"Joyce Carol Oates - Stripping" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

soul was a sudden sharp smell of animal terror. Saliva at the corners of the
contorted mouth. In the ruins of the abandoned house. Crumbling bricks,
rotted floorboards. Underfoot lay a childтАЩs mitten stiff with filth. Underfoot a
torn calendar, stained newspapers. Stumbling in the dark laughing dared to
take your hand Come this way You know the way I think you do you
teasing taunting eyes glassy-festive high on methamphetamine picking her
way through the filth to the mattress that was known to her stained
beforehand with her blood or the blood of someone very like her WhereтАЩve
I seen you before have you seen me smiling as if laughing inside where
her soul was filth and it came to you in a wave of disgust like filthy water in
your mouth that maybe she was known to you, in your memory known to
you, in an earlier life you had been a school-teacher until the school was
barred to you, the childrenтАЩs eyes sharp as beaks pecking, maybe the
woman had been a child once in your classroom in St. Ignatius Middle
School in an earlier life before the school was taken from you and all
seemed clear to you sud-denly Yes I am lonely, it is my loneliness that
feeds me beneath the shower in the sharp-stinging needles of water, such
pleasure, such happiness, now the filthy things have been stripped off, the
stained things and the smells and blood swirling down the drain and gone
and the fragrance of soap in your nostrils the simplicity of the naked body
armored in flesh covered in wire-hairs thrumming with life, with heat My
loneliness I have come to love this is why you were born, strip all else
away and this is it.

****