Read Alyx - Joanna Russ for Free Online

these women, on crying, on making demands, and on disagreeing about everything. They fight from one side of the room to the other. She bit his hand and he howled and brought it down on the side of her head. He called her a little whore. He stood blocking the doorway and glowered, nursing his hand. Her head was spinning. She leaned against the wall and held her head in both hands. Then she said:
    “So you won’t let me go.”
    He said nothing.
    “You can’t keep me,” she said, and then she laughed; “no, no, you can’t,” she added, shaking her head, “you just can’t.” She looked before her and smiled absently, turning this fact over and over. Her husband was rubbing his knuckles.
    “What do you think you’re up to,” he muttered.
    “If you lock me up, I can’t work,” said his wife and then, with the knife she had used for the past half year to pare vegetables, this woman began to saw at her length of hair. She took the whole sheaf in one hand and hacked at it. Her husband started forward. She stood arrested with her hands involved in her hair, regarding him seriously, while without taking his eyes off her, running the tip of his tongue across his teeth, he groped behind the door—he knew there is one thing you can always do. His wife changed color. Her hands dropped with a tumbled rush of hair, she moved slowly to one side, and when he took out from behind the door the length of braided hide he used to herd cattle, when he swung it high in the air and down in a snapping arc to where she—not where she was; where she had been—this extraordinary young woman had leapt half the distance between them and wrested the stock of the whip from him a foot from his hand. He was off balance and fell; with a vicious grimace she brought the stock down short and hard on the top of his head. She had all her wits about her as she stood over him.
    But she didn’t believe it. She leaned over him, her cut black hair swinging over her face; she called him a liar; she told him he wasn’t bleeding. Slowly she straightened up, with a swagger, with a certain awe. Good lord! she thought, looking at her hands. She slapped him, called his name impatiently, but when the fallen man moved a little—or she fancied he did—a thrill ran up her spine to the top of her head, a kind of soundless chill, and snatching the vegetable knife from the floor where she had dropped it, she sprang like an arrow from the bow into the night that waited, all around the house, to devour.
    Trees do not pull up their roots and walk abroad, nor is the night ringed with eyes. Stones can’t speak. Novelty tosses the world upside down, however. She was terrified, exalted, and helpless with laughter. The tree on either side of the path saw her appear for an instant out of the darkness, wild with hurry, straining like a statue. Then she zigzagged between the tree trunks and flashed over the lip of the cliff into the sea.
    In all the wide headland there was no light. The ship still rode at anchor, but far out, and clinging to the line where the water met the air like a limpet or a moray eel under a rock, she saw a trail of yellow points appear on the face of the sea: one, two, three, four. They had finished their business. Hasty and out of breath, she dove under the shadow of that black hull, and treading the shifting seas that fetched her up now and again against the ship’s side that was too flat and hard to grasp, she listened to the noises overhead: creaking, groans, voices, the sound of feet. Everything was hollow and loud, mixed with the gurgle of the ripples. She thought, I am going to give them a surprise. She felt something form within her, something queer, dark, and hand, like the strangeness of strange customs, or the blackened face of the goddess Chance, whose image set up at crossroads looks three ways at once to signify the crossing of influences. Silently this young woman took off her leather belt and wrapped the buckleless end around her