（外文电子版资料）Robert Charles Wilson - The Blue Gularis.pdf

Wilson, Robert Charles - The Blue Gularis [FSF 1985-07].htm Robert Wilson was born in 1953 in California, now lives in Toronto, from which he sends this perfectly chilling story about little Sarah, who undertakes piano lessons and instead receives instruction in something quite strange... The Blue Gularis BY ROBERT CHARLES WILSON T here was nothing for it, little Sarah must have Lessons; and so the small, dark shrunken man was introduced into the household like a Lobe-Fin amongst a school of Gourami. It wasnt Sarahs idea. Sarah, in fact, was dead set against it. The Lessons — piano lessons — were her mothers notion. Mrs Chesley had married into her husbands shiftless family, subsisted as they did on the remains of the family fortune, but she was determined that her daughter would not be raised an idler. And so Sarah, who would have been perfectly happy attending school during the day and tending her tropical fish in the evenings, was persuaded into an uncomfortable dress (yellow, a color she hated) and presented to Mr. Bodega on a Saturday morning. Sarah Chesley, he said. How do you do. Sarah looked at him with dismay. She had imagined a piano teacher to be a formidable and horrible thing, but Mr. Bodega was even more formidable and horrible. He was so small and old as to seem deflated, a pinkish brown skin from which the contents had been partially drained. His eyes were an unsettingly bright, focused blue; and his teeth, which he displayed prominently, were uneven and matched her dress. Sarahs mother, a buxom woman capable of lifting the dining room table unaided, pushed Sarah forward. Shake hands, dear. She extended her small white hand tenuously. Mr. Bodega put down his valise — an enormous mud-brown case peeling at the corners, which seemed from the way he carried it to contain something heavy but fragile — and reached out (too eagerly, Sar- The Blue Gularis 39 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Robert%20Charles%20Wilson%20-%20The%20Blu