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

  Their leader, Mullah Omar, believed that human beings were naturally virtuous and, if placed on the right path, needed no government coercion, social services, or public health care. There was therefore no centralized government, and the population was ruled by local Taliban komitehs, whose punishments for the smallest infringement of Islamic law were so draconian that a degree of order was indeed restored. Fiercely opposed to modernity, which had, after all, come to them in the form of Soviet guns and air strikes, the Taliban ruled by their traditional tribal norms, which they identified with the rule of God. Their focus was purely local, and they had no sympathy with Bin Laden’s global vision. But Mullah Omar was grateful to the Arab-Afghans for their support during the war, and when Bin Laden was expelled from Sudan, he admitted him to Afghanistan, in return for which Bin Laden improved the country’s infrastructure. 32 Other uprooted radicals gathered around Bin Laden in Afghanistan—Zawahiri and his Egyptian radicals most especially. 33 Yet al-Qaeda was still a minor player in Islamist politics. A former militant told ABC television that even though he had spent ten months in training camps run by Bin Laden’s aides, he had never heard of the organization. 34 It seems that, even though he expressed his approval of both operations, Bin Laden played no part in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York by Arab-Afghan veteran Ramzi Youssef or in the 1995 truck bombing in Riyadh that killed five Americans. However, al-Qaeda may have provided an ideological focus for militants in Afghanistan, who were feeling increasingly dispirited. 35 Not only had they failed to advance on their three main fronts of Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt, but by the end of the 1990s, political Islam itself seemed in terminal decline. 36 In a dramatic turnabout, Hojjat ol-Islam Seyyed Muhammad Khatami, running on a democratic ticket, won a landslide victory in the 1997 elections in Iran. He immediately signaled that he wanted a more positive relationship with the West and dissociated his government from Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In Algeria the government of President Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika included militant secularists as well as moderate Islamists, and in Pakistan the secularist colonel Pervez Musharraf toppled Nawaz Sharif, patron of the Islamist parties. In Turkey the Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erkbakan had to resign after a single year in office, and Turabi was deposed in a military coup in Sudan. It seemed increasingly urgent to Bin Laden to reignite the jihad in a spectacular operation that would catch the attention of the whole world.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s tongue was its own language, a language that didn’t need to be taught to it. When the riverwoman came in her mouth, Ama didn’t rinse it for days, kept tonguing the salt between her teeth. The riverwoman flipped onto her stomach and the mud opened around her, her limbs waning back into her body. Red scales rushed up her belly like a flame and she slid forward through silt, belly-flopping back into the river. Back home, Ama undressed and scrubbed the mud from her dress, but it had ground itself too deep into the weave and become inseparable from the fabric. She shook it out, went outside to dry it anyway, and saw something clinging to its hem. A scale the size of her toenail. Ama placed the scale on her tongue and sucked on it all day until it blurred away. When her belly rose as rapidly as bread, she knew this would be her last daughter. Ama thought of the riverwoman whose belly never left the ground, the way her hips gave into honey. The scale Ama swallowed: It must have doubled itself inside her, daughtering. This daughter was only hers. Hers and the river’s. Hers and the dead’s. This daughter—my mother—was the one Ama would see as her second body, a liability. Months later, when Ama tossed all her daughters off the bridge and into the river red, she would watch the snakes warring over their meat. She was waiting for the riverwoman to bring her daughters out of the water, her tongue hooking their mouths, dragging them back to the surface. While Ama was dropping her daughters into the river, trying to skip the last baby like a stone, she thought of water as the best of all mothers. Water had none of its own wants: It served only the thirst of others. Ama knew being needed was a kind of divinity, and she was tired of being that good, that god. When she dropped my mother into the river last, Ama thought: I am returning her to the river that will raise her better, raise her like a flood I will run from. _ In her house there was only her. When we’d pulled away, I’d looked through the back windshield, holding Agong’s head in my lap like a fruit I couldn’t figure out how to fit in my mouth. Ama watched me from the dark of her doorway, her knees blurring into each other. Her mouth was pitted from her face, a hole where she once had a name.

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

  One of the many reasons the drama of Jonestown is so disturbing is the germ of nihilism it reveals in modern culture. The Temple was clearly haunted by two of the dark icons of modernity: the concentration camp and the mushroom cloud. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had found that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for procreation. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness, a void at the heart of modern culture. By the mid-twentieth century, that psychic void had been filled with a terrible reality. Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people in Europe and the Soviet Union had died violent deaths.6 Some of the worst atrocities had been perpetrated by Germans who lived in one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. The Holocaust shook the Enlightenment optimism that education would eliminate barbarism, since it showed that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The sheer scale of the Nazi genocide reveals its debt to modernity; no previous society could have implemented such a grandiose scheme of extermination. The Nazis used many of the tools and achievements of the industrial age—the factory, the railways, and the advanced chemical industry—to deadly effect, relying on modern scientific and rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, limited, and defined objective.7 Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate step in social engineering and the most extreme demonstration of the inability of the nation to tolerate minorities. It showed what can happen once the sense of the sacredness of every single human being—a conviction at the heart of traditional religions that quasi-religious systems seem unable or disinclined to re-create—is lost. On August 6, 1945, a 3,600-kilogram atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing approximately 140,000 people instantaneously. Three days later a plutonium-type bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing some 24,000 people.8 For centuries people had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, with weapons of mass destruction, it appeared that human beings no longer needed God to achieve apocalyptic effects. The nation had become a supreme value, and the international community acknowledged the legitimacy of a nuclear strike to protect it, despite the prospect of total annihilation that such means suggested. There could be no more potent evidence of the death wish Freud had described. But it also, perhaps, suggests a flaw in the purely secular ideal that eliminates “holiness” from its politics—the conviction that some things or people must be “set apart” from our personal interests. The cultivation of that transcendence—be it God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana—had, at its best, helped people to appreciate human finitude. But if the nation becomes the absolute value (in religious terms, an “idol”), there is no reason why we should not liquidate those who appear to threaten it.

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

  [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] True to their mandate to create an alternative society, Israelites were reluctant at first to establish a regular state “like the other nations” but seem to have lived in independent chiefdoms without a central government. If they were attacked by their neighbors, a leader or “judge” would rise up and mobilize the entire population against an attack. This is the arrangement we find in the book of Judges, which was also heavily revised by the seventh-century reformers. But over time, without strong rule, Israelites succumbed to moral depravity. One sentence recurs throughout the book: “In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did as he pleased.”59 We read of a judge who made a human sacrifice of his own daughter;60 a tribe that exterminated an innocent people instead of the enemy assigned them by Yahweh;61 a group of Israelites who gang-raped a woman to death;62 and a civil war in which the tribe of Benjamin was almost exterminated.63 These tales are not held up for our edification; rather, they explore a political and religious quandary. Can our natural proclivity for violence be controlled in a community without a degree of coercion? It appears that the Israelites had won their freedom but lost their souls, and monarchy seemed the only way to restore order. Moreover, the Philistines, who had established a kingdom on the southern coast of Canaan, had become a grave military threat to the tribes. Eventually, the Israelite elders approached their judge Samuel with a shocking request: “Give us a king to rule over us like the other nations.”64 Samuel responded with a remarkable critique of agrarian oppression, which listed the regular exploitation of every premodern civilization: These will be the rights of the king who is to reign over you. He will take your sons and assign them to his chariotry and cavalry, and they will run in front of his chariot. He will use them as leaders of a thousand and leaders of fifty; he will make them plough his ploughland and harvest his harvest and make his weapons of war and the gear for his chariots. He will also take your daughters as perfumers, cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields, of your vineyards and olive groves, and give them to his officials.… He will take the best of your manservants and maidservants, of your cattle and your donkeys, and make them work for him. He will tithe your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out on account of the king you have chosen for yourselves, but on that day Yahweh will not answer you.65 Unlike most religious traditions that endorsed this system, albeit reluctantly, Israel had utterly rejected its structural violence but failed to establish a viable alternative. Despite their dreams of freedom and equity, Israelites had discovered, time and again, that they could not survive without a strong state.

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

  He stands not ten feet from me. He hangs all saggy now from his metal frame by these rusted springs. Mother is pouring gas out of the red can onto him, and he looks sullen underneath. When she takes up the big box of safety matches, she waves Lecia and me back with a broad sweep of her arm, like she’s about to do some circus trick. I start to stand so I can jump and catch her arm before she lights that match. But Lecia’s hand clamps on both my shoulders to stop my rising. She shoves me back down onto the ground. I feel my legs buckle under me like they’re the legs of some different girl, or even like the cold steel legs of one of those lawn chairs just folding up on itself. I sit down hard on the wet St. Augustine grass, the blades of which are stiff as plastic. That’s my horse getting doused by the upended gas can. I knot my arms in front of my chest and think how I wanted to keep that horse for bouncing. It’s supposed to be a baby toy, but some days when Lecia’s out, I ride it with springs screeching and close my eyes and picture myself galloping across a wide prairie. Now that horse looks at me all blank-eyed and tired. I scan around for a rock or two-by-four to conk Mother on the head with. But Lecia’s hands won’t let go my shoulders. She could be watching the weather on TV for all the feeling her face shows. I tell her that’s my horse Mother’s messing with. But she’s bored with this complaint. So I let it go. Bye-bye, old Paint , I think to myself, I’m a-leaving Cheyenne. Mother drags the safety match in slo-mo down the black strip on the side of the box, and the spark takes the red match head with a flare. She tosses the match toward the horse with a gesture that’s almost delicate. For an instant she might be a lady dropping a hanky. Then flames surge up over my horse with a loud whump. For a long time inside the orange fire you can see the black horse shape real clear. But at some point that shape caves in on itself, gives way to the lapping fire that Mother pitches stuff into, no horse left at all. She upends the last box of toys and shakes it the way, earlier in our room, she dumped out each drawer from our highboy. The fire is working hard. It climbs up and over every single object piled there. She’s burning her own paintings too, some of them, the landscapes of the beach mostly. The canvases catch before the frames do, so lined up at different heights along one side of the pyramid are these framed pictures of flames. Fire burns wild inside the gilt frames and wormwood frames and slick, supermodern brass frames.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I eavesdropped on all your bones laboring to make blood your throat diameter of a fishbone nothing could fit down it I injected water into your belly needle stolen from the morphine-addicted widow the one whose doctor husband disappeared with the rest of the men when the rain was raided the police told her to listen to General [ ] [ ]-[ ] on the radio transcribing the night into names of the missing because they owned guns fists she didn’t tell them she was illiterate I transcribed General [ ] [ ]-[ ] ’s speeches for her when the soldiers came again they told her eat what you’ve written they said a woman is only loyal with a man’s words inside her I watched from the door you were strapped to me batting milk from my breasts the woman knelt in the road the roosters round her preening gungloss round her mouth O O O she swallowed each sheet of my handwriting I used to think the neighborwoman weak her needles sinning through skin now I pray to replace my blood something sweet & buzzed honey or bees my bones a hive of memory make me foamfooted porridge-headed as your father never thought I’d marry another soldier his sack of government rice pregnant with rats your father with his gold bars love for American rock I watched him hawk his Japanese watch sell his own shoes outside the bars in Taipei eavesdropping on jukeboxes he never knew the lyrics made them up in dialect the province he was born in north of a river cleaving mountains like an ass-cleft when he sang so off-pitch even birds offended shat all over his shoulders now his voice is a gnat I slap off my cheek you always thought I hated him saddling me with shit-stains the river I inherited like debt following me to bed bowl of water where I swim his dentures at night I wrap him in lamp-skin search for a bulb small enough to fit his mouth beneath his eyelids clots of flies I have always wanted to be that empty no need to be anything but living maybe god a hole we keep filling with our dead I envy the way he watches me TV the way he believes blinking his eyes changes the channel. Sometimes he thinks shutting off the TV means the weather is off the war has switched countries time to halve his skull into bowls pour out the oil of last week he thought the TV a window tried opening the country climb in this week gardening I dug a hole in the ground beneath my chili bush a rehearsal the hole sized for his skull my chili bush will keep the dogs away from his body I’ll home him better than any country the army claiming they’d pay him enough to keep hunger at home every hole is a crown the dead wear save me from what my hands plot * when I let them off the leash of my arms I mine for gods all of them hiding here I’ll dig him here he’ll share a grave with his gold They always say: cold feet in bed means a man will leave you I have had cold feet my whole life & still no luck _ My tail ticked side to side while I read the fourth letter, beating out of sync with each syllable. Outside, my mother approached the holes with a butterfly net in her hand, prodding dirt-mouths with the rod of it. But my holes were not traps: They didn’t shut around squirrels or stray cats, they weren’t triggered by anything but my voice.

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

  If you can’t sell your house, you buy a statue of Jude, get the priest to dab holy water on it, then bury it upside down in your yard before dawn. And by suppertime, you’ll be knocking your for-sale sign over with a hammer. That’s the fact that must for a while occupy all my available brain space, for next thing I know, I’m not at the Janisches’ anymore at all, but back across the street on my own porch, at my own front door with a breathing presence behind me that must be Mr. Janisch. The padded arms of his parka make a whipe, whipe noise when he moves. I can still smell his mint shaving foam. I feel dumb knocking instead of just walking in yelling hey. But he insists. After nobody comes, though, I watch my raw-looking little hand start slapping flat on that door over and over. Mr. Janisch grabs my wrist with his leather-gloved hand to stop me, but I twist loose and bang again with both fists. I’ve neglected to listen back on Mother’s house. I was across the street, sunk deep in my own task. So my house has gone grinding through time minus my vigilance. If, for instance, a gun went off, I’d have missed hearing it. Two or three shots might have been fired. This thought causes me to kick the door with my numb bare foot, so hard that later the big toenail will go black. Suddenly there sails through my head a hand-lettered banner that used to hang in front of Central Baptist Church back home: Prayer changes things , it said. So if I can eke out the right prayer before that door opens on everybody sprawled around dead like deer you’d line up for a Polaroid before strapping them over the truck hood, maybe I can change the scene we’ll find. I have to pray fast and get it right the first time. God’ll want a convincing trade, not just that weary promise to be good I always back up on. Then in a flash, the idea comes. How Abraham was ready to cut his own son’s throat solely because God said to. Thinking that, I let one bullet have its way. I give God that bullet killing Hector the way you’d spot points in football when you got only the puny kids on your team. But God’s counteroffer comes in a backwash. I halfway wanted Hector dead from the git-go anyways. So that bullet may not count as offering enough. In church back home, Deacon Sharp always says—while he slips the offering envelope from his shirt pocket to drop in the prayer basket that’s swooping up the pew on a long stick—he always says to give till it hurts. The real choice is between Mother and Lecia. Mother lying sprawled on the floor in that creamy slip. Or Lecia in a hump across Hector in the chintz armchair.

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

  I must have said as much, for at some point she tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and told me there was no more point to Sisyphus’ task than there was to washing dishes or making beds. You just did those things endlessly till your body wore out, then you died. The first French sentence I learned might well have come from that book. Il faut souffrir , one must suffer. For some reason, suffering got lined up in my head not with moral virtue or being good, as it had with the Baptist kids back home, but with being smart. Smart people suffered; dumb people didn’t. Mother had said this back in Texas all the time. We’d be driving past some guys in blue overalls selling watermelons off their truck bed and grinning like it was as good a way as any to pass an afternoon. She’d wag her head as if this were the most unbelievable spectacle, saying God, to be that blissfully ignorant. Daddy had always countered that message, for he took big pleasure in the small comforts—sugar in his coffee, getting the mockingbird in our chinaberry tree to answer his whistle. Without him, Mother’s misery was seeping in. Happiness was for boneheads, a dumb fog you sank into. Pain, low-level and constant, was a vigil you kept. The vigil had something to do with looking out for your own death, and with living in some constant state of watchful despair. Meanwhile, the world was draining itself of color before my eyes. The sky was grayer than ash, clouds close and vague as chalk smudges. Trees lost their leaves. Through the venetian blinds in our parlor Lecia and I watched autumn slip into winter like a slide show. For several days our neighbors raked, their kids jumping into the piles with dogs of various sizes bounding on the edges. It was like something from a Kodak commercial. Then the piles got burned in culverts and trash cans in front of the big colonial houses all up the block. Wasn’t it weird, I said to Lecia in the bath one night, how we thought of trees having leaves as being “normal,” when in fact six months out the year they were necked as jaybirds. At school, I looked around at the dazed and sleeping kids, my peers—one boy drooling onto graph paper, another folding together a cootie-catcher. Even the monitor, the principal’s daughter, who was supposed to be the smartest kid in class, was at that instant blissfully outlining her own hand in pencil. They didn’t seem to mind being there so much, which I couldn’t for the life of me figure, for it was all I could do to tromp through a day without screaming or breaking all my pencils or just kicking somebody hard in the shin. Mother and Hector went away twice, both times to Mexico, I think.

• From The Art of Memoir

  21 | Why Memoirs Fail My last memory is the Headmaster’s parting shot: “Well, good-bye, Graves, and remember that your best friend is the waste-paper basket.” This has proved good advice. . . . few writers seem to send their work through as many drafts as I do. Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That Most memoirs fail because of voice. It’s not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling. Or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read. The sentences are boring and predictable, or it’s so inconsistent you don’t know who’s speaking or what place they come from. You don’t believe or trust the voice. You’re not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer. The author’s dead in the water. We live in the age of the image, and it’s too easy to learn carnal writing for a memoirist to sketch a foggy physical world sans evocative sensory detail. A lot of instruction manuals beam in on the physical, simply because you can master it. But few textbooks take up how the inner life manifests itself in a memoir’s pages. In the more spectacular visual media like action films, say, the inner life fails to get much airplay—at most a scene in a shrink’s office or a snippet of voiceover here and there. But memoir can compete against the pyrotechnics of visual imagery in film and TV only by excelling where those media fail: writing a deeper moment from inside it. You’re looking for that inner enemy that’ll help you to structure the book. I always have inklings of it, but tend to find it by writing interior frets and confessions and yearnings as I recall them. Maybe

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

  The ultimate terror began in 1978, when members started to rehearse their mass suicide. On “white nights” they would be roused suddenly from sleep and informed that they were about to be killed by U.S. agents; suicide was said to be the only viable option. They were then given a drink that they believed to be poisoned and waited to die. On November 18, 1978, the community had been visited by U.S. congressman Leo Ryan, who had come to investigate reports of human rights abuses. After Ryan left, Jones dispatched Temple members to shoot him at the airstrip and then summoned the entire community to the Jonestown pavilion. There medical staff administered potassium cyanide in a batch of the soft drink Flavor-Aid, which parents fed to their children before taking it themselves. Most seem to have died willingly, though the two hundred children were certainly murdered and about a hundred of the elderly may have been injected involuntarily. They recorded their last messages on audiotape. Jones had taken the concept of “revolutionary suicide” from Black Panther leader Huey Newton.4 “I made the decision to commit revolutionary suicide. My decision has been well thought out,” said one Jonestown resident. “And in my death, I hope that it would be used as an instrument to further liberation.” “It’s been my pleasure walking with all of you in this revolutionary struggle,” one woman stated. “No other way I would rather go [than] to give my life for socialism, communism.” People who were convinced that they had no voice in their own society had come to believe that they could be heard only in the shocking spectacle of their dying. Jones was the last to take the poison: “We said—one thousand people who said, we don’t like the way the world is. We didn’t commit suicide. We committed an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”5 The community dynamics of Jonestown were, of course, complex and imponderable. Although religion was clearly not the cause of this tragedy, it has much in common with instances of “revolutionary suicide” that have been articulated in religious terms. The Temple was a protest against the structural violence of American society; it had developed a highly developed history of grievance and suffering that, its members claimed, mainstream society chose to ignore. Jonestown was an assault as well as a protest: Temple members were laying their deaths at the door of the United States, a demonstration that its systemic injustice had made their lives so intolerable that death was preferable. Jones clearly believed, however psychotically, that he was engaged in an asymmetrical struggle with a superpower that held all the cards. All these elements would also surface in the wave of religiously inspired terrorism that broke out in the 1980s.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It rains the Arkansas way, riddling the ground like gunfire. Years after this story, you’re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss. You ask why your grandfather once buried his gold and forgot about it, and I say his skull is full of snakes instead of brains. He’s all sold out of memories. One time, he pees all over the yard and we follow his piss-streams through the soil. Pray they convene at the gold’s gravesite. The gold in his bladder will guide us toward its buried kin. But his piss-river runs straight into the house and floods it with fermented sunlight. _ When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don’t sweeten tea. Don’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body. Ba says he’ll find the gold soon. Ma beats him again, this time with a pair of high heels (also a gift from the church wives). Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost. The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly. In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust. After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba. I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat.

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

  All this takes not more than a second. Just when I can’t stand it anymore, though, he pulls back. Which is a relief. He’s still holding my head in a clamp, but for a second the dick itself backs up from my throat a little so I can suck in a half-breath. I stop gagging then. My eyes are watering hard. Surely this is the end of it, I think, for more than this would kill a person. But no sooner has that thought scuttled through my brain than he pushes down on my head again and shoves his pecker forward again, the head of it like some soft mushroom swelling to block off the back of my throat, and I gag again. Then, worst of all, something wet and warm spurts out of the dick itself. He’s peeing in my mouth. I’m sure of it. Back in Texas, during a Scout jamboree, a boy I knew peed in his sleeping brother’s mouth, and neither one could live it down. But this pee is thick as cream rinse and not coming in a steady stream but pumping in a slow pulse I try to back away from. All the tendons in my neck get tight while I fight to raise my head out of his lap, but his hand holds me down. The dick pushes up. Then my throat fills with a salty chemical taste like the chlorine from a pool mixed up with salt gargle. Later, when he’s all done, he backs way off and gets gentle again. The flat of his hand rubs my back while I’m vomiting down the front of my gown. I am grateful for the warm rubbing of his hand, like whatever I did bad he’s forgiven me for. I vomit again till my stomach seizes up on its own hurt, and he’s patting on me bent over there. He’s saying I’m okay. I did good, though it’s clear down in the core of me that I’m no way okay. That night in bed, I look at the window and wonder about Dracula taking shape on the other side of the heavy drapes, waiting to be asked in. I myself shouted down to the baby-sitter to come up to me. After a long time, I get up and put on my school clothes. I sit dressed on the straight chair in Lecia’s room, feet not brushing the floor—sit still as a statue, the way you have to when bird-hunting, or bass-fishing with rubber worms. You let the worm drop down to the river bottom, and just scoot it through the silt every now and then. Otherwise, quiet, for you don’t want to thump around in the boat. When the curtains get light, Mother comes in to scrub at the vomit stain on the rug. She has made a little paste with water and baking soda in a cereal bowl and is working that paste into the nap with a toothbrush.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  After three years, we paid off our debts—half in labor, half in gold—to the missionaries who did our papers, who bought our plane tickets and rented us the house that’s so thick with mice we call them the carpet, who convinced the Sunday school to let Jie stay even after she began taking money with her mouth. She told me she was blowing boys in the woods, and for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees. The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies. We pack in the dark, take the moon with us. Leave the frying pan with its bottom scarred like a palm. The doorknobs we sold for nickels. Take the bucket we used to shower with, threading water through one another’s bones, going to bed wet as newborns. Ma stewed riverfish in our leftover bathwater. We taste of what has touched us. Ma tells us not to take everything, as if we own more than these bodies. Ba spends the rest of the gold on a used car, domestic, painted the purple of a bruised knee. Jie drives, and the ghostboy who taught her is standing on our driveway the entire time we load up. He’s the same sand color all over, his hair matching his lips. The boy tries to kiss her goodbye, just like the pastor did, but Jie veers her face away and the kiss sprawls dead on her neck. The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum. The car has a dent in the passenger door that looks human-shaped. Jie spends a whole minute petting the wheel like she’s taming it. Ma is shotgun. Ba and I sit in the backseat, windows down, suitcases trunked, a Spanish song on the radio that we all somehow know the chorus to. Jie and I bring jam jars to pee in. Ba fills them all, and we stop once a day to leave the jars by the side of the road like lanterns. Our piss is a gradient, darkening from clear to amber as we run out of water. At night, we pull over and sleep with the seats reclined, one back window open, headlights on in case of nocturnal animals. In case Ba wanders off, we paint his name with engine grease on the back of his windbreaker, along with these words written by Jie: DO NOT APPROACH .

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Some men carried a gun, but they weren’t soldiers like Ba. They looked at us like we were broken-legged animals to shoot, not because they hated us but because they wanted to save us from the hole we’d fallen into. Every other family had a car or a truck, and they drove to buy food. And we, we walked. We walked miles and miles. We walked to the grocery store and bought our meat in cans and found out later it was cat food. Why do cats get their own kind of food? Why wasn’t our hunger specified? It wasn’t bad, the cat food. It didn’t taste like anything. We stopped being able to taste after we landed. We weren’t fluent in the flavors here. Our tongues receded, beached in the back of our throats, whaling, amputated at the name. We walked until our feet were fish-floppy. We walked like those oxen: to death. DAUGHTER Girl in Gourd California, still I was born with a gourd-shaped head: My mother kneaded it back into a sphere while my bones were still milk. The left side of my head still wears her handprint. My mother joked that if she’d ever dropped me, I would have split open into symmetrical bowls, spilling a head full of black seeds. Every night, I sat cross-legged on the floor while she sat in a chair above me, holding my head between her knees and squeezing my skull into a shape that could sit in her palm. Her fingers fattened the strands of my hair with horse-oil cream. When her knee-bones ground against my temples and milked tears from me, she lapped them off my face like a cat and said she was almost done. She had to make sure my head was round enough to remember who loved me, sturdy enough to carry the stories she was going to crown me with. Eventually the gourd juice emptied out of me: I pissed twice as much as my brother, a spray so forceful my mother said I alone could have ended the California drought if only I knew how to aim. I was always sweating, my skin shifting like sheets of sea. My mother had to wring me out twice a day like a towel. Back before we lived in a house, I slept on a mattress at night, between my mother and father, my brother on a fold-out futon in the farthest corner of the room. Every night, a puddle flared around me like a skirt, wetting the whole mattress and waking my mother, who dreamed a typhoon had torn me from her tit. My mother feared my veins were full of salt, that my bones produced water instead of blood.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother gave him vitamins that made his nipples shrivel and slough their black velvet. Sometimes the vitamins gave him earaches too, and for relief my mother plugged his ears with ice cubes. He’s crying out of his ears, I said, drying the sides of his neck. In the morning before school, I heard my mother in the kitchen, grinding pills with her wooden bowl and pestle. I looked into the bowl and the powder inside was dust-fine, the air choking on chalk. She was sweating, arms flexing as she crushed the shards to sand. I asked her if she’d found a new vitamin to try, and my mother answered by grinding harder, the bowl buzzing in her hands. While she bobbed the pestle up and down, I told Agong the story of the Monkey King, plucking out a strand of his ash-colored hair to demonstrate how the monkey had multiplied himself, each strand growing into a soldier. My mother overheard me and said I shouldn’t give him ideas. So I told him the other monkey myth, the one about my mother’s cousin. The cousin’s boyfriend gave her a monkey when she turned nineteen. He brought it to her in a bamboo cage with a rope bow-tied around it. My mother’s cousin said, I fuck this boy and he gives me a monkey? I’d rather he’d given me syphilis. She gave the monkey away to a neighbor, who tied it in his tree and put a little bell around its neck. The neighborhood boys liked to come around and throw stones at it, pull it down out of the tree and kick it down the street. The monkey turned mean, peeing on your head or ejaculating onto your shoulders, yanking on your hair like a leash when you walked under its tree. It got so mean it jumped down on my mother one time, tried to skin her skull like a tangerine. Parting her hair with her fingers, my mother showed me a bald spot the size of a quarter where the monkey had hooked its claw. Then one month, the monkey disappeared and Ama grew wounds all down her arms and cheeks, her chin skinned so bad that the flute of her jawbone was exposed. Ama freed the monkey? I asked, and my mother said, That’s not the end of the story. The monkey turned up drowned in the river, all battered up, its bones crushed into ellipses. Once an animal gets mean, Ama liked to say, there’s no way to make it good again. You kill what can’t be saved. All of her murders began as mercies. I get it, I said to my mother. The moral is you can’t really save anything.

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

  I count the seven turns of the dial, feel it unwind under her stick finger. She’s crying, the stick mommy, with sucking sobs. A whole fountain of blue tears pours from both pin-dot eyes. I guess it’s Dr. Boudreaux who answers on the other end, because she says, “Forest, it’s Charlie Marie. Get over here. I just killed them both. Both of them. I’ve stabbed them both to death.”

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

  One of the many reasons the drama of Jonestown is so disturbing is the germ of nihilism it reveals in modern culture. The Temple was clearly haunted by two of the dark icons of modernity: the concentration camp and the mushroom cloud. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had found that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for procreation. The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) spoke of a God-shaped hole in human consciousness, a void at the heart of modern culture. By the mid-twentieth century, that psychic void had been filled with a terrible reality. Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people in Europe and the Soviet Union had died violent deaths. 6 Some of the worst atrocities had been perpetrated by Germans who lived in one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. The Holocaust shook the Enlightenment optimism that education would eliminate barbarism, since it showed that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The sheer scale of the Nazi genocide reveals its debt to modernity; no previous society could have implemented such a grandiose scheme of extermination. The Nazis used many of the tools and achievements of the industrial age—the factory, the railways, and the advanced chemical industry—to deadly effect, relying on modern scientific and rational planning in which everything is subordinated to a single, limited, and defined objective. 7 Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate step in social engineering and the most extreme demonstration of the inability of the nation to tolerate minorities. It showed what can happen once the sense of the sacredness of every single human being—a conviction at the heart of traditional religions that quasi-religious systems seem unable or disinclined to re-create—is lost. On August 6, 1945, a 3,600-kilogram atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing approximately 140,000 people instantaneously. Three days later a plutonium-type bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing some 24,000 people. 8 For centuries people had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, with weapons of mass destruction, it appeared that human beings no longer needed God to achieve apocalyptic effects. The nation had become a supreme value, and the international community acknowledged the legitimacy of a nuclear strike to protect it, despite the prospect of total annihilation that such means suggested. There could be no more potent evidence of the death wish Freud had described. But it also, perhaps, suggests a flaw in the purely secular ideal that eliminates “holiness” from its politics— the conviction that some things or people must be “set apart” from our personal interests. The cultivation of that transcendence—be it God, Dao, Brahman, or Nirvana—had, at its best, helped people to appreciate human finitude. But if the nation becomes the absolute value (in religious terms, an “idol”), there is no reason why we should not liquidate those who appear to threaten it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When the first boy was shot, the rest fell in with him. The army saved bullets this way. Polishing their names on its tongue, the river strung through their skulls and necklaced them. Snakes erased the boys’ bodies, entering through eye sockets to eat the rubymeat of their brains. At night, the river cleaved from its bed and heaved itself onto land, roaming as a snake. The red rain receded to a rumor, but some said the day the river was impregnated with snakes, there was a woman seen on the banks. Some said this woman had no spine, snakes for arms, teeth for eyes, adding details until she was nothing they could name. One night when she was almost nineteen and married to Agong, her second soldierfuck, Ama went down to the banks in the dark to see if it was true, if her snakes were women at night, if the river walked itself. Ama waded in and the river didn’t budge, thick as jelly. Ama waited for the snakes to circle her ankles, the snakes she’d birthed on her own. The moon pimpled the skin of the river. She walked back to the bank and sat in the mud, wondering where the snakes had gone, if they still loved her, if they still missed the color inside her. She closed her eyes and lay on her back, imagining all her ribs were the rungs of a raft. How bright a boat she would be. When she opened her eyes, three moons in the sky. One was whole and the others were halves. She sat up and saw a snake hanging on to her calf by its fangs. Ama wrenched it off. Before she could lie back down, the water tore in two. A body nosed onto the banks, gutting the mud. It was a woman with scales the color of blood, wearing her skin inside-out. She tucked her arms and legs into her body before oaring them out, shoving away the mud with each winging. Ama undressed and curled beside the riverwoman in the mud, soaking in the palm-sweat of night. She lowered her head to the riverwoman’s skin, tilting her tongue into the belly button, lapping out its sour lake of sweat. Ama remembered the river was conceived not by the sea but by a body: It had been pissed down the mountain Papakwaka, cleaving streams into the stone. Ama propped herself above the riverwoman’s ribs. The mud slapped against itself, a sound like farting, and they both laughed. Ama kneeled between the riverwoman’s knees and touched with her tongue the black hair there, gummy with mud and moonmilk.

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

  "It might be possible that you will soon be satisfied," my companion answered; "we are nearing the period of the festival: this circumstance rarely takes place without bringing them victims; they either seduce girls by means of the confessional, or, if they can, they cause them to disappear: which means so many new recruits, each of whom always supposes a retrenchment." The famous holiday arrived... will you be able to believe, Madame, what monstrous impieties the monks were guilty of during this event! They fancied a visible miracle would double the brilliance of their reputation; and so they dressed Florette, the youngest of the girls, in all the Virgin's attire and adornments; by means of concealed strings they tied her against the wall of the niche and ordered her to elevate her arms very suddenly and with compunction toward heaven simultaneously the host was raised. As the little creature was threatened with the cruelest chastising if she were to speak a single word or mismanage in her role, she carried it off marvelously well, and the fraud enjoyed all the success that could possibly have been expected. The people cried aloud the miracle, left rich offerings to the Virgin, and went home more convinced than ever of the efficacity of the celestial Mother's mercies. In order to increase their impiety, our libertines wanted to have Florette appear at the orgies that evening, dressed in the same costume that had attracted so many homages, and each one inflamed his odious desires to submit her, in this guise, to the irregularity of his caprices. Aroused by this initial crime, the sacrilegious ones go considerably further: they have the child stripped naked, they have her lie on her stomach upon a large table; they light candles, they place the image of our Saviour squarely upon the little girl's back and upon her buttocks they dare consummate the most redoubtable of our mysteries. I swooned away at this horrible spectacle, 'twas impossible to bear the sight. Severino, seeing me unconscious, says that, to bring me to heel, I must serve as the altar in my turn. I am seized; I am placed where Florette was lying; the sacrifice is consummated, and the host... that sacred symbol of our august Religion... Severino catches it up and thrusts it deep into the obscene locale of his sodomistic pleasures... crushes it with oaths and insults... ignominiously drives it further with the intensified blows of his monstrous dart and as he blasphemes, spurts, upon our Saviour's very Body, the impure floods of his lubricity's torrents.... I was insensible when they drew me from his hands; I had to be carried to my room, where for a week I shed uninterrupted tears over the hideous crime for which, against my will, I had been employed.

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

  Both he and his wife, they say, immolated victims daily and would have them live twenty-four hours in death's cruelest agonies, and in such a state of suffering that they were constantly on the verge of expiring but never quite able to die, for those monsters administered that kind of aid which made them flutter between relief and torture and only brought them back to life for one minute in order to kill them the next.... I, Therese, I am too gentle, I know nothing of those arts, I'm a mere apprentice." Roland retires without completing the sacrifice and hurts me almost as much by this precipitous withdrawal as he had upon inserting himself. He throws himself into Suzanne's arms, and joining sarcasm to outrage: "Amiable creature," he apostrophizes, "with such delight I remember the first instants of our union; never had woman given me such thrilling pleasures, never had I loved one as I did you... let us embrace, Suzanne, for we're going to part, perhaps the season of our separation will be long." "Monster!" my companion retorts, thrusting him away with horror, "begone; to the torments you inflict upon me, join not the despair of hearing your terrible remarks; sate your rage, tigerish one, but at least respect my sufferings." Roland laid hands on her, stretched her upon the couch, her legs widespread, and the workshop of generation ideally within range. "Temple of my ancient pleasures," the infamous creature intoned, "you who procured me delights so sweet when I plucked your first roses, I must indeed address to you my farewells...." The villain! he drove his fingernails into it and, rummaging about inside for a few minutes while screams burst from Suzanne's mouth, he did not withdraw them until they were covered with blood. Glutted and wearied by these horrors, and feeling, indeed, he could restrain himself no longer: "Come, Therese, come," he said, "let's conclude all this with a little scene of funambulism: it'll be cut-the-cord, dear girl." (This game, described above, was in great use amongst the Celts from whom we are descended (see Monsieur Peloutier's ‘Histoire d'u Celts’); virtually all these extravagances of debauchery, these extraordinary libertine passions some part of which are described in this book and which, - how ridiculously! today awaken the law's attention, were, in days bygone, either our ancestors' sports, games far superior to our contemporary amusement, or legalized customs, or again, religious ceremonies; currently, they are transformed into crimes. In how many pious rituals did not the pagans employ flagellation!