"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Memory Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

are inside a small, protective bubble. The bubble is inside of me.

She has no idea.

Perhaps I am loving this too much, watching her, being with her.
Putting off what needs to be done. But I am in heaven.

I hear it before her, the low sound of the truck engine, the hiccup of
the driver shifting gears, and jump up, stiff, growling. Alerted, she lowers
her ax and stands waiting, wondering: is this the time? She picks up the
pistol she left on the rock next to the chopping block. тАЬWho is it, girl? Get
him, Daisy!тАЭ

By now, IтАЩve recognized the sound of JakeтАЩs truck, relax, and run
down the steep hidden road wagging my tail. Jake, a local farmer Elizabeth
has known since she was a teenager, brings us supplies. Food, gasoline
for the generator so we can save the propane in the big buried tank, and
local news. Not regularly. The dead-end tree-hidden dirt road below us also
goes to property he owns, so it is far more likely that the smoke from our
woodstove would give us away than JakeтАЩs visits. But this has been a
vacation hideaway for years, so we could be anyone. Jake understands the
need for not revealing who we are.

I was cast off, taken for a ride, thrown out of the car, but I came back.
I will always come back. I am a dog.

****

Rain strikes the leaves, making them shiver. Fall is almost over and
they are few. By tomorrow, according to the weathernews that is so
submerged in my brain that I no longer have to access it deliberately, the
trees will be cloaked in ice.

Jake gone, Elizabeth continues to split wood, glancing at the sky
nervously. Weather is just about the only kind of uncorrupted television
information she can get now. The rest of television, a million stations, with
no exaggeration, is sheer entertainment, even what they call the news. I call
it the Allover Station because every station and all of the news is the same,
essentially. The weight of Allover draws everyone in, together, the same
way a hearth fire would. It is almost impossible to resist. It is so full of death
and murder and pain that we take it for granted that this is the way of the
world and nothing can be done.

They are wrong.

Truth comes in the form of newspods, released into the air, drawn
hither and yon by the magnetic call of those who swallowed the
black-market pill that gives them access to a million independent podders.
They call these newspods smacks: you get smacked with the truth, every
once in a while; the pod, an electromagnetic bundle of information, smacks