Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  On the 10th of July, after the arrival of the papal legates, who bore themselves as judges, Cyril held a second session, and then five more sessions (making seven in all), now in the house of Memnon, now in St. Mary’s church, issuing a number of circular letters and six canons against the Nestorians and Pelagians. Both parties applied to the weak emperor, who, without understanding the question, had hitherto leaned to the side of Nestorius, but by public demonstrations and solemn processions of the people and monks of Constantinople under the direction of the aged and venerated Dalmatius, was awed into the worship of the mother of God. He finally resolved to confirm both the deposition of Nestorius and that of Cyril and Memnon, and sent one of the highest civil officers, John, to Ephesus, to publish this sentence, and if possible to reconcile the contending parties. The deposed bishops were arrested. The council, that is the majority, applied again to the emperor and his colleague, deplored their lamentable condition, and desired the release of Cyril and Memnon, who had never been deposed by them, but on the contrary had always been held in high esteem as leaders of the orthodox doctrine. The Antiochians likewise took all pains to gain the emperor to their side, and transmitted to him a creed which sharply distinguished, indeed, the two natures in Christ, yet, for the sake of the unconfused union of the two (ajsuvgcuto" e{vwsi"), conceded to Mary the disputed predicate theotokos. The emperor now summoned eight spokesmen from each of the two parties to himself to Chalcedon. Among them were, on the one side, the papal deputies, on the other John of Antioch and Theodoret of Cyros, while Cyril and Memnon were obliged to remain at Ephesus in prison, and Nestorius at his own wish was assigned to his former cloister at Antioch, and on the 25th of October, 431, Maximian was nominated as his successor in Constantinople. After fruitless deliberations, the council of Ephesus was dissolved in October, 431, Cyril and Memnon set free, and the bishops of both parties commanded to go home.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The physical life of Jesus was not extinct, but only exhausted, and was restored by the tender care of his friends and disciples, or (as some absurdly add) by his own medical skill; and after a brief period he quietly died a natural death.219 Josephus, Valerius Maximus, psychological and medical authorities have been searched and appealed to for examples of such apparent resurrections from a trance or asphyxy, especially on the third day, which is supposed to be a critical turning-point for life or putrefaction. But besides insuperable physical difficulties—as the wounds and loss of blood from the very heart pierced by the spear of the Roman soldier—this theory utterly fails to account for the moral effect. A brief sickly existence of Jesus in need of medical care, and terminating in his natural death and final burial, without even the glory of martyrdom which attended the crucifixion, far from restoring the faith of the apostles, would have only in the end deepened their gloom and driven them to utter despair.220 4. The Vision-Theory. Christ rose merely in the imagination of his friends, who mistook a subjective vision or dream for actual reality, and were thereby encouraged to proclaim their faith in the resurrection at the risk of death. Their wish was father to the belief, their belief was father to the fact, and the belief, once started, spread with the power of a religious epidemic from person to person and from place to place. The Christian society wrought the miracle by its intense love for Christ. Accordingly the resurrection does not belong to the history of Christ at all, but to the inner life of his disciples. It is merely the embodiment of their reviving faith. This hypothesis was invented by a heathen adversary in the second century and soon buried out of sight, but rose to new life in the nineteenth, and spread with epidemical rapidity among skeptical critics in Germany, France, Holland and England.221 The advocates of this hypothesis appeal first and chiefly to the vision of St. Paul on the way to Damascus, which occurred several years later, and is nevertheless put on a level with the former appearances to the older apostles (1 Cor. 15:8); next to supposed analogies in the history of religious enthusiasm and mysticism, such as the individual visions of St. Francis of Assisi, the Maid of Orleans, St. Theresa (who believed that she had seen Jesus in person with the eyes of the soul more distinctly than she could have seen him with the eyes of the body), Swedenborg, even Mohammed, and the collective visions of the Montanists in Asia Minor, the Camisards in France, the spectral resurrections of the martyred Thomas à Becket of Canterbury and Savonarola of Florence in the excited imagination of their admirers, and the apparitions of the Immaculate Virgin at Lourdes.222 Nobody will deny that subjective fancies and impressions are often mistaken for objective realities. But, with the exception of the case of St.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Meanwhile the terrible globe has worked its way deep into my bowels and is cramping them, burning them, tearing them; I scream again and again: no words exist which can describe what I am undergoing; all the same and all the while, my murderer frolics joyfully, his mouth glued to mine, he seems to inhale my pain in order that it may magnify his pleasures: his intoxication is not to be rendered; but, as in his friend's instance, he feels his forces about to desert him, and like Saint-Florent wants to taste everything before they are gone entirely. I am turned over again, am made to eject the ardent sphere, and it is set to producing in the vagina itself, the same conflagration it ignited in the place whence it has just been flushed; the ball enters, sears, scorches the matrix to its depths; I am not spared, they fasten me belly-down upon the perfidious cross, and far more delicate parts of me are exposed to molestation by the thorny excrescences awaiting them. Cardoville penetrates into the forbidden passage; he perforates it while another enjoys him in similar wise: and at last delirium holds my persecutor in its grasp, his appalling shrieks announce the crime's completion; I am inundated, then untied. "Off you go, dear friends," Cardoville says to the pair of young men, "get your hands on this whore and amuse yourselves in whatever way your whims advise: she's yours, we're done with her." The two youthful libertines seize me. While one entertains himself with the front, the other buries himself in the rear; they change places and change again; I am more gravely torn by their prodigious thickness than I have been by Saint-Florent's artificial barricadings; both he and Cardoville toy with the young men while they occupy themselves with me. SaintFlorent sodomizes La Rose who deals in like manner with me, and Cardoville does as much to Julien who employs a more decent place to excite himself in me. I am the focal point of these execrable orgies, their absolute center and mainspring; La Rose and Julien have each four times done reverence at my altars, whilst Cardoville and Saint-Florent, less vigorous or more enervated, are content with one sacrifice offered to each of my lovers. And then the last measure of seed is sown by La Rose Ä 'twas high time, for I was ready to swoon.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  8 By 3500, Sumer numbered a hitherto unachievable half-million souls. Strong leadership would have been essential, but what actually transformed these simple farmers into city dwellers is a topic of endless debate. Probably a number of interlocking and mutually reinforcing factors were involved: population growth, unprecedented agricultural fecundity, and the intensive labor required by irrigation—not to mention sheer human ambition—all contributed to a new kind of society. 9 All that we know for certain is that by 3000 BCE there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. Theirs was subsistence-level living. Each village had to bring its entire crop to the city it served; officials allocated a portion to feed the local peasants, and the rest was stored for the aristocracy in the city temples. In this way, a few great families with the help of a class of retainers—bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and household servants—appropriated between half and two-thirds of the revenue. 10 They used this surplus to live a different sort of life altogether, freed for various pursuits that depend on leisure and wealth. In return, they maintained the irrigation system and preserved a degree of law and order. All premodern states feared anarchy: a single crop failure caused by drought or social unrest could lead to thousands of deaths, so the elite could tell themselves that this system benefited the population as a whole. But robbed of the fruits of their labors, the peasants were little better than slaves: plowing, harvesting, digging irrigation canals, being forced into degradation and penury, their hard labor in the fields draining their lifeblood. If they failed to satisfy their overseers, their oxen were kneecapped and their olive trees chopped down. 11 They left fragmentary records of their distress. “The poor man is better dead than alive,” one peasant lamented. “I am a thoroughbred steed,” complained another, “but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry weeds and stubble.” 12 Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization. 13 Its rigid hierarchy was symbolized by the ziggurats, the giant stepped temple- towers that were the hallmark of Mesopotamian civilization: Sumerian society too was stacked in narrowing layers culminating in an exalted aristocratic pinnacle, each individual locked inexorably into place. 14 Yet, historians argue, without this cruel arrangement that did violence to the vast majority of the population, humans would not have developed the arts and sciences that made progress possible.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Her talk ground Hector down worse. He sighed a lot, sour air whooshing out of him. I practically scanned his neck for the nozzle that had come unplugged, for with every sigh his whole body sagged a level flatter. So I sank deeper into him, the softness of him. Had this progression gone on forever, he might well have melted to nothing but a puddle under me. I stared at his ear, long and leathery with a few stiff white whiskers tufting out of it. Hector stopped not caring whether Mother shot him or not and started to lobby actively for it. Like getting shot was some kind of solution. Big alligator tears rivered down the folds in his face. She’s right , he said. His voice had a crimp in it. I ain’t never been worth a damn. I turned from where I lay on him to Lecia, who’d dropped her lawyer pose entirely. She was off on another tack. The look in her brown eyes under the shiny blond shelf of bangs was no longer set. It was weary. And the accent she used next was pure Texan, straight from what you might call The Ringworm Belt. He’s not worth the bullet it’d take to kill him , she said. She wasn’t talking to Mother like some Yankee newscaster anymore. She was buddying up, appealing to Mother’s fury, which she’d apparently adjudged immovable. Jesus, lookit him , Lecia said. She rolled her eyes. She might have been Mother’s cocktail waitress, off-handedly doling out comfort while picking through change on her drink tray. If Hector was on fire , Lecia said, nobody’d so much as piss on him to put him out. Mother said that was dead straight, and under me Hector seconded the idea. Then Lecia grabbed my foot and tugged. She wanted to lay across Hector too, she said. That seemed a sisterly gesture, helping out with a chore, as if she knew how gross it felt breathing in his whooshed-out scotchy fumes. She heaved herself up beside me as onto some squishy raft bobbing under us in the Gulf. I saw she’d transformed again. The tired frown she’d carved with her mouth was unbent. Her forehead had given up its furrow. Her round face was the only accurate barometer for the subtle atmospheric shifts in the room. And that face had gone blank and white as dough. Lecia had slap given up. I glanced back at Mother, who was sighting the short length of that nickel barrel as if to draw a very fine bead around us at Hector. Somehow I’d buried any real fear till then. The whole scene had struck me as goofy. Sure I was anxious, but a low thrum of worry ran through me more or less constantly like current. Anxiety made me a nail-biter, a restaurant fidgeter, the kind of kid liable, in a given day, to spill at least one glass of liquid.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] But while I was writing, Brandon taught himself about building codes and wood-fired ovens, restaurant licensing and leases, how to mix concrete and tile a wall. When I finally came to, when my book was at the printer, I saw that the lease was signed and our basement was impassable for all the scavenged pots and table bases, chairs, and professional kitchen equipment. I understood that I had been terribly wrong. He was going to open a restaurant. In the linoleum-floored kitchen of our duplex apartment, I sobbed and pleaded. I didn’t want a restaurant. I knew what that life looked like—debt, tight margins, long and irregular hours—and I didn’t want it. The friend with the successful Italian restaurant had recently filed for divorce. Our relationship stood on a foundation of long dinners and meandering conversations while cooking; now, when I finished my work each day, Brandon would be at the restaurant, beginning his. He would be a chef, working noon to midnight, seven days a week. Opening a restaurant is not a job for newlyweds. I didn’t want any of it. Brandon stared at me blank-faced. His mouth curled, a rictus of disbelief. The lease is already signed, he cried. I’ve been working on this for months! His voice had gone high and raspy. I did this for us, he said. I thought you would be happy. Now we can both do what we love to do. That’s what I meant this to be. The restaurant will bring together everything we love. But I don’t want it, I said, my pitch rising to match his. It can’t be that easy! That’s not what this industry is. I tried to slow down, catch my breath. I just never thought you’d get this far, I said. I thought you’d move on. I thought you’d give up. This would humiliate him, though that wasn’t what I wanted. I hadn’t believed in him, and now we both knew it. But I knew whose fault it was. I’d made the huge mistake. I’d been eyeballs-deep in my own work, distracted as I encouraged him in his. I hadn’t been clear about what I wanted, or didn’t want, because I didn’t think I had to be; the restaurant was never, not actually, going to open. Now it was. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] A friend of mine used to have a phrase taped to the wall of her office: Accept it as if you’d chosen it. The first time I read it, it seemed sad. I read it like an admission of defeat, the image of the toddler in the grocery store who, having wailed herself dry on the floor of the cereal aisle, stands and follows her mother in silence to the checkout line. When we opened Delancey, I saw that I’d missed the point. Accepting it, this thing I had not chosen—this was not defeat but evolution. This was what I’d heard called “resilience.” This was sanity.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  The sight, however, moved him, as he afterwards told me, irresistibly, and by way of giving me some reason to be less powerfully afflicted, he drew out his purse, and calling for pen and ink, which the landlady was prepared for, paid her every farthing of her demand, independent of a liberal gratification which was to follow unknown to me, and taking a receipt in full, very tenderly forced me to secure it, by guiding my hand, which he had thrust it into, so as to make me passively put it into my pocket. Still I continued in a state of stupidity, or melancholic despair, as my spirits could not yet recover from the violent shocks that they had received; and the accommodating landlady had actually left the room, and me alone with this strange gentleman, before I had observed it, and then I observed it without alarm, for I was now lifeless, and indifferent to every thing. The gentleman, however, no novice in affairs of this sort, drew near me; and, under the pretence of comforting me, first with his handkerchief dried my tears as they ran down my cheeks: presently he ventured to kiss me on my part, neither resistance nor compliance. I sat stock still; and now looking on myself as bought by the payment that had been transacted before me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I shuddered, but what my glances fell upon soon astonished me more: Omphale had either not known everything, or had not told all she knew; I spied four naked girls in the basement, and they certainly did not belong to our group; and so there were other victims of these monsters' lechery in this horrible asylum... other wretches unknown to us.... I fled away and continued my circuit until I was on the side opposite the basement window; not yet having found a breach, I resolved to make one; all unobserved, I had furnished myself with a long knife; I set to work; despite my gloves, my hands were soon scratched and torn; but nothing daunted me; the hedge was two feet thick, I opened a passage, went through, and entered the second ring; there, I was surprised to find nothing but soft earth underfoot; with each step I sank in ankle-deep: the further I advanced into these copses, the more profound the darkness became. Curious to know whence came the change of terrain, I felt about with my hands... O Just Heaven! my fingers seized the head of a cadaver! Great God! I thought, whelmed with horror, this must then be the cemetery, as indeed I was told, into which those murderers fling their victims; they have scarcely gone to the bother of covering them with earth!... this skull perhaps belongs to my dear Omphale, perhaps it is that of the unhappy Octavie, so lovely, so sweet, so good, and who while she lived was like unto the rose of which her charms were the image. And I, alas! might that this have been my resting place! Wouldst that I had submitted to my fate! What had I to gain by going on in pursuit of new pitfalls? Had I not committed evil enough? Had I not been the occasion of a number of crimes sufficiently vast? Ah! fulfill my destiny! O Earth, gape wide and swallow me up I Ah, 'tis madness, when one is so forsaken, so poor, so utterly abandoned, madness to go to such pains in order to vegetate yet a few more instants amongst monsters!... But no! I must avenge Virtue in irons.... She expects it of my courage.... Let her not be struck down... let us advance: it is essential that the universe be ridded of villains as dangerous as these.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "What is the trouble, Therese?" he demanded, urging me on toward his fortress; "you are not out of France; we are on the Dauphine border and within the bishopric of Grenoble." "Very well, Monsieur," I answered; "but why did it ever occur to you to take up your abode in a place befitting brigands and robbers ?" "Because they who inhabit it are not very honest people," said Roland; "it might be altogether possible you will not be edified by their conduct." "Ah, Monsieur I" said I with a shudder, "you make me tremble; where then are you leading me ?" "I am leading you into the service of the counterfeiters of whom I am the chief," said Roland, grasping my arm and driving me over a little drawbridge that was lowered at our immediately we had traversed it; "do you see that well?" he continued when we had entered; he was pointing to a large and deep grotto situated toward the back of the courtyard, where four women, nude and manacled, were turning a wheel; "there are your companions and there your task, which involves the rotation of that wheel for ten hours each day, and which also involves the satisfaction of all the caprices I am pleased to submit you and the other ladies to; for which you will be granted six ounces of black bread and a plate of kidney beans without fail each day; as for your freedom, forget it; you will never recover it. When you are dead from overwork, you will be flung into that hole you notice beside the well, where the remains of between sixty and eighty other rascals of your breed await yours, and your place will be taken by somebody else." "Oh, Great God!" I exclaimed, casting myself at Roland's feet, "deign to remember, Monsieur, that I saved you gratitude for an instant, you seemed to offer me happiness and that it is by precipitating me into an eternal abyss of evils you reward my services. Is what you are doing just? and has not remorse already begun to avenge me in the depths of your heart?" "What, pray tell, do you mean by this feeling of gratitude with which you fancy you have captivated me?" Roland inquired. "Be more reasonable, wretched creature; what were you doing when you came to my rescue? Between the two possibilities, of continuing on your way and of coming up to me, did you not choose the latter as an impulse dictated by your heart? You therefore gave yourself up to a pleasure? How in the devil's name can you maintain I am obliged to recompense you for the joys in which you indulge yourself?

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Indi pretending that she didn’t want just that, that it was irrelevant to her that someone would approach her on their hands and knees, would beg without shame to touch the quivering hillsides of her body. Beth rolled toward her as best she could, clutching tighter at her thigh. “ Please .” She knew how disgusting she sounded, but she couldn’t stop. It poured out of her in a dirty flood of begging even as Indi pushed her hand away, even as the other woman wordlessly held out another glass of sepia-colored diluted penicillin until Beth took it, slumping back onto the table. “Drink this, then try to sleep.” The door swung open, then shut hard enough to shake the framed diplomas on the wall. Beth stared up at the water spot, the glass forgotten in her hands. She began to cry again in thick, snotty gasps that quickly sealed her nose and reduced each breath to a whining gurgle. Fuck me, so I can pretend I’m a girl. Later, while Beth slept in her room upstairs, they sat together by candlelight at the hastily cleared kitchen table, eating cold pork and onions wrapped in thick brown flatbread. Fran had never tasted anything better in her life. Indi only picked at hers; she couldn’t stand to be seen eating. Robbie, by contrast, wolfed his down without pausing for air. He was a loud chewer, which Fran decided to find endearing, but he still wouldn’t say more than a few words at a time. “They’re all over town,” said Indi as Robbie mopped tzatziki from his plate with the last of his bread. “They got here the day before yesterday. They’re in Boston, too, and Manchester. Nashua. Nobody’s heard anything from Nashua on the ham since Wednesday.” Fran sighed, looking out the dining room window at the overgrown hedge and the street beyond it. Farm workers were trickling back into town as the last of the daylight faded. A pair of weathered middle-aged women in faded Levis, sun shirts, and work boots, one with a little girl clinging to her from behind, rode past on horseback, laughing about something as they went. Bees wandered through the lilac bushes in Indi’s front yard. It all looked like it always did. “We ran into them out by the coast, just across the Mass border. Beth took a shot at Teach, the one who’s supposed to be their den mother or whatever.” She felt a phantom twinge of her desire for that woman, for the cold, bitter mommy-ness of her, and tongued absently at the socket of her missing tooth. “We barely got out alive.” Indi looked troubled.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 14 Seventeen years later, Daddy had a stroke while sitting on a stool bellied up to the American Legion bar. It was ten on a summer morning. He’d been pounding shooters of whiskey he washed back with glasses of tap beer, which trick he’d performed daily for the seven years since he’d retired from Gulf Oil at the age of sixty-three. I say retired. Technically, he had a part-time job running errands for Lecia’s husband, David. The Rice Baron, I called him, for he owned working rice farms that nudged his income up towards the fifty percent tax bracket. David bought Daddy a little white pickup for mail-runs or for getting tacos come lunchtime, whatever needed doing. When Daddy, who supplemented his Legion alcohol-intake by sucking from a whiskey bottle he kept ratholed under his truck seat, got too weaving drunk to operate the pickup at all, somebody rang my brother-in-law, who dispatched one of the field hands to ferry Daddy around on some fabricated job till his head cleared and his hands started back trembling, a sign that his blood-alcohol level was edging down toward normal. Then he got re-deposited at the white truck. During all this, Mother was usually laid up in bed wearing something filmy. She’d quit teaching art in public school, allegedly to spend more time with her rickety and rheumy-eyed husband. Instead, depression had walloped her. She stayed in that giant bed she’d built decades before, with a bearing I still think of as imperial. She’d stopped drinking under threat from Lecia and me, but stayed drugged to the gills on Valium and related pharmaceuticals and whatever book she’d drawn from the literal tower of them stacked on the floor by her nighttable. Her reading tended toward religion and philosophy, the books ranging from the profound—Sartre was still a favorite; so was Gandhi—to the crackpot. She’d studied hatha yoga and macrobiotics, macramé and est. Her basic trouble at the time of Daddy’s stroke was that she saw no good reason to get up and put on clothes. Back then, I talked to her long distance from Boston most every night. After prime time, she lay in a torment that barbiturates only blurred the edges of: Football, fishing, and fucking —she’d say— that’s all anybody down here thinks about. I swear to God I’m going to blow my brains out. My live-in boyfriend at the time—a recent Harvard grad from an old Long Island family—praised my patience with Mother. He took the long hours I spent on the phone with her for kindness. His family estate had a name, an aged and doddering staff, and a formal library where silver polo trophies shone between rows of leather-bound editions. He spoke to his mother on holidays, from one end of a long glossy dinner table (a formality I envied and, when we later married, failed to master).

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  He was leaving; an unconquerable impulse drew me to his knees yet another time. "Tiger!" I exclaimed through my tears, "open your granite heart, let my appalling misadventures melt it, and do not, in order to conclude them, do not impose conditions more dreadful to me than death itself...." The violence of my movements had disturbed what veiled my breast, it was naked, my disheveled hair fell in cascades upon it, it was wetted thoroughly by my tears; I quicken desires in the dishonest man... desires he wants to satisfy on the spot; he dares discover to me to what point my state arouses them; he dares dream of pleasures lying in the middle of the chains binding me and beneath the sword which is poised to smite me... I was upon my knees... he flings me backward, leaps upon me, there we lie upon the wretched straw I use for a bed; I wish to cry out, he stuffs his handkerchief into my mouth; he ties my arms; master of me, the infamous creature examines me everywhere... everything becomes prey to his gaze, his fingerings, his perfidious caresses; at last, he appeases his desires. "Listen to me," says he, untying me and readjusting his costume, "you do not want me to be helpful, all very well; I am leaving you; I'll neither aid nor harm you, but if it enters your head to breathe a word of what has just happened, I will, by charging you with yet more enormous crimes, instantly deprive you of all means of defending yourself; reflect carefully before jabbering... I am taken for your confessor... now hark: we are permitted to reveal anything and all when 'tis a question of a criminal; fully approve what I am going to say to your warden, or else I'll crush you like a fly." He knocks, the jailer appears. "Monsieur," says the traitor, "the nice young lady is in error; she wished to speak to a Father Antonin who is now in Bordeaux; I have no acquaintance of her, never have I even set eyes upon her: she besought me to hear her confession, I did so, I salute you and her and shall always be ready to present myself when my ministry is esteemed important."

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The issue of women’s entrance into the professions is a spectacular case of the contradictions in the chivalrous mentality with which the sexual revolution had to contend. Women have always worked. They have generally worked longer hours for smaller rewards and at less agreeable tasks than have men. The issue of employment during the period of the first phase was simply their demand that they be paid for their efforts, have an opportunity to enter the most prestigious fields of work, and when paid be allowed to retain and control their earnings. Even before the industrial revolution brought them to the factory, women had always done menial labor, most of it physically exhausting and tedious, much of it agricultural. Yet chivalry’s accessory police ethic, “decorum” found it outrageous for a “lady” to use her mind rather than her hands and back. Such powerful feeling against such infraction of taboo affords a glimpse of how economically and politically useful taboo can be. In embarking upon the intellectually and socially responsible employment which the professions constituted, pioneers in each field met with ruthless and nearly overwhelming opposition in law, medicine, science, scholarship, and architecture. If among the middle classes the obsessive fetish of decorum could be damaging to women’s own interests, among the working class the passivity it implied took another form-despair. When the settlement houses began to reach the poor, they found, much as they would find today, that the women were at the bottom of the heap among slum dwellers; no one was paid less or needed unions more desperately than the women, more often unskilled and held back by the more severely inhibiting traditions of European patriarchy. Inured to servitude, they were listless and afraid to pursue their own interests, no matter how great their suffering. One of the pioneers in labor organization reported the situation in these depressing terms: …the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no ray of hope. Such people cannot be said to live, as living means the enjoyment of nature’s gifts, but they simply vegetate like partially petrified creatures…many women are deterred from joining labor organizations by foolish pride, prudish modesty, and religious scruples; and a prevailing cause, which applies to all who are in the flush of womanhood, is the hope and expectancy that in the near future marriage will lift them out of the industrial life to the quiet and comfort of a home, foolishly imagining that with marriage their connection with and interest in labor matters end; often finding, however, that their struggle has only begun when they have to go back to the shop for two instead of one. All this is the result or effect of the environments and conditions surrounding women in the past and present, and can be removed only by constant agitation and education.32

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "It was late at night, and I walked on without exactly knowing where my steps were taking me to. I had not to cross the water on my way home, what then made me do so? Anyhow, all at once I found myself standing in the very middle of the bridge, staring vacantly at the open space in front of me. "The river, like a silvery thoroughfare, parted the town in two. On either side huge shadowy houses rose out of the mist; blurred domes, dim towers, vaporous and gigantic spires soared, quivering, up to the clouds, and faded away in the fog. "Underneath I could perceive the sheen of the cold, bleak, and bickering river, flowing faster and faster, as if fretful at not being able to outdo itself in its own speed, chafing against the arches that stopped it, curling in tiny breakers, and whirling away in angry eddies, whilst the dark pillars shed patches of ink-black shade on the glittering and shivering stream. "As I looked upon these dancing, restless shadows, I saw a myriad of fiery, snake-like elves gliding to and fro through them, winking and beckoning to me as they twirled and they rolled, luring me down to rest in those Lethèan waters. "They were right. Rest must be found below those dark arches, on the soft, slushy sand of that swirling river. "How deep and fathomless those waters seemed! Veiled as they were by the mist, they had all the attraction of the abyss. Why should I not seek there that balm of forgetfulness which alone could ease my aching head, could calm my burning breast? "Why? "Was it because the Almighty had fixed His canon against self-slaughter? "How, when, and where? "With His fiery finger, when He made that coup de théâtre on Mount Sinai? "If so, why was He tempting me beyond my strength? "Would any father induce a beloved child to disobey him, simply to have the pleasure of chastising him afterwards? Would any man deflower his own daughter, not out of lust, but only to taunt her with her incontinence? Surely, if such a man ever lived, he was after Jehovah's own image. "No, life is only worth living as long as it is pleasant. To me, just then, it was a burden. The passion I had tried to stifle, and which was merely smouldering, had burst out with renewed strength, entirely mastering me. That crime could therefore only be overcome by another. In my case suicide was not only allowable, but laudable—nay, heroic. "What did the Gospel say? 'If thine eye …' and so forth. "All these thoughts whirled through my mind like little fiery snakes. Before me in the mist, Teleny—like a vaporous angel of light—seemed to be quietly gazing at me with his deep, sad, and thoughtful eyes; below, the rushing waters had for me a syren's sweet, enticing voice.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "My comrade has certainly hurt you, Therese," says Julien, "and I am going to repair all the damage." He picks up a flask of spirits and several times rubs all my wounds. The traces of my executioners' atrocities vanish, but nothing assuages my pain, and never had I experienced any as sharp. "What with our skill at making the evidence of our cruelties disappear, the ladies who would like to lodge complaints against us must have the devil's own time getting themselves believed, eh, Therese?" says Cardoville. "What proofs do you fancy could be presented to support an accusation ?" "Oh," Saint-Florent interrupts, "the charming Therese is in no condition to level charges; on the eve of being immolated herself, we ought to expect nothing but prayers from her." "Well, she'd be ill-advised to undertake the one or the other," Cardoville replies; "she might inculpate us; but would she be heard? I doubt it; our consequence and eminent stations in this city would scarcely allow anyone to notice suits which, anyhow, always come before us and whereof we are at all times the masters. Her final torture would simply be made crueler and more prolonged. Therese must surely sense we have amused ourselves with her person for the natural, common, and uncomplex reason which engages might to abuse feebleness; she must surely sense she can-not escape her sentence, that it must be undergone, that she will undergo it, that it would be in vain she might divulge this evening's absence from jail; she'd not be believed; the jailer Ä for he's ours Ä would deny it at once. And so may this lovely and gentle girl, so penetrated with the grandeur of Providence, peacefully offer up to Heaven all she has just suffered and all that yet awaits her; these will be as so many expiations for the frightful crimes which deliver her into the hands of the law; put on your clothes, Therese, day is not yet come, the two men who brought you hither are going to conduct you back to your prison." I wanted to say a word, I wanted to cast myself a suppliant at these ogres' feet, either to unbend their hearts, or ask that their hands smite away my life. But I am dragged off, pitched into a cab, and my two guides climb in after me; we had hardly started off when infamous desires inflamed them again. "Hold her for me," quoth Julien to La Rose, "I simply must sodomize her; I have never laid eyes on a behind which could squeeze me so voluptuously; I'll render you the same service."

• From Manhunt (2022)

  It would be perfect. A chance for all of them to start over without the threat that at any moment they might be dragged out of their beds and shot against some lonely wall. Except Indi couldn’t do it. Her knees, her back. She’d fall apart before we left New Hampshire. Get us caught. Get us eaten. And without Indi to extract and refine E for them, they were just another pair of manhunters. No one wanted to buy bags full of ballsacks from unshowered transsexuals, but tidy glass vials of estrogen from stern, no-nonsense—and, most importantly, cis—Dr. Indiresh Varma in her office on Main Street were another story. Maybe we could make it north, head through Vermont for Canada. We could get a car running good enough before fall. Lost in thought, she almost walked into Beth when the taller woman stopped dead in her tracks. In the gathering dusk a herd of goats was crossing the highway a few dozen yards on. They poured through a gap in the guardrail where a car must have run off the road, though there was no sign of one in the long, waving grass that covered the shallow slope of the hill running down from the highway to its southbound stretch. They moved in silence aside from the clop of their cloven hooves against the pavement, their kids trotting faster to keep up. “Their ears look so soft,” Beth murmured. There were tears in the big girl’s eyes. Fran glanced at the tree line on the far side of the southbound, watching for any sign of movement there. A herd this big, thirty or forty animals, it was a miracle they weren’t trailing a whole swarm of men. Maybe they were lucky, or all the loud goats were dead and these were the quiet, unassuming wallflowers. Fran wondered what they did all day. The goats went over the far guardrail in neat little hops, hooves together and necks arched, and streamed uphill toward the sumac and leaning beech trees on the ridge. One, a shaggy white nanny with a dangling udder, paused to look back at the lonely stretch of road. Her square pupils looked alien to Fran, like little copies of Kubrick’s monolith suspended in the amber jelly of her irises. She imagined throwing her arms around the nanny’s neck and burying her face in her soft coat, inhaling the warm, musky smell of her, and knowing those strange eyes were watching over everything. I want to feel safe again, she thought as the herd melted into the trees and the shadows under their branches. The nanny trailed after them, last in line. Just for a little while.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The wind sighed, the custodian’s house creaking as it settled, and Indi looked out into the scudding dark and thought of screwflies laying eggs in living flesh, of maggots feasting on blood and tissue. We looked at ourselves, and that’s what we saw. Just a wriggling mass of parasites chewing at whatever they could get into their mouths. She imagined someone cracking an ampule next to a circulation vent, or maybe leaving an aerosol mister in a restroom at a fast food joint or in a subway car. Who hasn’t thought that we should be exterminated? Who hasn’t imagined doing it? I guess someone finally did. Once upon a time there had been a billion-dollar industry dedicated to teaching women how to make men chase them. Cosmo quizzes. Pinterest fashion blogs. Makeup tutorials sprawling across YouTube’s algorithmically sorted wasteland like popup housing developments. Perfumes scented with the barest traces of rot and rut and stinking civet. Now all you had to do was blast Meek Mill out a speaker in the bed of your truck and you could pull a few hundred in a matter of minutes. Chum the highway with rotten meat scooped from a bucket and flung out over the tailgate and you’d start drawing stragglers who caught the scent, and as they got closer they’d hear the music or the sound of the engine. Some of them would start screaming. In an afternoon you could pull a thousand of them out of their burrows and dens. A bellowing horde of Pepé Le Pews chasing the scent trail of a Drake verse and some rancid pigs’ blood. Alyssa loved kiting detail. She’d been on one of the cross-country crews that pulled the horde down on Detroit in ’20, back when the Matriarchy was still getting its feet under it. Now, kneeling in the bed of a battered Ford pickup as Layla cruised down 93 doing a sedate ten miles an hour with occasional bursts of speed to keep them ahead of the tide of diseased flesh gathering in their wake, she felt that same thrill. Men drooled out of the woods singly and in twos and threes. Sometimes a whole pack emerged at once, snapping and screaming, to follow the trail of chum Alyssa scooped out of a Sheetrock bucket full of roadkill and rotting chicken shreds and dumped over the truck’s tailgate every half mile or so. She liked to look back at the surging wall of men behind them and see the frustrated rage in their eyes, almost the way Billy had looked at her when she said the wrong thing or dropped a glass or ate something he’d wanted for himself. There was something oddly comforting about it, something that gave her a case of the giggles just like she’d used to do when Billy got that look on his face.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I hadn’t thought , just hadn’t thought about any of that.” Mother says the word thought like she’s stomping out something, or as if the weight of it fell on her like a blow. Then Mother did what seemed at the time the Right Thing, though had she Thought, she may have Thought Twice about how Right the Right Thing would wind up being, for surely it drove her mad. She sat in that ladderback chair and tore up the papers giving her sole custody of the two minor children, Tex and Belinda. She tore them up under the smug smile and predatory eye of the monolithic Mother-in-Law. The constable showed visible relief. But the kids were still skittish, which was partly why Mother didn’t even hug them good-bye, for they would have winced in her arms. “I couldn’t have stood that,” she said. “What’d you do then?” I asked. “Then I flew back to New York and started looking for somebody to marry who’d help me get my kids back.” The room around us had vanished completely. We were held close in this timeless bubble of bad neon. “But after I got married, whoever it was”—she waved her hand at the various husbands—“would lose interest in getting me my kids. And I’d get sick of them and run off. Your daddy would have taken them, finally. Your daddy was the only one.…” In fact, after Mother and Daddy married, she wrote for the kids, but they were too big by then. “They didn’t want to come,” Mother said. The stepmother sent a letter to that effect. “Then it was like a big black hole just swallowed me up. Or like the hole was inside me, and had been swallowing me up all those years without my even noticing. I just collapsed into it. What’s the word the physicists use? Imploded. I imploded.” Those were my mother’s demons, then, two small children, whom she longed for and felt ashamed for having lost. And the night she’d stood in our bedroom door with a knife? She’d drunk herself to the bottom of that despair. “All the time I’d wasted, marrying fellows. And still I lost those kids. And you and Lecia couldn’t change that. And I’d wound up just as miserable as I started at fifteen.” Killing us had come to seem merciful. In fact, she’d hallucinated we’d been stabbed to death. “I saw blood all over you and everything else. Splashed across the walls.” As to why she hadn’t told us all this before—about the marriages and the lost children—her exact sentence stays lodged in my head, for it’s one of the more pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering: “I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore.” The next day Lecia hired a detective to find the lost kids, who were kids no longer, of course, being well into their forties by then. They were also damn eager to be found.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Did he give me back my baby girl from Satan’s arms?” And through her tears her eyes were sharp, her gaze as cold and patient as a snake’s. “Did he make you whole?” He leaned his head against her breast and let her stroke his sweaty hair, and he said “Yes, mama,” with as much peace as he could summon, but the prayer still echoed in his ears. Lord, make me a man. Indi lay awake, sheets kicked to the foot of her new bed, and thought of the thing in the pit that had once been a man named Mackenzie. That odious rich kid name. Whiteness. Old money. Spoiled and unloved packs of boys like that had roamed the streets of Bridgeport in her childhood. Probably they still did, only now with less discernment as to who they preyed on. If I don’t give her what she wants, will she let us live? And if I do, what would it mean to put the future of the world into those little ombré claws? She rolled onto her side and drew her legs up against the comforting weight of her belly, filtered air blowing over her bare skin and carrying her sweat away into a world of dark, clean vents scoured bare by endless wind. If, if, if. I’d need computers that are nothing but rust and rat nests. Software that doesn’t exist anymore. Isolating embryos, testing chromosomes. And the baby. Am I going to do that to a kid? She closed her eyes, the room swaying around her like the hold of some dark ship. Still drunk, she thought, picturing again the pit and the thing and its dripping tongue wrapped around Sophie Widdel’s pale, clear skin. Where the fuck did I bring us? “So, you were a manhunter?” The woman in charge of worker placement, what the bunkerites called “pitching in,” wasn’t much older than Fran. In her cat’s-eye glasses and Penn State sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up above her elbows, she looked like a tired postgrad catching up on work over the weekend. She smelled pleasantly—her odor filling the cramped closet of her office at the bunker’s midmost level—of sandalwood and something like vanilla. “Harvesting and selling,” said Fran. Slitting ballsacks open with a penknife while flies swarmed over her bloody hands. Arguing with armed premenopausal butch dykes outside Penacook over how much bear meat and block salt a Ziploc full of kidney lobes was worth. “My friend Beth did the actual hunting.” The other woman made a note on her clipboard. “And how well would you say you’re known in the greater Boston area? Up through coastal Massachusetts and New Hampshire?” “Known. Definitely known. We’ve been to Fort Fisher twice a year, three years running, and to Boston, Worcester, Manchester, Nashua—we trade in bulk to Lakeesha Wallis’s store.” Penn State scribbled for a minute, squinting as she hunched over her board, then capped her pen with a decisive click.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She heard herself scream. Crack. The man lying across her legs had fallen still. She crawled away from him, dragging her injured leg, elbows digging into the soft ground. She saw the mantis flying, translucent wings thrumming, and the gnats and butter hoppers rising from the undergrowth around her. A dead man lay not far off, a little dribble of blood, bone, and brain laid out beside his head. Two more were screaming from atop the carcass of the big one she’d shot. They’d already eaten most of his face. His thighs were pockmarked with bloody bites. Crack. One went stumbling back and hit the wall of the abandoned house, an eerily human expression of shock painted across his smeared and twisted features. Deep fissures in his lips wept some kind of lymphatic fluid, clear and thin. Crack. He fell with a thumbprint hole in his breast. The other broke and ran, bolting like a roach into the brush. Ferns and wild brambles swallowed him. There was a thump, a grunt, and then Fran was next to her, helping her sit up, asking if she was okay, but that was all a long, long way away. Beth leaned into Fran’s shoulder, inhaling the sweat and skin smell of the hollow of her neck, and closed her eyes. I hope I die, she thought as she slipped slowly into the black oil of unconsciousness. I hope I don’t have to wake up into this again. I hope I never have to see any of it. Please. Robbie skinned his elbows coming down the tree, though he wasn’t quite sure when or how. His flannel should have stopped it, but it was hot out and he’d rolled the sleeves up. The raw skin stung where his sweat touched it. He ran across the overgrown field, rifle slung across his back, briars tearing at his clothes. He crashed through reed-thin saplings and ferns that grew waist-high in the wet, enveloping heat. The air was thick with flies. He told himself again he hadn’t shot her, that he hadn’t misjudged it. They were on her. He burst out onto open lawn, grass swishing around his knees, and slowed, panting. The girl—she looked a little older than him, late twenties or early thirties, big and broad-shouldered with half an ear missing and scars crisscrossing her still oddly innocent and childish face—lay unconscious or dead in her friend’s arms. The men he’d shot were all around them. Jesus, he thought, anxiety digging its fingers into his stomach as he came close enough to see her pallor and the ugly gashes on the back of her right calf. Don’t let her be dead . The other woman saw him.