, it's all about exploring the
alien, exploring the difference until it's clear that there is no difference at all."

She came in as a thinskin and we started off badly. Thinskins pissed me off. Everything about them was
hopeless' their screams, their red faces, the smell of their blood, and there was always blood because it
was night and they came from Emergency. They made me remember where I still was, and that was a
terrible thing, a monster thing with nowhere to go but boiling out of me in a cloud of rage that fogged me
for hours sometimes. The ward is where they put you when you have the rage.

"Don't you bring her in here."

"Calm down, Rita, go back to your own bed."

"Don't you bnng her in here."

"Rita, I won't tell you again to behave yourself." Molasses voice and muscles and she meant it, Madge