"Lisa Tuttle - A Cold Dish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

A Cold Dish
by Lisa Tuttle


Throughout my pregnancy I was haunted by an ancient story.

Not so much a story, really, as a scene: the horrific climax to a dark drama of
betrayal and revenge. There are only two people in the scene, a man and a woman.
They are, or have been, married, and the woman has had two sons by him. Once
she loved the man, but now her love has turned to hate. He knows, but is indifferent
to her feelings, because he is a powerful and important figure, a force in the land,
and she is a mere woman, powerless.

The setting is her house, in her kitchen. Although he has left her, abandoned her for
another woman, he has returned to reclaim his sons. They are his heirs, after all;
this was in the olden days when children were the property of their father, and
women merely conveniences for their begetting.

With typical male vanity, he's not surprised that she is prepared to entertain him, has
even cooked a meal for the man who, having ruined her life, has now come to take
her children away. Accepting it all as his due, he sits and allows her to serve him. He
eats heartily, never wondering why she doesn't join him in the feast.

Finally, replete, he asks for his sons.

She, laughing horribly, tells him he's just had them.

What is this story? Who is she? Who is he? Without names, I couldn't research it, I
had no idea where to begin. I looked through books of ancient myths, and Greek
tragedies, but could never find it. But I must have read it somewhere, or seen it
staged.тАж

"People don't do such things." That's from a more modern playтАФIbsen, is it, or
Strindberg? Anyway, that's how I feel. Yet even if it never really happened, someone
wrote it, someone thought it up and found it plausible. Women have killed their own
children, I know, but тАж men are the ones who made parenthood all about
ownership, inheritance, and staking a claim, giving a name or not, as if love were
dependent on genes, or law. It's men, not women, who have always had the option
of denying their bastards. It's women who adopt, or even steal babies, just to have
someone to love. And it's men who want to believe that they're more important
than the children they sire, that a woman spurned would butcher her own children
just to spite the man who left her.

Yet what do I know, really, about what people will do in extremis?

And what if the story I think I remember is something I made up myself?


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