Notable American Women Read Online Free

decoy father sent to test your fealty while your real father waits trapped in a hole, fathering you from afar. This is not solely because I am a superior figure to your local father, or because I could reduce your local father to a mess of apologies and contradictions if I were allowed to occupy the same room as he does, to interrogate or debate him on
the complications, the difficulty, the serious flaw to the life project.
Nor is it because I am greater in physical prowess than your local father, could throw him in a pit or storm-fist his body to sleep, beat him in a foot-race or humiliate him at chess, outwit him in any conversation about a machine or the building of a house or the theory and use of every tool in his probably inferior tool chest. Nor indeed is it solely because I could twist your local father’s arm up his back, then turn him to face you so you could see his agony as he admits that, no, he doesn’t love you and how, if it came down to it, he would save himself, would sacrifice you to whatever threat came along, a dog, an intruder, a flood—you’re on your own!—because he doesn’t want to die either, this man masquerading as your father, the Halloween version, whom I am more than happy to unmask, the fraud.
    And this is where you must ultimately prefer me to any so-called father you may have known before.
    Your local father is afraid of everything, is only a baby, a whimpering infant who wants his parents, too, needs to be comforted, soothed, supported, and stroked until he sleeps. His secret is that he wishes it would all go away. You in particular; you are only a horrible responsibility made of flesh. Be gone, too, the world and everything big or little inside it, be forever gone, because it is terribly hard to be him, and no one has any idea how hard it is just to stay alive, to breathe freely, to walk along the road without collapsing in fear and fatigue. To just hide and sleep under a blanket where no one can find him, particularly not you, the creature he created, who now expects his holy everlasting love and will not be gone or ever, ever leave him the hell alone.
    I vouchsafe that you will not encounter these problems with me.
    You’ll note that when a man is rendered to an underground compartment, such as the case with myself, he becomes, among other things, immune to category, beyond a single family, a supervisor of the world he left behind. Such a one is the ideal father. He is a man without weather, upon whom weather cannot act. Do not underestimate this. Not rained upon. Not gusted over, or snowed on, or blown over, or burned by the sun, hidden in fog, lost at sea, killed at work, crushed in a crowd, broken in a fall off a bridge, wounded by the words of his wife, smashed with a hammer, washed away in a flood, or ever struck by sticks flying loose in a storm. Everything that has ever happened above ground has been hellaciously awful. There has been no event under the sun that has not killed people. And none of it can touch him. He is outside of circumstance. He wears a shell of earth on him. He is pure mind. Father mind.
    Throughout history, all important Command Centers— where key strategies have been decided and the Lost People of this world have been instructed through the haze—all of these Command Centers have existed underground, below the flow of the projectiles that reduce every other creature under the light into such shivering wrecks in need of protection. If your local father is not at the Command Center,
for I do not see anyone else here with me
—if he is sleeping, or tending the yard, or laughing and splashing in a pool—then I ask you how he can be an effective ruler. Is it not true that he has vacated his throne, and is now simply a boy who would cry like a child as soon as he saw me walking toward him? The minute I approached to take charge of the situation, your so-called father would collapse and fold into my arms with tears of