Only begotten daughter by Morrow James 1947-

Only begotten daughter by Morrow James 1947-

Author:Morrow, James, 1947- [Morrow, James, 1947-]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Women, Fathers and daughters, Lighthouse keepers, Messiah
Publisher: New York : W. Morrow
Published: 1990-05-19T04:00:00+00:00


Many voices, a mob. Not in the dream—r-outside it. New Jersey, Brigantine Point, here.

"Sheila!"

She slipped into Melanie's peach kimono and climbed the hundred and twenty-six steps to the beacon room, her nom de plume falling upon her like a succession of blows. Moving past the dormant lamp, she noticed the wick was missing: a Wyvern lamp, she decided, beaming darkness into the world.

She stepped onto the walkway.

"Sheila! Sheila!"

Vibrating like conglomerated bees, the crowd surrounded the lighthouse and overran the jetty. It was as if her temple had suddenly returned to haunt her, a museum of pain converging from all directions. Wheelchairs, crutches, and dialysis machines punctuated the swarming flesh. Stretchers lay on the grass like grave mounds, their occupants strung to IV bottles hanging from aluminum poles. Disease prospered. Blindness thrived. Burned and mutilated corpses proliferated—Milk's victims, she surmised—yet, curiously, not one of them touched the lawn, each lying instead across the arms of a parent or lover, as if resurrection were contingent upon the body literally being handed over to the divine Sheila.

"Save us!"

"We're yours!"

"Sheila!"

Julie cringed. Here, she realized, were the villains of her life, the ones who perpetuated the empire of nostalgia. Their needs were a thousand scalpels slicing her flesh, chopping her into relics—you take the holy spleen, I want the sacred brain. Damn them. She extended her arms, scissoring them as if marionettes dangled from her fingers. The clamor tapered off. "You must live in your own time!"

"I tried that!" screamed a gaunt young man, his writhing body bound to a wheelchair by leather straps.

The crowd seemed infinite. She imagined it stretching northward along the coast—the entire Eastern Seaboard lined up, waiting for deliverance. Nobody could be expected to deal with all this, nobody. "You must look to the future!"

"Screw the future!" called a potbellied man carrying a pre-adolescent girl, her body wracked by cystic fibrosis.

"Sheila!"



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.