（外文电子版资料）Avram Davidson - The Woman who Thought she Could Read.pdfVIP

THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT SHE COULD READ Avram Davidson [07 feb 2002—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz] Avram Davidsons ironic fantasies are treasures. He is a modern master, author of such novels as The Phoenix and the Mirror and the classic chronicles of Dr. Ezsterhazy. His stories have been praised by such luminaries as fantasy authors Peter S. Beagle and Damon Knight for being perhaps the best of all contemporary fantasies. He characteristically juxtaposes the supernatural or the magical with the naturalistic and gritty reality of contemporary life. This is a story about losing magic but it is still, somehow, an affirmation of wonder. One wants magic to redeem us. But the world stacks the deck against us and the magic is sometimes inadequate to the task in the face of common ignorance. This story offers an interesting contrast to Anne McCaffreys A Proper Santa Claus (pp. 183-91). About a hundred years ago a man named Vanderhorn built the little house. He built it one and a half stories high, with attached and detached sheds snuggling around it as usual; and he covered it with clapboards cut at his own mill—he had a small sawmill down at the creek, Mr. Vanderhorn did. After that he lived in the little house with his daughter and her husband (being a widower man) and one day he died there. So the daughter and son-in-law, a Mr. Hooten or Wooten or whatever it was, they came into his money which he made out of musket stocks for the Civil War, and they built a big new house next to the old one, only further back from the street. This Mr. Wooten or Hooten or something like that, he didnt have any sons, either; and his son-in-law turned the sawmill into a buggy factory. Well, you know what happened to that business! Finally, a man named Carmichael, who made milk wagons and baggage carts and piewagons, he bought the whole Vanderhorn estate. He fixed up the big house and put in apartments, and finally he sold it to my fat