Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon [Sturgeon, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-747-0
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

Poor Yorick

IF YOU DON’T want to read an unpleasant story, we are even. Because I didn’t want to write it either.

It can be told because it’s doubtful whether June will ever get hold of it because she doesn’t read the way you do. She is one of those who flatter themselves that they are too busy to waste time reading. She talks a great deal instead, and is only one-third of a person, the other two-thirds being entertainment-receptors for the radio and the movies respectively.

But she is inordinately pretty. She is very very blond and her lips are full and red, and her eyes are the color of grape juice, but bright. Her skin has indirect lighting and the lobes of her ears are always pink. She has a fiance, as she calls him in two syllables, in the South Pacific. He is a nice fellow and entirely suited to her. He and her kid brother had been inducted together and managed to stay together, and were buddies the way they always had been. She called him her kid brother because she was three-eighths of an inch taller than he, although he was older. So it was all nice and cosy, with them to watch over each other and with her to stay at home and be proud of them both. The fiance, whose name was Hal, wrote all the time, and her kid brother never wrote, which was all right too, as long as one of them did.

There was a lot of hard work and rough stuff out there but Hal found time to wrap up and send a present for her, and by hook or by crook it got to her. She opened it with two oh’s and an ooh, in the presence of both of her elderly and very gentle parents, and as the last of the wrapping fell away her mouth tried to “Eeek!” while she swallowed her gum, and her father spun on his heel and started to walk out but had to come right back to fix up her mother, who had silently fainted. The present was a Japanese skull.

After her mother was quiet and comfortable June went back into the front parlor—not a living-room, a parlor—and she and the skull stared at each other for quite a while. All the courage she had concentrated in the gingerly tip of one index finger which went out and touched it and jumped back as if the thing were hot. But it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t cold either. It was just smooth, and quite as clean-looking as anything could be. It was as clean as a kitchen sink. She touched it again, and gradually she saw that it was just ugly, that was all. She put out both hands and put one on each side of the skull and lifted it. She almost dropped it then because it was so light and she wasn’t prepared for that. But she held it and she had it and it was of value because Hal had sent it.

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