Fear

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 The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  The one time we’d spent the night there, Lecia and I wound up in the bathroom eating toothpaste past midnight. We’d eaten a whole tube, for which we had been switch-whipped in the morning by a gray-faced Mr. Smothergill. He was undergoing weekly chemotherapy treatments for mouth cancer at the time, and every kid in the neighborhood had an opinion about when he would die. Cancer and death were synonymous. His sandpaper voice and bleak disposition scared us more than any whipping. His kids called him Cheerful Chuck behind his back. The oldest Smothergill daughter had been permitted to visit my house only once. (Our house was perceived as Dangerous, a consequence of Mother’s being Nervous.) She was so tickled by the idea that we could open the refrigerator at will that she melted down a whole stick of butter in a skillet and drank it from a coffee mug. Lord, I would rather eat a bug than sleep on that hard pallet at the Smothergills’. Plus in the morning the boys get up and stand around the TV in their underpants doing armpit farts. Let it be the Dillards’, and I’ll lead a holy life forever from this day. I will not spit or scratch or pinch or try to get Babby Carter to eat doo-doo. Mrs. Dillard stood with the other ladies in her pale blue zip-front duster, her arms folded across her chest. She made Pillsbury cinnamon rolls in the morning and let me squiggle on the icing. Plus her boys had to wear pajama pants when we were there. But the Dillards had space for only one of us, and that on the scratchy living room sofa. Maybe Lecia could go to the Smothergills’ , I proposed to whatever God I worshiped, and I could take the Dillards. I wished Lecia no particular harm, but if there was only one banana left in the bowl, I would not hesitate to grab it and leave her to do without. I decided that if the june bug could be herded the length of a brick before I could count five I’d get what I wanted. But the june bug kept flipping and waggling before it had even gone an inch, and Mrs. Dillard went out of her way, it seemed, not to look at me. I don’t remember who we got farmed out to or for how long. I was later told that we’d stayed for a time with a childless couple who bred birds. Some memory endures of a screened-in breezeway with green slatted blinds all around. The light was lemon-colored and dusty, the air filled with blue-and-green parakeets, whose crazy orbits put me in mind of that Alfred Hitchcock movie where birds go nuts and start pecking out people’s eyeballs. But the faces of my hosts in that place—no matter how hard I squint—refuse to be conjured.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The cramps were bearable, especially through the buzz of the expired Adderall she’d snorted on her way to barracks. She raised two fingers. Made a fist. Jules, who was the tallest, kicked the door down. Piper pulled the pin out of her tear gas canister and lobbed it down the front hall of the ground-floor apartment, clocking the first trans girl square in the nose as she burst out of one of the bedrooms. She reeled and crashed into the wall, clutching at her face. Clouds of gas billowed up around her thrashing silhouette. “Go, go, go,” Ramona barked, her voice buzzing through the snoutlike filter of her gas mask. Her heartbeat quickened to a sprint. They went. Piper and Sadie first, then she and Karin, with Jules bringing up the rear. The trans girl, face bloody and eyes squeezed shut, blundered into Piper, who seized her by the arm and shoulder and propelled her face-first into the wall again. Plaster cracked. So did bone. Ramona pounded past and on into the dirty kitchen, her own breath rasping mechanically in her ears as she squinted through the smoke at the scarred butcher-block countertops, the drab little breakfast nook with its card table and folding chairs and the sachets of scraggly cohosh hanging over the sink. A crash from the hall behind them. Someone had pasted a water-spotted paper chore wheel onto one of the cabinets. Neela: Trash, Stevie: Dishes, Veronica: Harvest, Sibylle: Pigeons. Not letting herself pause to wonder what the fuck kind of chore “pigeons” was, she gestured for Karin to go out through the back to sweep the porch and yard. The tall, skinny girl fumbled with the knob a moment, shooting an embarrassed look back at Ramona, before vanishing into the dark outside. Ramona turned back toward the smoke just as a wispy little elf of a trans woman came flying at her out of the darkened pantry. She had an impression of a wrinkled face, wild white hair, and the hard knot of an Adam’s apple. Ramona caught the other woman’s knife arm by the wrist and for a moment they struggled over the long blade, stumbling around the kitchen in a clumsy, desperate dance. The knife caught the starlight coming through the open kitchen window. The air was cold and damp. Did it rain last night? Ramona drove the woman back into the counter, knocking a stack of dishes to the floor to shatter at their feet. Screams rang from the hall behind her. Flashlight beams swept the kitchen through the window over the sink.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  If I hadn’t taken that stupid fucking shot. That girl screaming—straight bangs and big brown eyes—with the shaft buried deep in her shoulder. Beth shook her head. She passed a hand gingerly over her face, brushing light against the swollen skin around her stitches, and wondered if she’d have time for a quick shave tomorrow. It felt stupid to still care about it. It wasn’t like she’d ever passed, not at six foot two and two hundred pounds with her long horse face, broad shoulders, and blocky jaw. Why bother scraping another few days of stubble off something no one with eyes would ever think was a real woman? She made herself exhale. A self-pitying spiral wasn’t going to help anything. A shave would make her feel better. She didn’t need to put any more thought into it than that. Thanks, though, depression. This was fun. Minutes ticked by. Beth timed her breathing, trying to ease herself into drowsiness, to relax her muscles one by one until whichever of them held her wakeful finally unclenched. The stars turned overhead. The shadows of clouds swept over them. The heat was terrible, a smothering weight lying skin to skin with her no matter how she tossed and turned. Sweat poured in rivers over her tight, sunburned skin. A sound jerked her bolt upright in the starlight. A muted thunder of crunches and snaps from the forest to the north. Underbrush rustling in a distant susurrus. She shuffled on her knees to the roof’s retaining wall, squinting at the distant smear of Boston’s lights beyond the trees. Before T-Day it would have burned like a beacon. Now it was only a pale yellow-white smudge, a porch light someone had forgotten to turn off. The crashing grew louder. Across the parking lot, a doe burst out of the dark under the pines. She was full-out, lathered like a racehorse, her shadow sweeping smooth and fleet over the broken pavement with each bound. Behind her, mouths gaping, eyes luminous in the faint silver light, came a tide of men. They ran on all fours, callused feet and knuckles making the visitor center shake under Beth’s knees. She glanced at Fran, still sleeping, and then back at the oncoming wave. Their eyes glinted in the dark like the eyes of animals caught in car headlights. The deer ran on. Beth wondered what had happened to the rest of her herd. Torn flesh. Gristle stretched by rotten teeth. A scrap of dappled hide. A gory hoof. The men streamed after her, backs heaving, limbs scything through grit and dust and flying pine needles. They poured past the visitor center, their pack stretching out as stragglers fell behind and the doe opened up a lead.

• From My People (2022)

  It was based on more than a hundred interviews, conducted in six of the country’s nine provinces. “There are real gaps in just information of what sexual orientation is, what gender is, what gender identity is,” Nath told me. “Coupled with that is a history of violence in the country.” She cited a number of factors to explain the increase in violence, including mass migration of male laborers to cities, unsafe working conditions, and the legacy of segregation and apartheid policies that encouraged violent crime in townships by leaving them deliberately unpoliced. She pointed, too, to widespread firearm use, beginning during colonial rule and continuing through apartheid. Socioeconomic inequality has persisted in the post-apartheid era, as have alarming rates of unemployment, lack of educational and economic opportunity, uneven functioning of state institutions, and the devastating effect of HIV and AIDS. I asked Saki Macozoma, a prominent businessman and a former employee of the South African Council of Churches, about this period of transition. “We live in an age that one Xhosa writer called ‘the generation of doubt,’ with one foot in traditional society and another in some form of modernity,” he said. He theorized that the fading authority of the clan, the unit that once instilled order in the lives of many South Africans, had created a “sense of rootlessness,” opening the road to criminality. At the EPOC offices, a woman named Lungile Cleopatra Dladla, from a nearby township, told me of the night she was raped. Dladla, a stocky lesbian in her mid-twenties, was walking home one night with a female friend who was also gay. An armed man, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, came up behind them and directed them to a field. “Then he undressed us,” she said. “He tied us, and then he was going, ‘Ja, today I want to show you that you’re girls.’” He raped them both. “And then, immediately after, he dressed and untied my friend’s hands and then untied my feet and then he walked. You could hear the grass—like a snake is walking through the grass. From a distance, he shouted, ‘Now you can dress and go.’ My friend untied my hands, I untied her feet, and then we started dressing. He even wanted to take my clothes, because they’re man clothes: my shoes and T-shirt. He says he will leave the pants.” The young women went to the local police station, where, Dladla said, she was “victimized” again; the police insisted that she was not a woman. “They said, ‘He’s not a girl. How can he be raped?’” Eventually, a former classmate who happened to work at the police station recognized her, and the officers finally took down information about the crime. Dladla told me that she had been raped once before, when she was six or seven. The perpetrator was her father. About two years after she was raped in the field, Dladla started having trouble breathing.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The tall girl’s forearm trembled. Her fingers flexed on her bowstring. Septum Piercing stood her ground but Fran saw her bottom lip tremble, like a child’s. I don’t want to see this. The whine of a motor ripped through the stillness. Beth whirled toward the sound, arrow flying off at random into the underbrush as Septum Piercing dropped and scrambled into the cover of the ferns, snatching up her crossbow on the way. Fran lurched to her feet, dripping and dizzy with the pain in her jaw. Beside her Beth was fumbling with another arrow. There, on the crest of the southern ridge of the defile, was Teach. She rode on a fast little Honda motorbike, the kind Fran’s dad would have called a crotch rocket, slewing toward them down the slope at breakneck speed. Her hair blew wild all around the pale, pointed oval of her face and she had something compact and black in her hands, too small to be a crossbow but— “Beth!” Fran screamed. “Get down!” The submachine gun barked like sped-up footage of a bichon frise having some kind of seizure. Moss and dirt flew where the hail of bullets ripped into the bank. Bits of shredded fern floated through the air over Fran’s head as she cowered in the stream, duffel clamped tight against her side. Through the underbrush she could just see Septum Piercing wriggling away flat on her belly. That seemed like the right idea. All we need is enough breathing room to get up the far slope and into the trees. They won’t follow, not just for two trashgirls. The sewing machine clatter of Teach’s gun let up, the echoes ringing down the defile’s wooded length. The Honda’s engine purred as it rolled downhill, closer and closer. Soon Teach wouldn’t be able to miss if she tried. Fran looked over at Beth. The other girl lay huddled against the bank with her bow over one shoulder and her chin pressed to the mud, dirty blond hair hiding her face. We’re not going to make it, she thought, curling in on herself as her insides filled up with the black sludge of despair. I don’t want to run anymore. A scream rose up from the woods. It hung in the air, high and quavering, and seemed to come from all sides. Another voice, farther away, added its ear-piercing song and a white knife of terror cut through Fran’s paralysis. She knew that sound. It had chased her for five years, chased her all the way from the dressing room at the Charlotte Russe at the Steeplegate Mall to this overgrown ditch where she knelt quivering, sweat streaming down her face, waiting to die. She looked up.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  He squinted down the sights, picked a target, led it, and put a round cleanly through its bellowing face as other women joined him at the ramparts, fumbling with their guns, some still in pajamas and T-shirts in spite of the morning chill. A ragged, rippling wave of gunfire. Limbs went out from under charging bodies. Puffs of dirt rose from the barren ground. Robbie shrugged his blanket off and worked the bolt, ejecting a smoking cartridge. A wave of screams rose from the tree line, a moving wall of noise so loud it felt like a slap as it broke over the wall. The scavenged wood and bricks shook beneath him, and the body of the horde broke from the shadows under the old pines. Thousands of them. More than he’d ever seen in one place. For a moment he froze in place, unable to imagine how he could begin to choose where to shoot. What was the point? Like firing at a landslide. Then Steph plunked down beside him, sweaty and flushed, and opened up with the M60 they’d looted from the Screw. The gun sounded like a car door slamming about thirty times a second. Smoking shells fountained from its ejector, pinging off the bricks as Steph swept the barrel back and forth. Muzzle flash strobed in the predawn gloom. Men came apart. Robbie sucked in a deep breath and ducked back down to his sights. He fired. He worked the bolt. He fired again. Bloody skin and rotten teeth. The forefront of the charging wave barreled on into the minefield. Detonations tore the earth and flung towers of flame and smoke into the sky as shrapnel and ball bearings shredded flesh and pulverized the bone beneath. Still they came on, pounding through the carnage and the drifting towers of smoke, racing toward the wall. That was when the trucks roared out of the woods, three huge semi cabs plowing through saplings and thundering over the rocky, uneven ground. Driverless. Steering wheels must be jammed in place , he realized. Bricks on the accelerators. Men vanished under the huge tires. Others scrambled, shrieking and yelping, out of the way. The leftmost drifted from its course, funneled by a flat tire or the lay of the peninsula or some other quirk of fate out onto the stony beach and into the surf. The right-hand truck went up in a spectacularly sudden fireball as Steph hosed it with armor-piercing rounds. The middle truck came on. Bullets punched through its grille and hood. Shattered its windscreen. It’s going to hit. “Get down!” Robbie screamed, lurching to his feet. “Get off the wall!” His legs tangled in the discarded heap of his blanket. He toppled.

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

  The whole burden of it seems to fall on him full force. His shoulders slump. The deep lines of his face get deeper. Then he gets an unfocused look at the middle distance like the beating’s happening right in the room, and all he has to do is watch it and report back to the other guys. “That pole of hers cut the shirt right off my back in about four swipes.” His head drops lower, as if under the weight of that pole, which is getting easier by the minute for me to imagine. “I’ve had grown men beat on me with tire irons and socks full of nickels and every conceivable kind of stick. But that old woman shrunk up like a pullet hen took that piss elum pole and flat set me on fire from my shoulders clear down past my ass. And every time she said a word, she brought that pole down. ‘Don’t—you—lie—to—me—Don’t—you—run—from—me!’ Hell, I broke loose from her a couple of times. And I run to the screen door. But the pine boards on that old sleeping porch was swole up from that rain. The door was swole. So I couldn’t pull it flush all the way, couldn’t get the latch unhooked. I’d just about get it wiggled tight in the frame, and then that pole would find my back again. You could hear it come whistling through the air just a heartbeat before you felt it. And Momma behind it just hacking at me like I was a pine she was trying to knock over. I was scared to fall. Scared I wouldn’t live to get vertical again. I promise you that. You think she was wore out on A.D.?” He squints at us, then picks up the mallard again and picks at a few of the quills like he’s winding down. “Hell, she just warmed up on A.D.” “They hate that when you run,” Ben says. He’s sliding the last egg onto the platter. “My grandma was the same exact way. Running just dragged it out.” Of course, I am famous for running in the middle of a spanking. It makes me proud that Daddy used to run too. I always figured only a dumbass would just stand still and take it. I have maneuvered my way over by the stove and am eye level now with the plate of biscuits, which have plumped up nice and brown on top. The slightest blink from Ben saying okay, and I will snatch the first one. “I finally broke straight through the middle of that screen,” Daddy says. “Left a outline of myself cut clean around the edges as a paper doll.” Shug winks at me over the unlikeliness of this. He always keeps me posted as to the believability quotient of what Daddy’s saying, even though I’m a kid, and a notorious pain in the ass as kids go.

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

  Her name was Octavie; we were soon informed she was a girl of the highest quality, born in Paris, and had just emerged from a convent in order to wed the Comte de * * *: she had been kidnaped while en route in the company of two governesses and three lackeys; she did not know what had become of her retinue; it had been toward nightfall and she alone had been taken; after having been blindfolded, she had been brought to where we were and it had not been possible to know more of the matter. As yet no one had spoken a word to her. Our libertine quartet, confronted by so much charm, knew an instant of ecstasy; they had only the strength to admire her. Beauty's dominion commands respect; despite his heartlessness, the most corrupt villain must bow before it or else suffer the stings of an obscure remorse; but monsters of the breed with which we had to cope do not long languish under such restraints. "Come, pretty child," quoth the superior, impudently drawing her toward the chair in which he was settled, "come hither and let's have a look to see whether the rest of your charms match those Nature has so profusely distributed in your countenance." And as the lovely girl was sore troubled, as she flushed crimson and strove to fend him off, Severino grasped her rudely round the waist. "Understand, my artless one," he said, "understand that what I want to tell you is simply this: get undressed. Strip. Instantly." And thereupon the libertine slid one hand beneath her skirts while he grasped her with the other. Clement approached, he raised Octavie's clothes to above her waist and by this maneuver exposed the softest, the most appetizing features it is possible anywhere to find; Severino touches, perceives nothing, bends to scrutinize more narrowly, and all four agree they have never seen anything as beautiful. However, the modest Octavie, little accustomed to usage of this sort, gushes tears, and struggles. "Undress, undress," cries Antonin, "we can't see a thing this way."

• From Manhunt (2022)

  As she nocked an arrow, took aim through the pine’s sheltering limbs, and drew back to the corner of her mouth, thighs clamped tight around her branch, Beth heard one of them say something about a car. She loosed. It caught the one with the bait bag high up in the left thigh. She went over, and to her credit she had the presence of mind not to scream. Beth watched her face turn purple with effort, tendons standing out in her neck like cables as she dragged herself over the forest floor, hands clawing at dead needles and soft humus. It didn’t matter, though, because the one Keesha nailed through the stomach with a crossbow bolt from a tree set back from the far side of the game trail started shrieking like a banshee about half a second later. Chinless cast about wildly for something to shoot as two others got Thigh Wound to her feet and started hauling her back the way they’d come, shouting for the rest to follow as the first harsh screams rose up from the deep woods to the northwest. One woman, a thin fortysomething blonde, took off alone at a run, her Legion sisters yelling at her to come back, to get back here Paula, you stupid bitch, but she was gone. Beth wondered if any of them would make it back alive to the fire-bombed hulk of their truck. An afternoon cull, picking off men in twos and threes before winter set in and dwindling food supply drove them into packs, then hordes. Leaves and pine needles flurried through the air as a stiff wind blew through the trees. The TERFs hadn’t made it far when the men came at them, two on the right and a larger pack snarling and slobbering somewhere just out of sight on the flagging group’s left. Chinless brought her crossbow up and fired too early, the bolt burying itself in a tree with a low thrumming sound. The men on the right flank broke from a thicket, three huge specimens trailed by a clutch of yearlings, teenager-slender rape spawn with mouths full of rotting baby teeth and milky eyes weeping rivers of crusty conjunctival crud. Beth thought of Leda’s little boy, George, and his screams of delight as he ran in and out of the freezing surf along the shore outside Fort Dyke. She thought of what Indi had sobbed to her near dawn a few days ago. The man in the Screw and his clutch of bastard boys. Two of the surviving women—the gutshot with the wedding band and the sad eyes and one of those who’d dragged her—got to their sidearms and shot themselves before the men closed with the hunting party. Crossbows twanged. A man went down, floundered in the deadfall like a landed fish.

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

  We roll on our sides and face each other. The quilt squares stretch beneath us. We hopscotch from square to square in finger tag—black gabardine to charcoal flannel to gray pinstripe, like farmlands seen from up high. Mother earlier smashed all the lightbulbs in our room with a broom handle, so it’s dark. You can’t quite decipher the individual pieces of furniture tipped over and flung around, just the right angles that poke up making a jagged mountain landscape around our floor pallet. I can hear Mother in the kitchen now. She must be dumping cutlery from the drawers because the noise of metal crashing explodes then stops, explodes then stops. If I close my eyes it’s like a great battle right out of King Arthur is taking place in there. I can picture knights in armor bringing their swords down against shields, arrows flying into battlements, lances striking the breastplates of horsemen. When I open my eyes, though, there is only the dark plain of the quilt we lie on divided up in squares by the neat grid of suit samples. Next to me Lecia’s face is long and white under her spiky bangs. She looks baleful as a basset hound. She has stopped hopscotching and now presses her index finger against her lips to show me not to say anything, but what might I say? A long rectangle of light spills over us from the open door. Then a dark shape comes to occupy that light, a figure in the shape of my mom with a wild corona of hair and no face but a shadow. She has lifted her arms and broadened the stance of her feet, so her shadow turns from a long thin line into a giant X. And swooping down from one hand is the twelve-inch shine of a butcher knife, not unlike the knife that crazy guy had in Psycho for the shower scene, a stretched-out triangle of knife that Daddy sharpens by hand on his whetstone before he dismantles a squirrel or a chicken, though it is also big enough to have hacked through the hip joint of a buck. It holds a glint of light on its point like a star, so that old rhyme pops into my head: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. Then I don’t know what to wish for. Lecia’s finger stays pressed to her lips. Her eyes are big but steady on that figure in the doorway and on the knife. I wish not to scream. Screaming would piss Lecia off. I can tell. A scream is definitely not what I want to happen to me right now. It’s part wish and part prayer that zips through my head and keeps me from howling. No sooner do I choke down that scream than a miracle happens. A very large pool of quiet in my head starts to spread.

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

  Even when she said that they were my half brother and half sister, I couldn’t figure it out. Hell, other than Mother divorcing Paolo, which was a kind of family secret, I’d never known anybody who’d divorced, never even heard about anybody divorcing other than Elizabeth Taylor. The idea of having half a sister fascinated me. Which half was mine? I must have asked Grandma about this, because at some point she explained that they were Mother’s Other Kids from her Other Husband. I asked was that Paolo, whom Daddy had whomped so good so long ago, and she said no. She always got weary thinking of how Mother had thrown Paolo over, so she took a second to look weary before saying that their daddy was another husband, Mother’s first husband, Tex, who was news to me. The whole idea of a new husband and two kids added up to my not knowing squat about Mother’s life before she came to Leechfield. Her history was almost a cipher as it stood. Oh, I knew she’d gone to art school in New York City during the war. But none of that story involved any other babies. She always made a big deal about how Lecia and I were her first babies, how she was thirty and that was old. I kept staring at the pictures in Grandma’s lap till she snapped them closed and slid them back in her dress pocket. While the fact of these two kids was trying to take shape in my head, Grandma did something that to this day my sister claims was so out of character for her it could not have happened. She grabbed my shoulder and breathed that death smell all over my face and said that should I fail to mind my mother—here Grandma brought her mouth right up to my face—if I continued to sass back and crud everything up—her eyes were almost pure white by now behind her smeary horn-rims—I would be Sent Away, just like they had been. They had never seen their mother again, not since they were babies. It was then that I found out that the snake smell wasn’t just from her bedpan or some old food getting nasty somewhere in the room. It came from her. In fact, it came from her open mouth, from deep inside her where the cancer was doubtless eating out whatever was human. If you had told me at that minute that writhing in her belly were dozens of newly hatched baby moccasins just busted loose from their eggs, I doubt I would have expressed surprise. She had also put Vicks VapoRub around her nostrils, maybe to shield her very self from her mouth’s own death stink. That eucalyptus in the Vicks rode right on top of her cottonmouth breath in a way that made it worse. (The closest I had ever come to that smell before Grandma’s room was the closest I’d come to a snakebite.

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

  Hearing the national anthem got all balled up in his mind with that brother’s funeral—the flag folded neat in a navy-blue triangle some officer handed over to his mother, the fistful of dirt Hector himself had tossed down the oblong hole onto the polished box they lowered by hand on straps. Anyway, Lecia stood, and Hector’s face worked itself into a twist we’d never seen. He wound up calling Lecia a spoiled little bitch. Now, nobody would dispute we were spoiled. But the “bitch” part hit some string in Mother, and the next thing we knew she held that pistol. Night had blacked out the bay windows behind her. She had on a silk slip the color of mayonnaise. Underneath that slip was her long-line conical bra, which turned breasts into something not unlike artillery. Hector slumped in the rose chintz armchair. His head bobbed down, so folds of neck skin gathered around his chin like a basset hound’s. He said go on and shoot, his life wasn’t worth a nickel anyway. I got the idea to fling myself across his body. I was betting Mother wouldn’t plug me to get at him. And the move did draw her up short. She squinted at me as if I were a long ways off. When she waved the gun sideways to motion me out of the way, her arm looked boneless and wiggly as an eel. Scoot over , she said. Lecia begged her not to pull the trigger, while I draped the length of my body down his front like a lobster bib. He smelled of Burma-Shave and scotch. His belly was wishy under all the knobs and angles of me. I sank into that softness a notch, then craned my head back to see what effect I was having on Mother. A mist from somewhere inside her skull seemed to skitter behind her green eyes. She was considering. Her hand even dropped a few degrees from its straight-on angle. My poor, poor babies , she said. Then the lines of her face drew up and hardened into something like resolve. Get offa him, Mary Marlene , she said. Hector’s breath was wicked sour when he pleaded back to her, Honey …to which she said shut up. Lecia took her place at Mother’s elbow. She stared up with an expression that struck me as lawyerly, like Perry Mason’s at the jury box. At any second she might’ve drawn out a pointer and clicked on an overhead projector, the better to list her arguments, which, by the way, struck me as real obvious. If you shoot him, you’ll go to jail, maybe forever—that sort of thing. This didn’t trouble Mother one whit. She tossed her head and squared her shoulders. At least I’d have done something worthwhile , she said. Killing that low-life sonofabitch. She studied Hector like he was some worn-out farm mule she was fixing to plug. She waxed lyrical about what a worthless sack of shit he was.

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

  I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City café that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs, which is a shame, since I love those crabs for their sweet grease and liquid-smoke taste. I don’t remember how much Mother drank in that bayou café, where you could walk to the end of the dock after dinner and toss your leftover hush puppies to hungry alligators. My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat, I can see a sliver of Daddy’s hatchet-shaped profile—his hawk-beak nose and square jaw. Some headlights glide over him and then spill onto me. I want to see Mother’s face, to see which way her mood is drifting after all the wine. But I’m staring at the back of her head in its short, wild tangle of auburn curls. All at once, the car rears back the way a horse does underneath you if it shies away from a small, skittery animal on the road, and we’re climbing up the bridge. The steel webbing of the road sets the tires humming. That matches up just right with that humming in my head left over from the hurricane day. The night streams over the car and fans away like black water. I can almost feel a long wake of dark dragged out behind us. Sometime during this ride, the car has filled up with that musky snake smell from Grandma’s old room, a smell I hadn’t even noticed had been gone from our lives till it flooded back. Lecia rolls down the window, maybe to get the stink out. Her hair is spronging loose from its French twist. The wind’s about to suck me out that window and over the bridge rail. The rushing sound marries with the tires humming till a big rocket fills the small car space and makes me feel little. I muster all my courage to look out my window at the long drop down. It makes my stomach lurch. The steel girders jerk by my window in a fast staccato. In the distance, I can see two flaming refinery towers. They make a weird Oz-like glow that bleeds up the whole bottom part of the sky. It’s a chemical-green light the color of bread mold, rising up the night sky like a bad water stain climbing wallpaper. Out beyond the river there are marshes and bayous. A black barge moves slow under the bridge. Mother is shouting, shouting she wished herself dead before she’d ever married Daddy. She wished she’d been struck by lightning on this very bridge before she crossed over into that goddamn bog. Leechfield is the asshole of the universe, the great Nowhere. And Daddy is a great Nothing. I feel over for Lecia’s hand, and it’s a cold fist knotted shut.

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

  “Just more squirrel for me and you.” One Sunday, when Daddy was working days, I woke up late and found the old lady sitting in her wheelchair by herself in the kitchen. Breakfast dishes were scattered around, and she had a beer stuck between her thighs. I’d never been alone with her before and didn’t fancy it. She lifted her head like she’d been dozed off; then she jumped a little when she saw me. “Don’t shout!” I remember her saying. She gave me a walleyed stare. I told her I hadn’t made a peep. She said that Lecia had asked Mother to drive her to church, which idea made me want to dip snuff. Lecia’s religious ardors were at least as vague as mine. But her going to church had the desired effect on Grandma: she got a rapturous look telling me about it, as if that one piddling trip to the house of the Lord might hold Lecia a place in heaven. Then Grandma said she had something to show me in her room. I was grateful, at least, that she had her leg on that morning. She’d even covered it up with these thick support hose, Supp-Hose, they were called. They were orange and heavier than sausage casings. Anyway, she wore those and had wedged the black shoe back on the plastic foot. (There’s something overdressed about a shoe on a plastic foot, like it’s beside the point.) Once we were in her room, she closed the door and posted herself, wheelchair and all, right in front of it. Let me take a minute to tell you about the smell in that room. It stank of snake, specifically water moccasin. If you are walking in waders through a marsh, say, on a warm winter morning, scanning the sky for mallards riding their jagged V overhead, you can smell a moccasin slithering alongside you long before you see it. It has an odor like something dead just before the rot sets in and the worms in its belly skin get it to jiggling around unnaturally. Often the smell of some rotting carcass—armadillo or nutria rat or bird—has stopped me in my tracks and gotten me to turn my eyes expecting to find on the ground the triangular, near-black head of a cottonmouth, which is related to both cobra and pit viper and the most vicious snake on this continent. I could never smell one swimming in a bayou, but on land it gives off a musk easily as strong as skunk. (I knew a drug dealer once who collected them in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers.

• From My People (2022)

  Dozens of journalists have fled into exile and six have been charged with terrorism in absentia, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). When I visited Ethiopia earlier this month with a colleague from the CPJ and the continent-wide project called the African Media Initiative, journalists we met with told us they all live in fear, calling the terrorism law a “game changer.” One foreigner working in Ethiopia told me: “There is a red line. The problem is, we don’t know where it is.” When we met Bereket Simon, Ethiopia’s minister of information, he defended the incarceration of Eskinder and the seven other journalists locked up with him on the grounds that they were involved in terrorism. In a polite but firm dissent, he said neither Eskinder nor any of the other journalists were in prison for what they wrote. When we asked to see Eskinder and the others in prison, we were told that it was not likely and that turned out to be the case. But his wife, Serkalem, who was recently in New York receiving on Eskinder’s behalf a prestigious freedom of the press award from PEN America, told us when we met her in Addis that Eskinder had asked her to tell us that he was in no way connected with any terrorist group—there or in the United States. She also told us that he said that if the price of telling the truth was imprisonment, he could live with that. Of course, when the verdict is handed down—which is scheduled to happen Thursday—Eskinder could be sentenced to life in prison or death. Part of the reason for my involvement with journalists and their issues in Ethiopia and other parts of the continent is to try to present a much-maligned continent in a light different to that in which it is often portrayed elsewhere in the world: in a light that makes it clear that Africans want as much as anyone else to make choices about themselves and their children in an informed way, and that they have the same hopes and aspirations for themselves, their families, and their communities as do people in democracies the world over. Imperfect as many democracies are, their governments do not put people in jail for words that come out of their mouths and the freedom-loving desires that live in their hearts. That’s why, as an American, I hope that my countrymen and women who have that right should get on Ethiopia’s case. They should insist that a U.S. government which is pledged to ensure those rights in America should also help ensure them in Ethiopia. And I hope they will be joined by freedom-loving people all over the world, including on the African continent. But Ethiopia stands as a partner with the United States, in particular, in fighting real terrorists, including Al Qaeda, in a strategic part of the world.

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

  It was a dull white color. It looked like a free-floating brain knocked out of somebody’s skull. I found a pole to pick it up, stabbing up under the hard white tentacles till it was pretty deep on the stick with its inner goop squooshing out. This was the perfect weapon to chase Lecia with, jellyfish being somehow like roaches in their ability to make her squeal. I stood in the shorebreak and brandished it like a head on a pole, holding it angled away from myself so none of the poison would get on me. She’d backed up into a big piece of chop. The white top of the wave slapped over her head and got her hair in her face. She must have had hair spray in it, because it stayed glued together in a kind of slab, and she started rubbing at her eyes with a fury. She was still rubbing with one hand when she started squealing. At first I thought she was screaming to mock me. It was such a high-pitched squeal, like a little shoat hog might make. Then she danced up and down in the water, pumping her knees too high. I kept wielding the jellyfish on the pole at her. If anything, I was happy because I was really scaring her with it. I waded out a little closer to her. I wanted her to stop making fun of me so I could find out what kind of liquor license they had at the Breeze Inn. But of course she kept squealing. The slab of hair over her eyes shielded her face. But when she began swatting and slapping at her leg below the water, I backed up pretty quick. Maybe a braver child would have rushed to help her. I was not a braver child, though. I backed up slow, afraid if I took my eyes off her she might vanish below the surface in the jaws of some sea creature. After a while, I dropped the pole and ran as fast as I could to the bar. It was a hard run in deep sand from the waterline to the steps of the Breeze Inn. My feet sank and couldn’t get traction, like the run in a bad dream. Mother and Daddy ran back with me all the way down to the beach, but once they got there, they seemed way too calm. I mean, neither of them lit a cigarette or anything, but it took a long time before either of them really did much. The guy in the camouflage pants had dragged Lecia out of the water while I was fetching my parents. He was kneeling beside her with his pink grandma gloves on when we came up. Lecia sat on the sand with her legs straight out in front of her like some drugstore doll. She had stopped squealing.

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

  Lecia’s face shrinks back like somebody in the wrong end of your telescope. Then even Mother’s figure starts to alter and fade. In fact, the thin, spidery female form in black stretch pants and turtleneck wielding a knife in one upraised arm is only a stick figure of my mother, like the picture I drew in Magic Marker on the Mother’s Day card I gave her last Sunday. I wrote underneath it in pink block letters that I decorated with crayon drawings of lace, “You are a nice Mom. I love you. It has been nice with you. Love from Mary Marlene.” That Sunday morning when she’d opened that card up and read it, she cried racking sobs and hugged me hard so her tears streamed down into my ears till Lecia showed up at Mother’s bedside with a vodka martini she’d mixed saying, Here, sip at this. Then there was another martini and another. Della Reese was singing “Mack the Knife” on the record player. She kept saying My poor, poor babies and This isn’t your fault. By the time I got my nerve up to sneak in the kitchen and upend the vodka bottle down the sink, there was only an inch left anyway. That was Mother’s Day a week ago. On my card, I had drawn a stick-figure mom wearing a string of Ping-Pong-sized pearls around its stick neck. Now in my mind, that stick figure is what Mother becomes. She’s just a head like a ball and curly scribbles for hair. But there the likeness to the figure on my card ends. This stick figure holds a triangle knife with a star glinting off its end. My stick-figure sister is breathing deep in the chest of her white PJs, and I match my breath to hers. We lie there in that cartoon of a room for what seems like forever, and then out of nowhere Mother roars No! like a lioness, her mouth shapes itself into a giant black O with real definite pointy teeth for what seems like a long time. The black NO sails out of that mouth in a long balloon with the tail of a comet streaking past us and out the wax-papered windows into the flaming night. That’s how God answered my prayers: I learned to make us all into cartoons. That stick woman in the center of the big black page with her eyebrows squinched down in a mad V over pin-dot eyes is no more my mother than some monster on the Saturday cartoons. She just isn’t. I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice. I can feel Lecia cock her head at me, like she wants to know what the hell I have to grin about. Now the stick-figure mom sets down the knife on the floor to dial the phone.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Then, in December, the Apollo lifted anchor and headed to the warmer climate of the Canary Islands. One day in Tenerife, Hubbard decided to take his Harley-Davidson motorcycle out for a spin on the twisty mountain roads. Miles away, in the lush volcanic landscape, the Harley hit a patch of oil or mud and crashed. Hubbard broke his arm and several ribs. Somehow he managed to right his bike and make his way back to the ship. Some members of the Sea Org cite the motorcycle accident as the moment when Scientology changed course and sailed toward a darker horizon. Hubbard was in terrible pain, but he was fearful of doctors and refused to go to the hospital. Dincalci and the ship’s other medical officer, Kima Douglas, neither of whom had a medical degree, attempted to treat him. They strapped Hubbard’s injured arm to his side and wrapped his broken ribs, then sat him in a velvet reading chair, which he rarely left for the next six weeks, day or night. The whole ship could hear him cursing and screaming and throwing plates and things against the wall with his one good arm. He was in too much discomfort to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, so the ranting and moaning went on almost nonstop. The medical officers had persuaded him to let a local doctor come aboard with a kind of primitive X-ray machine, which confirmed the broken bones. The doctor left Dincalci a prescription for pain pills. The first time Dincalci gave Hubbard the pain pills, however, Hubbard panicked and said that they had slowed down his heart. “ You’re trying to kill me!” he shouted. Dincalci, who looked upon Hubbard as a father, both spiritually and emotionally, was devastated. Hubbard ordered him “beached”—dropped off in Madeira, the distant Portuguese island, where he remained for a year. Other members of the Sea Org were having a hard time coping with the blatant contradiction between Hubbard’s legend and the crabby, disconsolate figure howling in his stateroom. “ If he is who he says he is, why does he have so little staying power?” Hana Eltringham wondered. “He has a motorcycle accident, he doesn’t recover quickly, and he doesn’t use Scientology techniques on himself.” By now, Eltringham had been promoted to Deputy Commodore, the highest post in the Sea Org after Hubbard himself. She had been off the ship for a couple of years, in Los Angeles, running the Advanced Orgs—the divisions responsible for producing Operating Thetans—and setting up a liaison office to supply the Scientology fleet. During that period, she began experiencing crippling headaches. Some days she was unable to work at all. She couldn’t even lie down because the pressure from the pillow was unbearable. The vibration of footsteps in the hall outside her room made the pain excruciating. She thought if she could only discover the body thetans that she must be harboring she could ease her misery.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  I will have a cunt, I will, I will, and I’ll never be hungry again or sleep outside or have to pretend with Beth. It’s going to be better. It’s going to be— “Perfect,” said Viv, tugging off her right glove with her teeth and offering Nam-joo her hand. “Let’s fucking celebrate.” Robbie staggered out the clinic’s front door, stepping over Reena’s body where it lay curled on the threshold in the arms of another corpse—a man, his teeth buried in the back of her neck, a crossbow bolt through his left eye socket. A dozen yards off, two more men were fighting over what was left of Sam in the shade of a stand of beeches. Flesh stretched and tore between their rotting teeth. He watched them, breathing hard. The van stood unattended across the expanse of the parking lot. Thirty yards of waving grass and wildflowers shedding dry, dead petals in the wind. I can make it. From somewhere back inside the clinic came the booming report of Doe’s revolver. A man screamed again. Another answered from the tree line to the north. No more time to think. He shoved his knife into its sheath and launched himself toward the van. No cover. Witchgrass hissing against his jeans. His own breath rasping in his ears as he saw Sam yanked again and again back through the hole in the wall. Blood on broken brick and concrete. An eagle swooped low over the field, passing by not far from him, and he wished, with the same terrible, helpless fury with which he had once wished to sleep and wake up as a boy, to shuck his skin and leap after it into the sky, to be wild and alone and friendless. Free. The van’s rear doors were open. He leaped inside, nearly braining himself on the car’s roof. The gray tomcat hissed at him from underneath the passenger seat, eyes gleaming like jewels in the dark. He covered his mouth to stifle a yelp of hysterical fear and crouched down to catch his breath, not daring to believe he’d made it. The keys were still in the ignition. The lockbox where Doe kept her handguns lay forgotten under the bench that ran the length of the van’s left-hand wall. “You coming with me?” he asked the cat, who only hunkered down and made a low, warning kind of yraowl sound. He chuckled and turned back to pull the doors shut behind him. Doe stood there, snub-nosed revolver pointed squarely at his chest. “Too bad,” she rasped. Her ginger hair was matted and spiky with blood. Ugly gashes glistened on her throat and shoulder. She held her right arm tucked under her left and the sleeve of her windbreaker was soaked through and dripping.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  There would be no rebellion for him, no linking up with Zia and her crew within and without the Screw to liberate the women it was sending north to be worked to death by TERFs on some industrial project. They’re going to put me through something, something to make sure I stay loyal. “Sure,” he said. “Give me a second—I’ll get dressed.” He kicked the door shut and dove under his bed, scrambling over the concrete floor without regard for his bare knees. Or, he thought as he used his teeth to rip a strip of electrical tape from the roll he’d stashed and wrapped it tight around his stolen knife to strap it to his forearm, they know I talked to Zia and they’ll just kill me, and leave my body out there for the dogs, and the turkey vultures. He’d tried to find Indi last night, to tell her what was happening, but she hadn’t answered her door and the public clinic wasn’t open. He struggled into an old, paint-stained sweatshirt and a pair of shapeless jeans. His reflection, pale and harried, looked back at him from the mirror by the door. He made himself take a breath. Another. And another. His composure was all that stood between him and the forest’s scavengers. He exhaled and gripped the doorknob. And the other men. Vivian led them down the beach, waves flattening out over wet sand before retreating, leaving only a silvery sheen and a few flecks of foam in their wake. Fran watched a crab scuttle sidelong through the rushing surf. The ocean was calm today, sparkling and trackless, and seagulls whirled over the breakers where they tumbled clear and ponderous into the shallows, the mass of the water beneath them no longer enough to support their weight. Dissolution. The hiss of water over earth. Ahead, the TERFs’ work crews were scrapping the USS Hyannis , taking her apart screw by screw and loading the resultant detritus onto the barges they’d pulled ashore in the predawn light. Hydraulic cutters whined. Rusted steel crunched and sparks flew in short-lived jets where women severed struts and whatever you called the little walls around the deck with acetylene torches. Most of the pilot house and radar tower were already disassembled and loaded away, and a crane jacked up on bricks and shale strewn over the sand had one of the deck guns swinging from its arm. “We’ll have shipping running up and down the coast,” Viv shouted back at Fran and Nam-joo. “Rye, Portsmouth, Bath—we’ll start in Boston, come up through here!” They have people that far north? “Fuel?” Nam-joo shouted back.