"Mike Resnick - Marcia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

I pull the knife from my purse.
тАЬSlut!тАЭ I scream, and plunge it into her belly.

She howls in pain and spits blood.

тАЬCunt!тАЭ I rage, and stab her in the throat.

She tried to scream again, but it comes out as a wet gurgle.

тАЬI loved you!тАЭ I say, burying the knife in her again and again. тАЬWe could have been so happy! Why did
you have to spoil it? Why do all of you always have to spoil it?тАЭ

She doesn't say anything, of course. She is past saying anything ever again, and before I can mourn my
lost love in private there is the body to be disposed of. I leave her apartment, return to my own, pick up
a pair of plastic leaf bags and some masking tape, and pull my Volkswagen (a Beetle, twenty-three
hundred dollars new, andstill a great car) into the alley behind her building.

Then I go upstairs, slip one of the bags over her head and torso and the other over her legs, tape them
together, hoist her over my shoulder, hobble back down to the alley, and place her in the trunk.

I drive to the local supermarket and pull around to the back, where they keep their huge metal dumpster,
and I deposit her with all the other refuse and rubbish that will be picked up tomorrow morning.

I was worried the first time I did it, but human hands never touch the dumpster. The truck reaches out
with its long mechanical arms and lifts the dumpster high in the air and turns it upside down, and since
they never found Phyllis or Joan or Martha I know that they won't find Marcia either. The selfish,
unfeeling slut will be crushed into a tiny compact cube along with the tin cans and broken crates and will
be deposited in some foul-smelling hole in the ground and that will be that and no one will ever know
what happened to her. (Though if she ever treated other lovers in the same high-handed, uncaring
fashion, there will be some who at least can hazard a guess, who might even congratulate me if they
knew.)

And if the police come by (though of course they never do) I will just look shocked and say yes, I had
seen her on occasion. She seemed like kind of a cold fish, if you ask me.

Lovers?

I'll smile and shake my head and say no, not her, she just wasn't the type.

Besides, what would a gray-haired little old neighbor lady know about that?
****

Wednesday, July 6

I think I'm in love.

Her name is Sharon, and she's much more sensitive than Marcia. No trashy romance novels for her, oh
no; she comes in at two on the dot every afternoon and goes right to the poetry section. She's polite and
refined, and she has the longest, most beautiful legs I ever saw. (And I'll bet she doesn't have a gross ugly
mole like Marcia did.)