Shatterday by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online

very long essay.
    But in that essay I recounted an anecdote concerning myself and the woman who was to become my fourth wife. We had just met, were just beginning to date, and she asked me how many women I had been with. "Been with": that's one of those phrases we use.
    After a few days of hemming and hawing, and avoiding answering the question because I didn't think she really wanted to hear the truth, I was pressured into answering, and I did. It was a substantive number of liaisons.
    Gary Crawford read that line about how many women I'd "been with" to this total stranger, this Anne who shares the cost of renting a house up in Kingston; and with a demonstration of provincial audacity that resonated perfectly with concretized tenets of the Judeo-Christian Ethos, she concluded I was a brutalizer of women, a shallow gigolo or profligate tramp; a womanizer of the more odious sort.
    Ah, lady, would that it were so. Too much pain and visceral material expended during the course of my love life ever to garner me such unassailable encomiums. No, kiddo, I'm just a slave to love like you.
    The judgment is one, clearly, of geography…not morality.
    But there it was happening to me again: some reader taking a tour through my life and doing it with considerable ineptitude, and then reporting back to strangers the skewed visions he had had while on his jaunt. And there goes Anne, getting all pruney around the lips and calling me bad names.
    I won't run my credentials. Call me what you will. It's your problem and none of my own, friends. Anarchist, rakehell, asshole, monster, pyromaniac, child molester, assassin, lover of the music of Lawrence Welk…the most awful things you or I could think of. What the hell do I care? I'm still the one who can write these stories.
    And no one ever said Dostoevski was a paragon of the virtues; but I'll bet he bought his way into Heaven with The Idiot.
    Why does he tell us all this?
    I tell you all this because the next story you'll read here is about fucking. No, not lovemaking, or "being with," or anything more meaningful sexually than fucking. And I tell you all this ahead of time so you will understand that I think love and sex are separate and only vaguely similar. Like the word bear and the word bare. You can get in trouble mistaking one for the other.
    The same goes for love and sex.
    Writers take tours in other people's lives. This is a hippity-hop through all of yours; even you too, Anne, you who engage in all that deep breathing about love and romance and the intricate pavane of sexual encounter when the truth of the matter is…the whole damn subject is mostly just funny.

 
How's the Night Life on Cissalda
    WHEN THEY UNSCREWED the time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.
    Every head turned away. The word that sprang to mind first was, " Feh !"
    They wouldn't tell Enoch Mirren's wife he was back. They evaded the question when Enoch Mirren's mother demanded to know the state of her son's health after his having taken the very first journey into another time/universe. The new President was given dissembling answers. No one bothered to call San Clemente. The Chiefs of Staff were kept in the dark. Inquiries from the CIA and the FBI were met with responses in pig Latin and the bureaus were subtly diverted into investigating each other. Walter Cronkite found out, but after all, there are even limits to how tight security can get.
    Their gorges buoyant, every one of them, the rescue crew and the medical team and the chrono-experts at TimeSep Central did their best, but found it impossible to pry temponaut Enoch Mirren's penis from the (presumably) warm confines of the disgusting thing's (presumed) sexual orifice.
    A cadre of alien morphologists was assigned to make an evaluation: to decide if the disgusting thing was male or female. After a sleepless week they gave up. The head of the group made a good