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 My Secret Garden (1973)

  At one time I used to collect pictures of tattooed people and patterns that I thought would be nice as things to have done, but then I threw them away because I got frightened that he might find them. I really would like to be tattooed, but of course it is not possible. But just to think about it gets me going. Mostly though, it only happens when I am having it off with my husband; and there is another little thing: If I get too randy, I start rolling about, and if my husband loses it out of me he gets mad at me. So I have to be a bit careful. I have never told anyone else about this and I know you will think I am silly but it really does happen. [Letter] ROOM NUMBER SIX: THE SEXUALITY OF TERROR, OR, “HELP! I’M OUT OF CONTROL, THANK GOD!”I may be making work for myself, defining differences in the emotions behind fantasy where they may not exist, setting up two rooms in the House of Fantasy where there could be one. It would be easier—certainly more obvious—to relegate Johanna (below) to the Rape Room, instead of arranging for a completely separate space just to satisfy her slightly different, though none the less real, sexual desires. But this House has no precedent, nor has my work, and therefore I choose to specify a whole separate area of fantasy that is occupied by fear. Not just ordinary fear, but the kind of total and complete terror that can be strangely sexual when you see it as leading to loss of control. It’s the only way I can account for the different quality in the fantasies that follow. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to understand that for some women who never reach an orgasm, it may have to do with their fear of letting go, fear of the helplessness, the lack of control, that goes with orgasm… you just have to be a woman. And for some women—especially highly independent, self-contained women like Johanna and Anne (below), who manage their lives unto themselves—the loss of this control must be terrifying, the experience of orgasm impossible without, and synonymous with, the terror. You don’t have to have been “scared shitless” to know what it means. Continue the sensation of the pounding heart, the open mouth, the helpless, limp attitude of the body on to orgasm, and you’re halfway to understanding the sexuality of fear for these women.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The husband doesn’t like people watching him, so I always look at his left ear when he pays me in cash. When I mow their lawn, the husband hides under the sofa and says I’ll never find him. One weekend, the Armenian woman tells me not to come back. She says her husband is afraid of the monkey in the tree. He told her about it. He’s seen it many times. I say I’ve never seen any monkey. Describe it to me. Her husband says the monkey had a bald red face and a flat nose, hair thick as needles, a tail made of scissor blades. The monkey could climb high, all the way up to the ceiling of the sky, and sometimes it tried to thieve from the tree, pinching the leaves and pocketing the fruit in its cheek. The monkey had beady eyes and looked to be about breeding age. Her husband says the monkey is frightening him. I say I’m not afraid of any monkey, I’ll come anyway. I’ll help kill it. The Armenian lady says no, the monkey might bring fleas or babies, and that’s when I realize the monkey is me. _ Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it’s given birth. The floor is dappled with blood from the earlier fight, when Jie had thrown a knife. It was aimed at Ma but found its destiny in me. The knife landed in the delta of my inner elbow. My blood was dynamic, leaping out in two directions, avoiding the walls. Earlier we’d been watching a TV broadcast about a serial killer back on the island. The man claimed to be a former emperor reincarnated into a mailman. He’d beheaded two girls with an axe, claiming they were his concubines from another life and were destined to join him in his death-palace. We reached the place in the footage where the bodies had to be blurred out. There was a head on the sidewalk, an adjacent stain or shadow, and a forensic scientist prodding the head with something like a long fork. Ma said that long ago, our tribe had been headhunters, and that maybe this man was mistaken: In his past life he was not an emperor but a man of our tribe, a hunter in the wrong time. Ma said her grandfather once showed her the head he’d stolen off another tribe’s boy, how it was bloodless like a radish. How one eye still blinked, even days after death, and she waved at it in case it was lonely. For weeks, the whole family fed the head, offered it wine. If the skull learned to love the family, the fields would grow. Jie said, Enough, I’m trying to listen, and we watched the beheaded girl’s mother get interviewed. The mother said she’d tried walking onto a highway that morning, but god would not let her die, god chose her to outlive grief.

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

  The rest of the soiree would have resembled all the others had it not been for the beauty and the touching age of this young maiden who more than usually inflamed those villains and caused them to multiply their infamies; it was satiety rather than commiseration that sent the unhappy child back to her room and gave her, for a few hours at least, the rest and quiet she needed. I should indeed have liked to have been able to comfort her that first night, but, obliged to spend it with Severino, it may well have been I on the contrary who stood in the greater need of help, for I had the misfortune, no, not to please, the word would not be suitable, no, but in a most lively manner to excite that sodomite's infamous passions; at this period he desired me almost every night; being exhausted on this particular one, he conducted some researches; doubtless afraid the appalling sword with which he was endowed would not cause me an adequate amount of pain, he fancied, this time, he might perforate me with one of those articles of furniture usually found in nunneries, which decency forbids me from naming and which was of an exorbitant thickness; here, one was obliged to be ready for anything. He himself made the weapon penetrate into his beloved shrine; thanks to powerful blows, it was driven very deep; I screamed; the monk was amused, after a few backward and forward passes, he suddenly snapped the instrument free and plunged his own into the gulf he had just dug open... what whimsy! Is that not positively the contrary of everything men are able to desire! But who can define the spirit of libertinage? For a long time we have realized this to be an enigma of Nature; she has not yet pronounced the magic word. In the morning, feeling somewhat renewed, he wanted to try out another torture: he produced a far more massy machine: this one was hollow and fitted with a high-pressure pump that squirted an incredibly powerful stream of water through an orifice which gave the jet a circumference of over three inches; the enormous instrument itself was nine inches around by twelve long. Severino loaded it with steaming hot water and prepared to bury it in my front end; terrified by such a project, I throw myself at his knees to ask for mercy, but he is in one of those accursed situations where pity cannot be heard, where far more eloquent passions stifle it and substitute an often exceedingly dangerous cruelty. The monk threatens me with all his rage if I do not acquiesce; I have to obey.

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

  "Narcisse," said the Count to one of them, "here is the Countess' new chambermaid; I must test her; hand me the lancets." Narcisse opens a cupboard and immediately produces all a surgeon's gear. I allow your imagination to fancy my state; my executioner spied my embarrassment, and it merely excited his mirth. "Put her in place, Zephire," Monsieur de Gernande said to another of the youths, and this boy approached me with a smile. "Don't be afraid, Mademoiselle," said he, "it can only do you the greatest good. Take your place here." It was a question of kneeling lightly upon the edge of a tabouret located in the middle of the room; one's arms were elevated and attached to two black straps which descended from the ceiling. No sooner have I assumed the posture than the Count steps up scalpel in hand: he can scarcely breathe, his eyes are alive with sparks, his face smites me with terror; he ties bands about both my arms, and in a flash he has lanced each of them. A cry bursts from between his teeth, it is accompanied by two or three blasphemies when he catches sight of my blood; he retires to a distance of six feet and sits down. The light garment covering him is soon deployed; Zephire kneels between his thighs and sucks him; Narcisse, his feet planted on his master's armchair, presents the same object to him to suckle he is himself having drained by Zephire. Gernande gets his hands upon the boy's loins, squeezes them, presses them to him, but quits them long enough to cast his inflamed eyes toward me. My blood is escaping in floods and is falling into two white basins situated underneath my arms. I soon feel myself growing faint. "Monsieur, Monsieur," I cry, "have pity on me, I am about to collapse." I sway, totter, am held up by the straps, am unable to fall; but my arms having shifted, and my head slumping upon my shoulder, my face is now washed with blood. The Count is drunk with joy... however, I see nothing like the end of his operation approaching, I swoon before he reaches his goal; he was perhaps only able to attain it upon seeing me in this state, perhaps his supreme ecstasy depended upon this morbid picture.... At any rate, when I returned to my senses I found myself in an excellent bed, with two old women standing near me; as soon as they saw me open my eyes, they brought me a cup of bouillon and, at three-hour intervals, rich broths; this continued for two days, at the end of which Monsieur de Gernande sent to have me get up and come for a conversation in the same salon where I had been received upon my arrival. I was led to him; I was still a little weak and giddy, but otherwise well; I arrived.

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

  But the better feeling of the Christian church shrank from it with horror. The bishops Ambrose of Milan,247 and Martin of Tours,248 raised a memorable protest against it, and broke off all communion with Ithacius and the other bishops who had approved the execution. Yet it should not be forgotten that these bishops, at least Ambrose, were committed against the death penalty in general, and in other respects had no indulgence for heathens and heretics.249 The whole thing, too, was irregularly done; on the one hand the bishops appeared as accusers in a criminal cause, and on the other a temporal judge admitted an appeal from the episcopal jurisdiction, and pronounced an opinion in a matter of faith. Subsequently the functions of the temporal and spiritual courts in the trial of heretics were more accurately distinguished. The execution of the Priscillianists is the only instance of the bloody punishment of heretics in this period, as it is the first in the history of Christianity. But the propriety of violent measures against heresy was thenceforth vindicated even by the best fathers of the church. Chrysostom recommends, indeed, Christian love toward heretics and heathens, and declares against their execution, but approved the prohibition of their assemblies and the confiscation of their churches; and he acted accordingly against the Novatians and the Quartodecimanians, so that many considered his own subsequent misfortunes as condign punishment.250 Jerome, appealing to Deut. xiii. 6–10, seems to justify even the penalty of death against religious errorists.251

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

  The ummah also had internal troubles. Three of Medina’s Jewish tribes—the Qaynuqa, Nadir, and Qurayzah—were determined to destroy Muhammad, because he had undermined their political ascendency in the oasis. They had sizable armies and preexisting alliances with Mecca so they were a security risk. When the Qaynuqa and Nadir staged revolts and threatened to assassinate him, Muhammad expelled them from Medina. But the Nadir had joined the nearby Jewish settlement of Khaybar and drummed up support for Mecca among the local Bedouin. So after the Battle of the Trench, when the Qurayzah had put the entire settlement at risk by plotting with Mecca during the siege, Muhammad showed no mercy. In accordance with Arab custom, the seven hundred men of the tribe were slaughtered and the women and children sold as slaves. The other seventeen Jewish tribes remained in Medina, and the Quran continued to instruct Muslims to behave respectfully to “the people of the book” (ahl al-kitab) and stress what they all held in common.18 Even though the Muslims sentenced the tribesmen of Qurayzah for political rather than religious reasons, this atrocity marked the lowest point in the Prophet’s career. From then on, he intensified his diplomatic efforts to build relationships with the Bedouin, who had been impressed by his military success, and established a powerful confederacy. Bedouin allies did not have to convert to Islam but swore merely to fight the ummah’s enemies: Muhammad must be one of the few leaders in history to build an empire largely by negotiation.19 In March 628, during the month of the hajj, Muhammad announced, to everybody’s astonishment, that he intended to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, which, since pilgrims were forbidden to carry weapons, meant riding unarmed into enemy territory.20 About a thousand Muslims volunteered to accompany him. The Quraysh dispatched their cavalry to attack the pilgrims, but their Bedouin allies guided them by a back route into the sanctuary of Mecca, where all violence was forbidden. Muhammad then ordered the pilgrims to sit beside the Well of Hudaybiyyah and wait for the Quraysh to negotiate. He knew that he had put them in an extremely difficult position: if the guardians of the Kabah killed pilgrims on sacred ground, they would lose all credibility in the region. Yet when the Qurayshi envoy arrived, Muhammad agreed to conditions that seemed to throw away every advantage the ummah had gained during the war. His fellow pilgrims were so horrified that they almost mutinied, yet the Quran would praise the truce of Hudaybiyyah as a “manifest victory.” While the Meccans had behaved with typical jahili belligerence when they tried to slaughter the unarmed pilgrims, God had sent down the “spirit of peace” (sakina) upon the Muslims.21 Muhammad’s first biographer declared that this nonviolent victory was the turning point for the young movement: during the next two years “double or more than double as many entered Islam as ever before,”22 and in 630 Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army.

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

  Gregory was early instructed in the Holy Scriptures and in the rudiments of science. He soon conceived a special predilection for the study of oratory, and through the influence of his mother, strengthened by a dream,1968 he determined on the celibate life, that he might devote himself without distraction to the kingdom of God. Like the other church teachers of this period, he also gave this condition the preference, and extolled it in orations and poems, though without denying the usefulness and divine appointment of marriage. His father, and his friend Gregory of Nyssa were among the few bishops who lived in wedlock. From his native town he went for his further education to Caesarea in Cappadocia, where he probably already made a preliminary acquaintance with Basil; then to Caesarea in Palestine, where there were at that time celebrated schools of eloquence; thence to Alexandria, where his revered Athanasius wore the supreme dignity of the church; and finally to Athens, which still maintained its ancient renown as the seat of Grecian science and art. Upon the voyage thither he survived a fearful storm, which threw him into the greatest mental anguish, especially because, though educated a Christian, he, according to a not unusual custom of that time, had not yet received holy baptism, which was to him the condition of salvation. His deliverance he ascribed partly to the intercession of his parents, who had intimation of his peril by presentiments and dreams, and he took it as a second consecration to the spiritual office. In Athens be formed or strengthened the bond of that beautiful Christian friendship with Basil, of which we have already spoken in the life of Basil. They were, as Gregory says, as it were only one soul animating two bodies. He became acquainted also with the prince Julian, who was at that time studying there, but felt wholly repelled by him, and said of him with prophetic foresight: "What evil is the Roman empire here educating for itself!"1969 He was afterwards a bitter antagonist of Julian, and wrote two invective discourses against him after his death, which are inspired, however, more by the fire of passion than by pure enthusiasm for Christianity, and which were intended to expose him to universal ignominy as a horrible monument of enmity to Christianity and of the retributive judgment of God.1970

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

  “Why not?” she said, “and take note of what I am about to say to you. Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in woman’s nature than you imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman’s character is characterlessness. The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the most divine, of the filthiest as well as of the purest, thoughts, emotions, and actions. In spite of all the advances of civilization, woman has remained as she came out of the hand of nature. She has the nature of a savage, who is faithful or faithless, magnanimous or cruel, according to the impulse that dominates at the moment. Throughout history it has always been a serious deep culture which has produced moral character. Man even when he is selfish or evil always follows principles, woman never follows anything but impulses. Don’t ever forget that, and never feel secure with the woman you love.” * * * * * Her friend has left. At last an evening alone with her again. It seems as if Wanda had saved up all the love, which had been kept from her, for this superlative evening; never had she been so kind, so near, so full of tenderness. What happiness to cling to her lips, and to die away in her arms! In a state of relaxation and wholly mine, her head rests against my breast, and with drunken rapture our eyes seek each other. I cannot yet believe, comprehend, that this woman is mine, wholly mine. “She is right on one point,” Wanda began, without moving, without opening her eyes, as if she were asleep. “Who?” She remained silent. “Your friend?” She nodded. “Yes, she is right, you are not a man, you are a dreamer, a charming cavalier, and you certainly would be a priceless slave, but I cannot imagine you as husband.” I was frightened. “What is the matter? You are trembling?” “I tremble at the thought of how easily I might lose you,” I replied. “Are you made less happy now, because of this?” she replied. “Does it rob you of any of your joys, that I have belonged to another before I did to you, that others after you will possess me, and would you enjoy less if another were made happy simultaneously with you?” “Wanda!” “You see,” she continued, “that would be a way out. You won’t ever lose me then. I care deeply for you and intellectually we are harmonious, and I should like to live with you always, if in addition to you I might have—”

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

  "I have got to know how you are made," continued the Count, staring at me in a way that set me to trembling; "the post you are to occupy precludes any corporeal defects; show me what you have about you." I recoiled; but the Count, all his facial muscles beginning to twitch with anger, brutally informed me that I should be ill-advised to play the prude with him, for, said he, there are infallible methods of bringing women to their senses. "What you have related to me does not betoken a virtue of the highest order; and so your resistance would be quite as misplaced as ludicrous." Whereupon he made a sign to his young boys who, approaching immediately, fell to undressing me. Against persons as enfeebled, as enervated as those who surrounded me, it is certainly not difficult to defend oneself; but what good would it have done? The cannibal who had cast me into their hands could have pulverized me, had he wished to, with one blow of his fist. I therefore understood I had to yield: an instant later I was unclothed; 'twas scarcely done when I perceived I was exciting those two Ganymedes to gales of laughter. "Look ye, friend," said the younger, "a girl's a pretty thing, eh ? But what a shame there's that cavity there." "Oh!" cried the other, "nothing nastier than that hole, I'd not touch a woman even were my fortune at stake." And while my fore end was the subject of their sarcasms, the Count, an intimate partisan of the behind (unhappily, alas! like every libertine), examined mine with the keenest interest: he handled it brutally, he browsed about with avidity; taking handfuls of flesh between his fingers, he rubbed and kneaded them to the point of drawing blood. Then he made me walk away from him, halt, walk backward in his direction, keeping my behind turned toward him while he dwelled upon the sight of it.

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

  The gun was—in a word I pinched off Lecia’s sixth-grade spelling list—superfluous. Guns per se didn’t worry me. Every pickup in Leechfield sported a National Rifle Association sticker and rifle rack in the back window. I’d fired my first pistol way before kindergarten. Two-handed on New Year’s Eve, I’d leveled Daddy’s .22 over the garage roof and straight at the pie-faced moon. At the stroke of midnight, I squeezed the trigger. My hand flew up a good half yard, but I barely flinched at the blast. When the moon itself didn’t go hissing across the black sky like a plugged balloon, I busted out crying. Later, my BB gun took down all manner of sparrows and blackbirds. By second grade, if Daddy braced himself behind me, I could shoulder and shoot a four-ten shotgun without the recoil knocking my arm out of socket. That meant I waded into the black marshes during duck season in winter, and spring found me trotting behind while the men bagged brown morning doves for gumbo. Still, the sudden appearance of those guns in that bar set a shimmer of anxiety going in some watery place in my middle. They rested in the hands of people who’d never held firearms before. Fools, to a one. Like Hector, Gordon would draw his Magnum like Wyatt Earp for a joke, then shoo me off, saying the safety was on, or the chamber hollow. One night Joey fell into a crying jag at the bar. His poor poppa had died in the mines at forty, and he pressed Mother’s pistol to his temple, that shallow place where his hairline was starting to back up. After that, we’d stopped going to the bar, Lecia and I. But Mother hung on to her joke pistol. The night she decided to shoot Hector, it appeared in her hand fast. Lecia had been playing the piano when Hector two-stepped out of the bedroom sloshing scotch. He stood behind the bench all misty-eyed. After a few bouncing renditions of “Alley Cat,” he asked her to play the national anthem. She said she didn’t feel like it. Hector even dug down in his trouser pocket and hauled out a wadded-up ten-dollar bill. He smoothed it flat on the keyboard. He said that money was all hers if she’d only play “America the Beautiful.” I pointed out that “America the Beautiful” wasn’t the national anthem, which insight caused Hector to smile blurrily at me while Lecia wadded up his ten-spot and pitched it onto the strings. She banged down the keyboard cover and stood up. She wasn’t playing diddly-squat, she said. Usually, that would have sent old Hector sulking off to bed. But for some reason, he took offense. Maybe because at dinner he’d been talking about the brother he’d lost in World War II.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I have a frequent sexual fantasy about being raped, by one or more men. These fantasies do not take place, however, while having sex with my husband. They take place when I am alone, and with time on my hands. I know it sounds weird or even crazy, but at times I feel as if I want to actually act my fantasy out, as if it were truly happening! I don’t know why this happens, or why I should even feel this way. At the age of seventeen I was almost raped by a boy who was my best friend’s boyfriend. The act was never completed… he was finally stopped by my crying. This all took place in his car, while he was supposed to be taking me home from a party after he’d had a quarrel with his girlfriend. She left the party, and he stayed and drank pretty heavily, as did the rest of us. He volunteered to take me home, after my boyfriend, who is now my husband, called me at the party from his job and told me he had to work late and couldn’t make it. I remember wondering what my girlfriend actually saw in the boy, who was nothing but a rough, tough, and more or less foulmouthed bully. He had always been nice to me, but treated her like dirt. And yet she loved him, and took any kind of abuse from him, including getting pregnant by him, and then losing the baby by miscarriage in her fourth month. Anyway, on the way home he pulled into a deserted spot in our neighborhood. I immediately sensed what was about to happen and I had mixed emotions about it. I thought to myself how awfully exciting this was in one way, and then again I was truly scared! He immediately pulled me to him and wanted to kiss me, but I automatically refused. I really wanted to, just to find out if it was his animal charm, so to speak, that my girlfriend was in love with.

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

  "Listen to me, Therese, listen, my child, you have not yet heard it all, not by any means," said Omphale. "Pregnancy, reverenced in the world, is the very certitude of reprobation amongst these villains; here, the pregnant woman is given no dispensations: brutalities, punishments, and watches continue; on the contrary, a gravid condition is the certain way to procure oneself troubles, sufferings, humiliations, sorrows; how often do they not by dint of blows cause abortions in them whose fruits they decide not to harvest, and when indeed they do allow the fruit to ripen, it is in order to sport with it: what I am telling you now should be enough to warn you to preserve yourself from this state as best you possibly can." "But is one able to ?" "Of course, there are certain devices, sponges... But if Antonin perceives what you are up to, beware of his wrath; the safest way is to smother whatever might be the natural impression by striving to unhinge the imagination, which with monsters like these is not difficult. "We have here as well," my instructress continued, "certain dependencies and alliances of which you probably know very little and of which it were well you had some idea; although this has more to do with the fourth article Ä with, that is to say, the one that treats of our recruitings, our retrenchments, and our exchanges Ä I am going to anticipate for a moment in order to insert the following details. "You are not unaware, Therese, that the four monks composing this brotherhood stand at the head of their Order; all belong to distinguished families, all four are themselves very rich: independently of the considerable funds allocated by the Benedictines for the maintenance of this bower of bliss into which everyone hopes to enter in his turn, they who do arrive here contribute a large proportion of their property and possessions to the foundation already established. These two sources combined yield more than a hundred thousand crowns annually which is devoted solely to finding recruits and meeting the house's expenses; they have a dozen discreet and reliable women whose sole task is to bring them every month a new subject, no younger than twelve nor older than thirty. The conscriptee must be free of all defects and endowed with the greatest possible number of qualities, but principally with that of eminent birth.

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

  I find the tablet and plop back down in my spot of sun to start explaining the initiations. But when I look up from the sloping page, to see if he’s buying it so far, the whole mood of the room has shifted. The zipper of his chinos is level with my eyes. And inside that zipper his pecker is making that bulge, the bad words for which zoom through my head—Hard-on, Boner, Stiffie. I think it is testament to my badness that I even know such words. Once I spent the night with the principal’s daughter, and when I asked her if she knew what “fuck” meant, she said no. When I explained it to her as nice as I could, she broke out crying, though I hadn’t even used a single cuss word, sticking instead to those words you find in the encyclopedia under A for Anatomy, with the sheer glassy pages of muscle and vein and bone assembling into a man body and a woman body side by side in TV-family clothes. Still, the minute I got to the end of telling the principal’s daughter about the baby being born, her face just collapsed in on itself in a big pucker. She screamed that her parents would never do something that nasty, even trying to have kids. “Then where do you think you came from, dumbass,” I said. She ran caterwauling out of the room at that point. A heartbeat later, her mother popped in all grim-faced. She led me by the hand into their dusty foyer, where she zipped up her parka right over her bathrobe and stepped barefoot into her galoshes. She hoisted me up still in my pajamas with my coat thrown across me and walked through the cold night back across the street to our house. That was the end of spending the night with the principal’s daughter. Maybe grown-ups know I know words like Hard-on from looking at me. “You got a smart mouth, little girl,” Mrs. Dillard back in Leechfield always said, narrowing her eyes at that pronouncement. And I said that a smart mouth was better than a dumb one anyday. Still, sometimes I think being smart just makes certain words go scooting through your head, leaving some bad-word vapor that a mean man can pick up on. In fact, maybe this man, now, who’s dragging down his zipper in slow motion, the little brass teeth unlocking before my eyes like the fangs of some sea monster, can hear that word Hard-on bouncing around inside my head. It invites him almost, draws him to me, actually draws on his dick like magnetism and makes it swell up inside the cloth of his pants. I think of how the vampire couldn’t cross into the girl’s window unless she herself took the crucifix off that window and opened it to him, saying come on in. And still people did it, even when they didn’t mean to.

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

  Mother has dug a trench in the sand for the leg, and she is packing wet sand on it, trying to get the swelling down the way you would with a poultice or mustard plaster. The leg doesn’t look much like a leg anymore. The skin is too tight and inflamed. It looks to me a little like the gray blood sausage Cajuns make called boudain. There are more people standing around—all the men from the seining party and a family, and the light is fading fast behind all their heads. The sky has gone gray, and the colors from everybody’s clothes seem muted, like somebody has sprinkled us all with lime. Somebody gives Lecia a slug of Coca-Cola, and she spits it right back out. She’s going pale all over, to match the leg. In the next slide, dark finally comes. Daddy is talking off to the side with some lawman about what hospital to take Lecia to—High Island or Port Arthur: which is closer, which better. Somebody’s had the idea of turning everybody’s car headlights on us, so lights shoot at us from all kinds of crazy angles. I am kneeling right next to Lecia, holding her hand, but I don’t want to look at her face. The last time I checked it out, it was the color of the moon that’s starting up. Mother is washing that face with a little damp Wash’n Dri cloth she got out of a foil packet in her purse, and I can smell the antiseptic from that under the sea smell and the musty smell of vodka they’ve given Lecia mixed up with Coke to help with the pain. Instead of looking at Lecia, I am paying big attention to the Gulf, which has moved farther away, breaking in long, electric-white lines in the dark. Mother starts talking. She says the light in the breaking waves is caused by phosphorus. She is telling Lecia this like Lecia’s listening. Mother’s voice is very whispery and makes me want to go to sleep. There are, in salt water, she says, microscopic sea animals that get excited by the turmoil of water and so give off light when waves break. One night the three of us took off all our clothes—a phosphorus night like this—and went skinny-dipping. Daddy picked our clothes off the sand and laughed at us from his truck. “You crazy, woman,” he yelled to Mother, but there was joy in it. Then the waves ate his voice, and I dove in and watched my whole body light up. Probably I was falling asleep on somebody’s lap, because that’s what I see us doing. Mother and I are flying underwater like light-green phantoms. It reminds me of the Matisse painting that she’d razored out of one of her art books and taped up over the bathtub. In it the women dance nude in a circle. And we are like those huge women, fluid and pale, Mother and I.

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

  They hung up those garlic ropes at bedtime. They looped the rosary around the window handles. They full well meant to shoo that evil away when it came flapping all liquid at the glass. But by the time the vampire actually floated there in the creamy moonlight, the girl in the gauzy nightdress was so awestruck by his hunger—the sheer largeness of it—that she’d unloop all the stuff she’d fixed up to stave him off. The garlic ropes slipped from the brass handles, and the windows swung wide so the curtains billowed over them as he gathered her slender self up into his cape. This whole scene is rushing through my head when my babysitter’s zipper hits bottom. His hand fishes into that zipper and farther, into the shadow of his shorts. The seriousness of that reaching keeps me even from breathing regular. I’m also afraid to make him mad somehow, and even more afraid that any move I make or any word I speak will seem like welcome. So I sit still and pretend not to be home inside myself. I worry worry worry though about what’s about to happen. I think of that old neighbor boy laying me down on the cement sack in the Carters’ garage, him on top of me bucking. Probably I don’t even have a cherry from that. I didn’t hear it pop inside me, because I was so busy thinking for him to hurry before I got in trouble. Whether I have a cherry or not, though, I can feel how marked I am inside for being hurt that way. The high school girls always say in the bathroom that you can tell who’s been fucked by how she walks. Lecia told me that a slew-footed girl—one whose feet splay out—has been getting it for sure. I take comfort in that, for I have the worst pigeon toes in school. Really. Back in Leechfield, I got kicked out of the yoga class that Mother wanted me to take at the Theosophical Society. Here I got kicked out of the Antelope ballet school. No hip rotation at all , the teacher told Mother, then suggested tap dancing for me. But stumping through a tap routine is for fools. The other girls at the barre mirror looked so graceful. They bent their knees down in plié, their frail arms sweeping as they rose. They moved all together like flowers in some Disney cartoon. I knew in my heart I’d never look that way. The man’s dick springs forward fast to get out of those tight britches. It’s red like somebody’s mad face, swollen like it hurts. The mere fact of it makes me seize up inside. The man pushes it down a little, holding it at its base so it points right at my face. I never saw a dick this big, this close. The little pee-hole surprises me, how it’s cut longways like a vent in a pie.

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

  A lot of families took time to root around in their attics to rescue special photographs and papers like marriage licenses from the tidal wave that Cattleman Bill was calling inevitable. I remember Carol Sharp’s mother wrapped her baby shoes up in tissue paper to take along. We did none of these things. Daddy tended to shrug about a storm. “Shit, if it hits here, it’ll take the house,” he said. He didn’t figure there was much point in scrabbling around, since a direct hit would wipe us out anyway. Which attitude didn’t go far toward reassuring me. While other fathers were taking sick leave and folding up their lawn chairs and storing special furniture high in their attics, Daddy just kept plodding off to the plant and coming home long enough to refill his mess kit with food and plodding back. Eventually, he didn’t bother coming home at all. It’s odd to me now how easily I let him leave our lives that fall at such an ugly time. Maybe he’d been slowly backpedaling out of the daddy business since Grandma came. Things just ran smoother without him around for the old woman to carp at. Maybe his absence was inevitable as we got older. In fairness to Daddy, we at that point had plenty of time to evacuate, so it’s not like the storm threatened our lives or anything, just our property, which didn’t actually amount to much dollarwise. Plus the Gulf Oil Corporation kept those men who hadn’t run off with their families working more or less nonstop, at double overtime, trying to get the plant battened down. Daddy would have felt like a fool turning that down. Still, I wonder why we loosened our grip on him so easy. Having Mother take care of us without him meant that—with the right amount of whining—we could talk her into buying nearly any toy, article of clothing, or treat. She saw us as grossly underprivileged. We were practically urchins, by her standards. So, in her care, we did things things that Daddy, with his forty-acres-and-a-mule sense of thrift, wouldn’t have stood for: cutting up a sheet over a card table for a playhouse, say, or painting murals on the garage wall with oil paints. Daddy had an extravagance of heart. He pretty much indulged us in a way neighbors found shameful. But he drew a hard line at anything that seemed to waste money, which was where Mother started to overtake him in our hearts. The first day that he didn’t come home at all, Lecia and I called him a bunch of times. I always imagined our voices snailing through the telephone lines in an intricate pattern of stops and transfers trying to get to him. “Gulf Oil. Hep you?” was how the operator answered at the first ring. “Extension 691, please,” we’d tell her. Lecia and I would stand nearly ear to ear in the kitchen, each one trying to squeeze the other off the receiver.

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

  "By this means," Rosalie continued, "the girls are not in the least dishonored, there are no pregnancies to fear, and nothing prevents them from finding a husband; not a year goes by without his corrupting nearly all the boys in this way, and at least half the other children. Of the fourteen girls you have seen, eight have already been spoiled by these methods, and he has taken his pleasure with nine of the boys; the two women who serve him are submitted to the same horrors.... O Therese! " Rosalie added, casting herself into my arms, "O dear girl, and I too, yes I, he seduced me in my earliest years; I was barely eleven when I became his victim... when, alas! I was unable to defend myself against him." "But Mademoiselle," I interrupted, horrified, "at least Religion remained to you... were you unable to consult a confessor and avow everything?" "Oh, you do not know that as he proceeds to pervert us he stifles in each of us the very seeds of belief, he forbids us all religious devotions, and, furthermore, could I have done so ? he had instructed me scarcely at all. The little he had said pertaining to these matters had been motivated by the fear that my ignorance might betray his impiety. But I had never been to confession, I had not made my First Communion; so deftly did he cover all these things with ridicule and insinuate his poisonous self into even our smallest ideas, that he banished forever all their duties out of them whom he suborned; or if they are compelled by their families to fulfill their religious duties, they do so with such tepidness, with such complete indifference, that he has nothing to fear from their indiscretion; but convince yourself, Therese, let your own eyes persuade you," she continued, very quickly drawing me back into the closet whence we had emerged; "come hither: that room where he chastises his students is the same wherein he enjoys us; the lessons are over now, it is the hour when, warmed by the preliminaries, he is going to compensate himself for the restraint his prudence sometimes imposes upon him; go back to where you were, dear girl, and with your own eyes behold it all." However slight my curiosity concerning these new abominations, it was by far the better course to leap back into the closet rather than have myself surprised with Rosalie during the classes; Rodin would without question have become suspicious. And so I took my place; scarcely was I at it when Rodin enters his daughter's room, he leads her into the other, the two women of the house arrive; and thereupon the impudicious Rodin, all restraints upon his behavior removed, free to indulge his fancies to the full, gives himself over in a leisurely fashion and undisguisedly to committing all the irregularities of debauchery.

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

  I descended the winding stairs that lead from her bedroom to the bath; my feet gave way beneath me, and I had to support myself against the iron banister. After having ascertained that the door leading to the Loggia and the garden was locked, I returned. Wanda was now sitting on the bed with loosened hair, wrapped in her green velvet furs. When she made a rapid movement, I noticed that the furs were her only covering. It made me start terribly, I don’t know why? I was like one condemned to death, who knows he is on the way to the scaffold, and yet begins to tremble when he sees it. “Come, Gregor, take me on your arms.” “You mean, mistress?” “You are to carry me, don’t you understand?” I lifted her up, so that she rested in my arms, while she twined hers around my neck. Slowly, step by step, I went down the stairs with her and her hair beat from time to time against my cheek and her foot sought support against my knee. I trembled under the beautiful burden I was carrying, and every moment it seemed as if I had to break down beneath it. The bath consisted of a wide, high rotunda, which received a soft quiet light from a red glass cupola above. Two palms extended their broad leaves like a roof over a couch of velvet cushions. From here steps covered with Turkish rugs led to the white marble basin which occupied the center. “There is a green ribbon on my toilet-table upstairs,” said Wanda, as I let her down on the couch, “go get it, and also bring the whip.” I flew upstairs and back again, and kneeling put both in my mistress’s hands. She then had me twist her heavy electric hair into a large knot which I fastened with the green ribbon. Then I prepared the bath. I did this very awkwardly because my hands and feet refused to obey me. Again and again I had to look at the beautiful woman lying on the red velvet cushions, and from time to time her wonderful body gleamed here and there beneath the furs. Some magnetic power stronger than my will compelled me to look. I felt that all sensuality and lustfulness lies in that which is half-concealed or intentionally disclosed; and the truth of this I recognized even more acutely, when the basin at last was full, and Wanda threw off the fur-cloak with a single gesture, and stood before me like the goddess in the Tribuna. At that moment she seemed as sacred and chaste to me in her unveiled beauty, as did the divinity of long ago. I sank down on my knees before her, and devoutly pressed my lips on her foot. My soul which had been storm-tossed only a little while earlier, suddenly was perfectly calm, and I now felt no element of cruelty in Wanda.

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

  These words gone out of his mouth, Roland went away and left me to ponder thoughts which, as you may well believe, presented him in no favorable aspect. I had been six months in this household, from time to time serving the villain's disgraceful debauches, when one night I beheld him enter my prison with Suzanne. "Come, Therese," said he, " 'tis already a long time, I find, since I took you down to that cavern which impressed you so deeply; both of you are going to accompany me there, but don't expect to climb back together, for I absolutely must leave one of you behind; well, we'll see which one fate designates." I get to my feet, cast alarmed glances at my companion, I see tears rolling from her eyes... and we set off. When we were locked into the underground vault, Roland examined each of us with ferocious eyes, he amused himself by reiterating our sentence and persuading us both that one of the two would certainly remain there below. "Well," said he, seating himself and having us stand directly before him, "each of you take your turn and set to work exorcising this disabled object; there's a devil in it keeps it limp, and woe unto the one of you who restores its energy." " 'Tis an injustice," quoth Suzanne; "she who arouses you most should be the one to obtain your mercy." "Not at all," Roland retorted, "once it is manifest which of you arouses me most, it is established which one's death will give me the greater pleasure... and I'm aiming at pleasure, nothing else. Moreover, by sparing her who inflames me the more rapidly, you would both proceed with such industry that you might perhaps plunge my senses into their ecstasy before the sacrifice were consummated, and that must not happen." " 'Tis to want evil for evil's sake, Monsieur," I said to Roland, "the completion of your ecstasy ought to be the only thing you desire, and if you attain it without crime, why do you want to commit one ?" "Because I only deliciously reach the critical stage in this way, and because I only came down here in order to commit one. I know perfectly well I might succeed without it, but I want it in order to succeed." And, during this dialogue, having chosen me to begin, I start exciting his behind with one hand, his front with the other, while he touches at his leisure every part of my body offered him by my nakedness. "You've still a long way to go, Therese," said he, fingering my buttocks, "before this fine flesh is in the state of petrified callosity and mortification apparent in Suzanne's; one might light a fire under that dear girl's cheeks without her feeling a thing; but you, Therese, you... these are yet roses bound in lilies: we'll get to them in good time, in good time."

• From Manhunt (2022)

  They tumbled together over Beth’s legs, rolling downhill in a knot of teeth and hair and clawing hands to fetch up with a sickening thud at the base of the hill where it rose into another, a flat defile not so different from the one she and Fran had fled down late that summer. Robbie was on top. He had a knife. It was over quick. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Beth croaked as he came up the hill toward her, pausing only to collect Corinne’s fallen automatic and stuff it into the waistband of his jeans. He reached her, limping a little, and knelt, and she thought she’d never again in her life be so glad to see someone. “I killed her sister. Can you tell me what the fuck is going on?” “We moved in with slavers,” he said, untying Corinne’s hasty knot and pulling the collar from around Beth’s neck before turning his attention to the zip ties. “They packed up the camp people. Most of the transes in the Screw. They’re selling them to Boston for some big project. The guards at the bunker tear-gassed the camp when someone figured out it wasn’t just day labor. Then they started shooting people. Set a few tents on fire.” “How’d you get out?” “I didn’t. I was up in Northampton raiding fertility clinics. I guess they knew I’d been talking to people in the camp, that I knew about the labor thing.” He slid his knife between her right wrist and the zip tie, the metal warm against her skin. The temperature of Corinne’s heart. “Doe tried to kill me.” “The fuck? What happened?” The gunshot blew out his left eardrum. He felt the soft, wet implosion. A pop as it depressurized. Then a white heat in his shoulder. He put the knife through Doe’s wrist. It slotted in perfectly, clicking against bone, and he twisted the grip. The gun flew out of her hand and went off when it hit the wall, putting a hole in the roof. The cat yowled and swatted at their feet as they staggered past the seat together. He ripped the knife out of her. She screamed. Clawed at his eyes. Somewhere nearby, men were roaring. They would be here soon. The thumb of her good hand found the hole in his shoulder, worming through his powder-burned hoodie and into raw, bleeding flesh. He must have made some kind of sound. Her twisted face was his whole world. Her teeth bared in a spit-slicked snarl. He got a hold on her hair and banged her head against the wall panel. Once. Twice. She lost her grip on him and he brought a knee up hard into her stomach, doubling her over. He chanced a look out the back of the van as she retched at his feet. Men were coming. Three of them loping through the windblown grass.