There once lived a woman who tried to kill her neighbor's baby: scary fairy tales by Li︠u︡dmila Petrushevskai︠a︡; Keith Gessen

Author:Li︠u︡dmila Petrushevskai︠a︡; Keith Gessen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Short stories, Horror, Short Stories (single author), Fiction, Fairy Tales, L'iudmila - Translations into English, Fairy tales, Legends & Mythology, Russian, Folk Tales, Short Stories, Petrushevska'ia, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780143114666
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-09-29T09:12:51.823000+00:00

Then they were working on him, and he was carted off again, and again he was surrounded by green trees, but this time he was woken by a noise: his daughter, on the cot next to him, was breathing in a terribly screechy way, as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her father watched her. Her face was white, her mouth open. A tube carried blood from his arm to hers. He felt relieved, and tried to hurry the flow of blood—he wanted all of it to pour into his child. He wanted to die so that she could live.

Once again he found himself inside the apartment in the enormous gray house. His daughter wasn’t there. Quietly he went to look for her, and searched in all the corners of the dazzling apartment with its many windows, but he could find no living being. He sat on the sofa, then lay down on it. He felt quietly content, as if his daughter were already off living somewhere on her own, in comfort and joy, and he could afford to take a break. He began (in his dream) to fall asleep, and here his daughter suddenly appeared. She stepped like a whirlwind into the room, and soon turned into a spinning column, a tornado, howling, shaking everything around her, and then sunk her nails into the bend in his right arm, under the skin. He felt a sharp pain, yelled out in terror, and opened his eyes. The doctor had just given him a shot to his right arm.

His girl lay next to him, breathing heavily, but no longer making that awful screeching noise. The father raised himself up on an elbow, saw that his left arm was already free of the tourniquet, and bandaged, and turned to the doctor.

“Doctor, I need to make a phone call.”

“What phone call?” the doctor answered. “It’s too early for phone calls. You stay still, or else I’m going to start losing you, too . . .”

But before leaving he gave the father his cell phone, and the father called home. No one answered. His wife and mother-in-law must have woken up early and gone to the morgue and now must be running around, confused, not knowing where their daughter’s body had gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.