>>6905>>6905Oh shit — I forgot all about this one, though it made a huge impact on my 12yo self. Short descriptions but juicy:
"I deleted him," he muttered, and went upstairs to meet her in the kitchen. Lina was fatter.
He had sent a woman off to bingo who weighed a hundred and eighty pounds or so. The woman who came back in weighed at least three hundred, perhaps more; she had to twist slightly sideways to get in through the back door. Elephantine hips and thighs rippled in tidal motions beneath polyester slacks the color of overripe green olives. Her skin, merely sallow three hours ago, was now sickly and pale. Although he was no doctor, Richard thought he cold read serious liver damage or incipient heart disease in that skin. Her heavy-lidded eyes regarded Richard with a steady, even contempt.
She was carrying the frozen corpse of a huge turkey in one of her flabby hands. It twisted and turned within its cellophane wrapper like the body of a bizarre suicide.
"What are you staring at, Richard?" she asked.
You, Lina. I'm staring at you. Because this is how you turned out in a world where we had no children. This is how you turned out in a world where there was no object for your love -- poisoned as your love might be. This is how Lina looks in a world where everything comes in and nothing at all goes out. You, Lina. That's what I'm staring at. You.
"That bird, Lina," he managed finally. "That's one of the biggest damn turkeys I've ever seen."
"Well don't just stand there looking at it, idiot! Help me with it!"
He took the turkey and put it on the counter, feeling its waves of cheerless cold. It sounded like a block of wood.
"Not there!" she cried impatiently, and gestured toward the pantry. "It's not going to fit in there! Put it in the freezer!"
"Sorry," he murmured. They had never had a freezer before. Never in the world where there had been a Seth.
He took the turkey into the pantry, where a long Amana freezer sat under cold white fluorescent tubes like a cold white coffin. He put it inside along with the cryogenically preserved corpses of other birds and beasts and then went back into the kitchen. Lina had taken the jar of Reese's peanut butter cups from the cupboard and was eating them methodically, one after the other.
"It was the Thanksgiving bingo," she said. "we had it this week instead of next because next week Father Phillips has to go in hospital and have his gall-bladder out. I won the coverall." She smiled. A brown mixture of chocolate and peanut butter dripped and ran from her teeth.
"Lina," he said, "are you ever sorry we never had children?''
She looked at him as if he had gone utterly crazy. "what in the name of God would I want a rug-monkey for?" she asked. She shoved the jar of peanut butter cups, now reduced by half, back into the cupboard.
"I'm going to bed. Are you coming, or are you going back out there and moon over your typewriter some more?"
"I'll go out for a little while more, I think," he said. His voice was surprisingly steady. "I won't be long."
"Does that gadget work?"
"What -- " Then he understood and he felt another flash of guilt. She knew about the word processor, of course she did. Seth's deletion had not affected Roger and the track that Roger's family had been on. "oh. oh, no. It doesn't do anything."
She nodded, satisfied. "That nephew of yours. Head always in the clouds. Just like you, Richard. If you weren't such a mouse, I'd wonder if maybe you'd been putting it where you hadn't ought to have been putting it about fifteen years ago." She laughed a coarse, surprisingly powerful laugh -- the laugh of an aging, cynical bawd -- and for a moment he almost leaped at her. Then he felt a smile surface on his own lips -- a smile as thin and white and cold as the Amana freezer that had replaced Seth on this new track.
"I won't be long," he said. "I just want to note down a few things."
"why don't you write a Nobel Prize-winning short story, or something?" she asked indifferently. The hall floorboards creaked and muttered as she swayed her huge way toward the stairs. "we still owe the optometrist for my reading glasses and we're a payment behind on the Betamax. why don't you make us some damn money?''
"well," Richard said, "I don't know, Lina. But I've got some good ideas tonight. I really do."
She turned to look at him, seemed about to say something sarcastic -- something about how none of his good ideas had put them on easy street but she had stuck with him anyway -- and then didn't. Perhaps something about his smile deterred her. She went upstairs. Richard stood below, listening to her thundering tread. He could feel sweat on his forehead. He felt simultaneously sick and exhilarated.
