"A. R. Morlan - Dear DB" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morlan A R)

She's old Palmer Winston's grandchild," or worse, "Devorah? That's old man
Winston's son's little girlie." When I got my driver's license, I had almost
expected it to say "Devorah Bambi Winston, daughter of Arlin, son of Palmer,
grandson of Porter," or something semi-Biblical like that. It was so
_frustrating;_ if I had stayed back home I wouldn't have ever had a chance to
be _me,_ but I would have either been dubbed "So and so's _child,"_ or "the
such-and-such _girl,"_ or if I had married one of the local-yokel Ewerton
males, eventually I would have become "Joe Blow's _wife,"_ or "the mother of
Dick and Jane" and so on to infinity. Part of the reason why I cleared out of
there was the fact that I had had no hope of carving out an identity for
myself; in a small town a person is never a _person,_ period, but either the
offspring of someone or the parent of another ... at least in New York, I
figured that a person would be known only as his or her _self_ without a
centipede-like trail of relatives hanging behind them. All I wanted to be was
_me,_ D. B. Winston, writer, but after all this _gringo_ and "better
identification" stuff, I was beginning to wonder if I should go and have my
gender and vital statistics tattooed across my forehead!
Crawling out of my pool of self-pity long enough to look up for my
station number, I noticed that I was sitting in a subway car full of boom-box
babes, all big, all poorly dressed ... and _all leaving me alone._ And there
wasn't a Guardian Angel in sight.
When I reached my stop, I hurried off, hoping to leave before my
traveling companions came to their senses. During the walk home, I toyed with
the idea of working this all into a story. It had worked for me in the past
... as evidenced by my still uncashed check.
****
After a bit of arm-twisting I got the super to cash my check for me (I used an
automatic teller to make my deposit later on), and settled down with a new
stock of groceries (and seeming tons of Alpo!), trying to catch up on my
writing. Just for the hell of it, I began a story called "The Metamanphosis"
While I was busy writing that, the _BQ_ editor sent me a black and white photo
mockup of the cover for the next issue a real stunner. I'd had my name on the
cover of more than a few issues, but this time was the first time that a cover
illo had been based on _my_ story. I liked the way Potter put the reflection
(distorted, of course) of the killer on the old-man's spittle-moist teeth,
inside the cavern of that drooling, vacant mouth. And next to that: A
HAIR-RAISING TALE OF NEIGHBORLY REVENGE _THE MOUTH THAT WOULD NOT DIE!_ BY D.
B. WINSTON. As I looked it over, I realized why the editor had opted for the
title change; this way it was a bit more on the Lovecraftian side. If only my
Grandpa Winston (the former English Lit teacher) could have seen that! (I




Page 3
wondered if _Gramps_ would have had trouble with my gender, too...) But the
story beckoned, a sure five hundred dollars if I could get it done and
accepted at a pro 'zine, so I put the cover mock-up aside and got down to
business, thinking that the heroine/hero of the story was the only with with
big problems....