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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Wanda shook her head. I left the room, passed through the gallery, and sat down on one of the steps, leading from there down into the garden. A gentle north wind brought a fresh, damp coolness from the Arno, the green hills extended into the distance in a rosy mist, a golden haze hovered over the city, over the round cupola of the Duomo. A few stars still tremble in the pale-blue sky. I tore open my coat, and pressed my burning forehead against the marble. Everything that had happened so far seemed to me a mere child’s play; but now things were beginning to be serious, terribly serious. I anticipated a catastrophe, I visualized it, I could lay hold of it with my hands, but I lacked the courage to meet it. My strength was broken. And if I am honest with myself, neither the pains and sufferings that threatened me, not the humiliations that impended, were the thing that frightened me. I merely felt a fear, the fear of losing her whom I loved with a sort of fanatical devotion; but it was so overwhelming, so crushing that I suddenly began to sob like a child. * * * * * During the day she remained locked in her room, and had the negress attend her. When the evening star rose glowing in the blue sky, I saw her pass through the garden, and, carefully following her at a distance, watched her enter the shrine of Venus. I stealthily followed and peered through the chink in the door. She stood before the divine image of the goddess, her hands folded as in prayer, and the sacred light of the star of love casts its blue rays over her. * * * * * On my couch at night the fear of losing her and despair took such powerful hold of me that they made a hero and a libertine of me. I lighted the little red oil-lamp which hung in the corridor beneath a saint’s image, and entered her bedroom, covering the light with one hand. The lioness had been hunted and driven until she was exhausted. She had fallen asleep among her pillows, lying on her back, her hands clenched, breathing heavily. A dream seemed to oppress her. I slowly withdrew my hand, and let the red light fall full on her wonderful face. But she did not awaken. I gently set the lamp on the floor, sank down beside Wanda’s bed, and rested my head on her soft, glowing arm. She moved slightly, but even now did not awaken. I do not know how long I lay thus in the middle of the night, turned as into a stone by horrible torments. Finally a severe trembling seized me, and I was able to cry. My tears flowed over her arm. She quivered several times and finally sat up; she brushed her hand across her eyes, and looked at me. “Severin,” she exclaimed, more frightened than angry.

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

  However, night descended before I thought to return; of a sudden I felt myself seized by three men: one clapped a hand over my mouth, the other two precipitated me into a carriage, climbed in, and for three full hours we sped along, during which time not one of these brigands deigned either to say a word to me or respond to any of my questions. The blinds were drawn down, I saw nothing; the carriage came to a halt before a house, gates swung wide, we entered, the gates clanged to immediately. My abductors pick me up, lead me through several unlit apartments, and finally leave me in one near which is a room wherein I perceive a light. "Stay here," says one of my ravishers as he withdraws with his companions, "you're soon going to see an old acquaintance." And they disappear, carefully shutting all the doors. At almost the same time, that leading into the room where I had spied illumination is opened, and carrying a candle in her hand, I see emerge... oh, Madame, fancy who it was... Dubois... Dubois herself, that frightful monster, devoured, no question of it, by the most ardent desire to be revenged. "Hither, charming girl," said she in an arrogant tone, "come here and receive the reward for the virtues in which you indulged yourself at my expense..." And angrily clutching my hand: "...ah, you wretch I I'll teach you to betray me!" "No, Madame, no," I say in great haste, " I betrayed you not at all: inform yourself: I uttered not one word which could cause you any inquietude, no, I spoke not the least word which might compromise you." "But did you not offer resistance to the crime I meditated? have you not thwarted its execution, worthless creature! You've got to be chastened...."

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

  Not surprisingly, this was the scene of a suicide every year or so. Jilted suitors and bankrupt oilmen favored it. Those who jumped from the highest point of the bridge broke every bone in their bodies. I remember Mother reading this fact out loud from the paper one time, then saying that women tended to gas themselves or take sleeping pills—things that didn’t mess them up on the outside so much. She liked to quote James Dean about leaving a beautiful corpse. Anyway, it was this bridge that the car bumped onto with Mother singing the very scariest part of “Mack the Knife.” She sang it very whispery, like a lullaby: When the shark bites with his teeth, dear, Scarlet billows start to spread. … The car tipped way back when we mounted the bridge. It felt sort of like the long climb a roller coaster will start before its deep fall. Mother’s singing immediately got drowned out by the steel webbing under the tires that made the whole car shimmy. At the same time—impossibly enough—we seemed to be going faster. Lecia contends that at this point I started screaming, and that my screaming prompted Mother to wheel around and start grabbing at me, which caused what happened next. (Were Lecia writing this memoir, I would appear in one of only three guises: sobbing hysterically, wetting my pants in a deliberately inconvenient way, or biting somebody, usually her, with no provocation.) I don’t recall that Mother reached around to grab at me at all. And I flatly deny screaming. But despite my old trick of making my stomach into a rock, I did get carsick. The bile started rising in my throat the second we mounted the bridge, which involved the car flying over a metal rise that felt like a ski jump. We landed with a jolt and then fishtailed a little. I knew right away that I was going to throw up. Still, I tried locking down my belly the way I had on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I squinched my eyes shut. I bore down on myself inside. But the rolling in my stomach wouldn’t let me get ahold of it. I wouldn’t have opened my window on a dare. And I sure didn’t want to ask Mother to pull over mid-bridge. Lecia was in charge of all Mother-negotiations that day anyway, and she had opted for the same tooth-grinding silence we’d all fallen into. Even though she was normally devout about watching the speedometer and nagging Mother to slow down (or, conversely, Daddy to speed up), she kept her lip zipped that morning. Anyway, at the point when I felt the Cheerios start to rise in my throat, I just ducked my head, pulled the neck of my damp T-shirt over my nose and away from my body a little, and barfed down my shirt front. It was very warm sliding down my chest under the wet shirt, and it smelled like sour milk.

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

  “Long afterward, in prison when the moral revolution had been effected within me, I thought of that minute, I remembered it as far as I could, and I co-ordinated all the sudden changes. I remembered the terrible consciousness which I felt,—that I was killing a wife, my wife. “I well remember the horror of that consciousness and I know vaguely that, having plunged in the dagger, I drew it out again immediately, wishing to repair and arrest my action. She straightened up and cried: “‘Nurse, he has killed me!’ “The old nurse, who had heard the noise, was standing in the doorway. I was still erect, waiting, and not believing myself in what had happened. But at that moment, from under her corset, the blood gushed forth. Then only did I understand that all reparation was impossible, and promptly I decided that it was not even necessary, that all had happened in accordance with my wish, and that I had fulfilled my desire. I waited until she fell, and until the nurse, exclaiming, ‘Oh, my God!’ ran to her; then only I threw away the dagger and went out of the room. “‘I must not be agitated. I must be conscious of what I am doing,’ I said to myself, looking neither at her nor at the old nurse. The latter cried and called the maid. I passed through the hall, and, after having sent the maid, started for my study. “‘What shall I do now?’ I asked myself. “And immediately I understood what I should do. Directly after entering the study, I went straight to the wall, took down the revolver, and examined it attentively. It was loaded. Then I placed it on the table. Next I picked up the sheath of the dagger, which had dropped down behind the sofa, and then I sat down. I remained thus for a long time. I thought of nothing, I did not try to remember anything. I heard a stifled noise of steps, a movement of objects and of tapestries, then the arrival of a person, and then the arrival of another person. Then I saw Gregor bring into my room the baggage from the railway; as if any one needed it! “‘Have you heard what has happened?’ I asked him. ‘Have you told the dvornik to inform the police?’ “He made no answer, and went out. I rose, closed the door, took the cigarettes and the matches, and began to smoke. I had not finished one cigarette, when a drowsy feeling came over me and sent me into a deep sleep. I surely slept two hours. I remember having dreamed that I was on good terms with her, that after a quarrel we were in the act of making up, that something prevented us, but that we were friends all the same. “A knock at the door awoke me.

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

  Ought I fear causing the doom of three or four men in order to save the millions of individuals their policy or their ferocity sacrifice? And therewith I pierce the next hedge; this one was thicker than the first: the further I progressed, the stouter they became. The hole was made, however, but there was firm ground beyond... nothing more betrayed the same horrors I had just encountered; and thus I arrived at the brink of the moat without having met with the wall Omphale had spoken of; indeed, there turned out to be none at all, and it is likely that the monks mentioned it merely to add to our fear. Less shut in when beyond the sextuple enclosure, I was better able to distinguish objects: my eyes at once beheld the church and the bulk of the adjacent building; the moat bordered each of them; I was careful not to attempt to cross it at this point; I moved along the edge and finally discovering myself opposite one of the forest roads, I resolved to make my crossing there and to dash down that road as soon as I had climbed up the other side of the ditch; it was very deep but, to my good fortune, dry and lined with brick, which eliminated all possibilities of slipping; then leapt: a little dazed by my fall, it was a few moments before I got to my feet... I went ahead, got to the further side without meeting any obstacle, but how was I to climb it! I spent some time seeking a means and at last found one where several broken bricks at once gave me the opportunity to use the others as steps and to dig foot-holds in order to mount; I had almost reached the top.when something gave way beneath my weight and I fell back into the moat under the debris I dragged with me; I thought myself dead; this involuntary fall had been more severe than the other; I was, as well, entirely covered with the material which had followed me; some had struck my head... it was cut and bleeding. O God! I cried out in despair, go no further; stay there; 'tis a warning sent from Heaven; God does not want me to go on: perhaps I am deceived in my ideas, perhaps evil is useful on earth, and when God's hand desires it, perhaps it is a sin to resist it! But, soon revolted by that doctrine, the too wretched fruit of the corruption which had surrounded me, I extricated myself from the pile of rubble on top of me and finding it easier to climb by the breach I had just made, for now there were new holes, I try once again, I take courage, a moment later I find myself at the crest.

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

  Conflicts with the devil and his hosts of demons were, as with other solitary saints, a prominent part of Anthony’s experience, and continued through all his life. The devil appeared to him in visions and dreams, or even in daylight, in all possible forms, now as a friend, now as a fascinating woman, now as a dragon, tempting him by reminding him of his former wealth, of his noble family, of the care due to his sister, by promises of wealth, honor, and renown, by exhibitions of the difficulty of virtue and the facility of vice, by unchaste thoughts and images, by terrible threatening of the dangers and punishments of the ascetic life. Once he struck the hermit so violently, Athanasius says, that a friend, who brought him bread, found him on the ground apparently dead. At another time he broke through the wall of his cave and filled the room with roaring lions, howling wolves, growling bears, fierce hyenas, crawling serpents and scorpions; but Anthony turned manfully toward the monsters, till a supernatural light broke in from the roof and dispersed them. His sermon, which he delivered to the hermits at their request, treats principally of these wars with demons, and gives also the key to the interpretation of them: "Fear not Satan and his angels. Christ has broken their power. The best weapon against them is faith and piety .... The presence of evil spirits reveals itself in perplexity, despondency, hatred of the ascetics, evil desires, fear of death .... They take the form answering to the spiritual state they find in us at the time.315 They are the reflex of our thoughts and fantasies. If thou art carnally minded, thou art their prey; but if thou rejoicest in the Lord and occupiest thyself with divine things, they are powerless .... The devil is afraid of fasting, of prayer, of humility and good works. His illusions soon vanish, when one arms himself with the sign of the cross."

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

  She rejoins him when he comes back; she employs these few hours to eat and rest, for she must remain awake all night throughout the whole of the term she spends with her master; I repeat to you, the wretch remains constantly on hand to serve as the object of every caprice which may enter the libertine's head; cuffs, slaps, beatings, whippings, hard language, amusements, she has got to endure all of it; she must remain standing all night long in her patron'.c bedroom, at any instant ready to offer herself to the passions which may stir that tyrant; but the cruelest, the most ignominious aspect of this servitude is the terrible obligation she is under to provide her mouth or her breast for the relief of the one and the other of the monster's needs: he never uses any other vase: she has got to be the willing recipient of everything and the least hesitation or recalcitrance is straightway punished by the most savage reprisals. During all the scenes of lust these are the girls who guarantee pleasure's success, who guide and manage the monks' joys, who tidy up whoever has become covered with filth: for example, a monk dirties himself while enjoying a woman: it is his aide's duty to repair the disorder; he wishes to be excited? the task of rousing him falls to the wretch who accompanies him everywhere, dresses him, undresses him, is ever at his elbow, who is always wrong, always at fault, always beaten; at the suppers her place is behind her master's chair or, like a dog, at his feet under the table, or upon her knees, between his thighs, exciting him with her mouth; sometimes she serves as his cushion, his seat, his torch; at other times all four of them will be grouped around the table in the most lecherous, but, at the same time, the most fatiguing attitudes. "If they lose their balance, they risk either falling upon the thorns placed near by, or breaking a limb, or being killed, such cases have been known; and meanwhile the villains make merry, enact debauches, peacefully get drunk upon meats, wines, lust, and upon cruelty." "O Heaven!" said I to my companion, trembling with horror, "is it possible to be transported to such excesses! What infernal place is this!"

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

  "Off you go, whore," says he, blasting out her brains, "go advise the devil that Roland, the richest villain on earth, is he who most insolently taunts the hand of Heaven and challenges Satan's own!" The poor girl did not expire at once: she writhed in her death throes for a considerable period: 'twas a hideous spectacle: that infamous scoundrel calmly considered it and did not tear his eyes away until he had left us forever. Everything changed the day after Roland went away. His successor, a gentle and very reasonable man, had us released at once . "That is hardly fit work for a frail and delicate sex," he said to us with kindness; "animals should be employed at this machine; our trade is criminal enough without further offending the Supreme Being with gratuitous atrocities." He installed us in the chateau and, without requiring me to do so, suggested I assume possession of the duties Roland's sister had performed; the other women were busied cutting out counterfeit coins, a much less fatiguing task, no doubt, and one for which they were rewarded, as was I, with good lodgings and excellent food. At the end of two months, Dalville, Roland's successor, informed us of his colleague's happy arrival at Venice; there he had established himself and there realized his fortune and there he enjoyed it in peace and quiet, wholly content, full of the felicity he had anticipated. The fate of the man who replaced him was of a distinctly different character. The unfortunate Dalville was honest in his profession, indeed, even more honest than was necessary in order to be destroyed. One day, while all was calm at the chateau, while, under the direction of that good master, the work, although criminal, was however being carried on with gaiety, one day the gates were stormed, the moats bridged and the house, before our men had a moment's opportunity to look to their defense, found itself invaded by soldiers of the constabulary, sixty strong. Surrender was our sole alternative; we were shackled like beasts; we were attached to the horses and marches down to Grenoble.

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

  She seemed distracted all the time, moving in some addled way through the rising sea of chores Grandma thought up. The only time she displayed much more than a low-level pulse was when Grandma talked her into spanking me about once a week, and then only if I really fought back. Don’t get me wrong. My mother’s flailings at me didn’t bring enough physical hurt or fear to qualify as child abuse. Her spankings were more pathetic than anything. She was way too scared of hurting anybody to hit with much of a sting. She must have been scared, too, of her own temper, or of feeling anything at all, because, as I said, she stayed pretty blank-eyed no matter what we did unless Grandma hollered her into action. At one point, Lecia and I emptied a box of Tide on the kitchen floor, then dragged in the garden hose till the whole house, carpet and all, was running with suds about a foot high. (We were imitating a floor wax commercial.) Grandma happened to be asleep during this, and Mother just sent us outside to play, then set about mopping the whole mess up without so much as a cuss word. But some kind of serious fury must have been roiling around inside her. Sometimes, instead of spanking us, she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn’t whipping us, because she knew if she got started she’d kill us. This worked way better than any spanking could have. Your mother’s threat of homicide—however unlikely she tries to make it sound—will flat dampen down your spirits. Anyway, her whippings, when they did come, were almost a relief given the spooky alternative of her silence. And they didn’t last very long if you stood still, as Lecia had the sense to do. Me, I never stopped trying to break loose for a second, which protracted the whole thing. (My spankings were a kind of family sporting event complete with rounds and what my sister still claims was a system of scoring more subtle and intricate than the mating signals of certain spiders.) Unless Mother managed to get me down in a corner, she would have to hold one of my wrists to keep me within flyswatter distance while she flailed in my direction. At best, she made contact about ten percent of the time. I dug my heels into the gray carpet and used my weight as you would in crack the whip. I became the pivot point in the spankings, a jerking, central force that she had to wheel around. Locked together this way, the two of us would spin from room to room with Grandma at our perimeter in her wheelchair, scolding and bitching and calling down the wrath of God on that spoiled ungrateful child, all the time seesawing the big wheels of her chair to keep herself in position.

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

  In fact, she had a glassy look, as if the leg with the man-of-war fastened to it belonged to some other girl. She wasn’t even crying, though every now and then she sucked in air through her teeth like she hurt. The camouflaged guy with the pink gloves was trying to peel the tentacles off her, but it was clumsy work. Mother was looking at Daddy and saying what should they do. She said this over and over, and Daddy didn’t appear to be listening. I sat down hard on the sand next to Lecia. I was getting that tight, buckled-down feeling in my stomach like I’d had during the hurricane. I wrapped my arms around my knees, bowed my head, and prayed to a god I didn’t trust a prayer that probably went like this: Please let Lecia not die. Make Daddy think of something fast. Don’t let them chop off her leg either. …But all of a sudden, there was that humming noise again, running underneath the prayer like an electrical current in my head. I opened my eyes fast so it went away. Daddy finally scouted around for a sharp shell and cut the head off the man-of-war and then popped it like an old balloon. But he saw quick that that didn’t do any good. The tentacles stayed wrapped around Lecia’s leg, which had started to swell up. Up near her hip joint the tentacles came together where the bubble-head had been. They fanned out down her leg all the way to the ankle. Where the guy with gloves had picked off a length, I could see tiny circle marks left behind where it had suctioned onto the flesh. The flesh was pulpy where these had been attached. There were perfectly circular blisters rising up. This wasn’t supposed to happen with Daddy around, I thought. I recalled a story of Daddy’s in which he’d stood drunk on this very beach with Jimmy Bent, the most badass Cajun in four counties. Jimmy had been drunk too, on Tennessee whiskey. It was a seining party. Girls in capri pants had been sitting along an old log they used for a bench. The girls were eating shellfish from the kettle of crab boil when Jimmy started shooting at Daddy’s feet with a Colt .45, saying, “It take a strong man to dance in the sand.” And Daddy saying back, “I’m a strong man, Jimmy,” dancing, till one of their seining buddies got up behind Mr. Bent and cracked him on the skull with a stick. That story came back to me as proof of my daddy’s omnipotence. People weren’t supposed to get hurt with him around. The next instant I can see, they’ve somehow gotten all the tentacles off, and there are bright red welts around Lecia’s leg in a swirly pattern, like she’s been switch-whipped with willow branches.

• 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.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Fell. The ground rushed up at him and smashed the breath out of his lungs. Something popped inside his chest with an awful white burst of pain. He retched and inhaled, sucking air, clawing his way up onto his feet, rifle still miraculously in hand, women landing all around him, legs threshing the air as they arced over his head. He turned. A tremendous, hellish crunch of metal against brick. Then, silence. The wall came apart. Bricks spun mutely through the air. Dirt pelted Robbie’s body in hard pellets and clumps. Someone nearby, a shape staggering through the smoke, fell as shrapnel tore through her like a scythe. He stumbled over something soft and saw a flash of Steph’s purple hair. Broken bone and blood. Fran was down at the end, he told himself as he pawed at his rifle with numb, trembling fingers, trying to slide the bolt again, looking back at the shadow of the hole in the land wall. She was nowhere near. She’s safe. “Make a line!” Zia was screaming at the top of her lungs. She had a long, ragged cut up near her hairline and blood sheeted down her face. “Make a line, make a line, make a line!” What the fuck were we thinking? Robbie wondered, dazed. There was blood on his right hand. We’re going to die here. And then the men came through the breach. Ramona could just see the fort from where Galbraith floated at anchor half a mile off the coast. Plumes of smoke drifted over the low spit of land with its wartime heap of an emplacement and mismatched walls of brick and concrete. Beside her, Teach stood with one hand on the gunwale and the other planted on her hip, inhaling deep lungfuls of clean salt air. She’d been standing like that, the crew frozen all around her, for almost half an hour before she turned back toward them, a secretive smile on those thin, perfectly arched lips. “Gunnery, find your range.” The massive barrels pumped, fire and smoke leaping out from their muzzles as the deck rocked back under the force of their recoil. The shells carved furrows along the surface of the sea. A breathless moment. Then, impact. Fire stitched along the coast. Thousands of pounds of rock and earth hurled into the air in grayish columns. Smoke rolling over the piled stones of the fort’s sloping foundations. Ramona couldn’t breathe. Which shell will kill her which one which one which one which one oh God what have I done what am I doing who am I who am I? The deck rolled again. Smoke and fire. Teach laughing into the wind. The deck crew cheering, screaming, pumping fists.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  All the couples are high on drugs and drink and they carry me off to the stable where the donkey is; it is very well lighted. They strip me naked and make me put on long black nylons and a suspender belt and lead me over to a low table, where I am made to kneel on all fours and open my legs wide. There are straps fastened to the table, and they put these around my arms and legs so I cannot move. There have obviously been other girls here before me. To the cries and catcalls of the couples, the woman leads the donkey up behind me. She has pulled into place a wooden frame above my backside and lifts the donkey’s front legs onto this. Then I feel someone spreading grease around my cunt and right up the hole. They must have played with the donkey’s prick to make it stiff, as I feel the hard stiff shaft against my ass as they pull it toward me. I feel the long knob end against the lips of my cunt. It forces them apart and begins to enter my hole as the woman guides it up me. I let out a cry of pain as it stretches the walls of my cunt. Inch by inch it slowly goes in and begins painfully moving up and back, in and out. The donkey’s prick has been well greased, and after a few abrasive thrusts the fucking rhythm becomes easier. When they have about six inches of the donkey’s prick up into me, they hold me still while the donkey pushes his massive prick up and down my cunt just like a piston: I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but I am being fucked by a donkey!

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The constant interpretation urged upon the reader in Mailer’s work seems to be that cruelty and violence spring out of the repressed homosexuality of men’s-house culture, both emotions inevitable and beneficial because they constitute the only defense against homosexuality which Mailer’s own sanctimonious sexual dogmatism regards as a greater evil than murder. This is nowhere made more graphic than in an account of the notorious Paret-Griffith prizefight in The Presidential Papers. “Now at the weigh—in that morning, Paret had insulted Griffith irrevocably, touching him on the buttocks, while making a few more remarks about his manhood. They almost had their fight on the scales.”111 The fight that did take place was an instance of murder acting as surrogate for sexuality. Ignoring both the bell and the referee, Griffith caught Paret in the ropes and struck him some eighteen times in three seconds, “making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod.”112 Sitting at ringside, Mailer reports he was “hypnotized” since he had “never seen one man hit another so hard and so many times.”113 “Off on an orgy,” Griffith was uncontrollable: “If he had been able to break loose from his handlers and the referee, he would have jumped Paret to the floor and whaled on him there.”114 The expression “whaled on” is synonymous here both with sodomize and kill. Paret died in a coma three days later, and the nasty incident gave boxing a bad name. Mailer’s analysis of the event has a brilliant, unerring clarity. His defense of it is another matter. First, he informs us that “violence may be an indispensable element of life” then that fight managers are simply unheralded defenders of “an unstated view of life which was religious,” and finally, he rationalizes all by declaring that the killer “sickens the air about him if he does not find some half-human way to kill a little in order not deaden all.”115 The fear of “deadening all” is clearly fear of falling into the plague of nonviolence, or the lethal defamation of homosexuality: The accusation of homosexuality arouses a major passion in many men; they spend their lives resisting it with a biological force. There is a kind of man who spends every night of his life getting drunk in a bar, he rants, he brawls, he ends in a small rumble on the street; women say “For God’s sake, he’s homosexual, Why doesn’t he just turn queer and get his suffering over with.” Yet men protect him. It is because he’s choosing not to become homosexual. It was put best by Sartre, who said that a homosexual is a man who practices homosexuality. A man who does not is not homosexual—he is entitled to the dignity of his choice. He is entitled to the fact that he chooses not to become homosexual, and is paying presumably his price.116

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  What kept me from imagining sex with her? I had never cringed at the word vagina. But I was still a product of a world where what’s between a woman’s legs was only fathomable in its relation to a penis. Did I think Laura would feel lumpy or slimy, gross? Did I think I’d find something alien inside her, like one of Carolee Schneemann’s paper scrolls? Or was it something else? Did I shy away for the same reasons that I felt unsure of myself with men? I’d had sex for the first time at twenty, an age that seemed embarrassingly old. I was still getting my footing as a bona fide Sexually Active Person. I was timid, must have been spastic as a filly. But at least with men there was a script to be had. I knew what it looked like, what it felt like, what it was to be a woman wanting a man. I had no script for wanting a woman. Laura drove us back to her apartment and showed me around. The kitchen looked like a grown-up’s, with handmade ceramic bowls and tall mullioned windows that wrapped around a corner. She’d lived there with her ex. In the living room, we sat down—me on the sofa, Laura on a chair. I still didn’t know what this was, but I wanted to kiss her. I felt suddenly brave, like someone else. I don’t know how to say this, I tried, but I’m really attracted to you. I couldn’t read her face, so I kept going. I’ve never been attracted to a woman before, I said. I’ve always thought I was straight. She must have said something in response, but what I saw was her watching me. Everything else went blank. She must have told me she couldn’t, or she wouldn’t. She didn’t touch me. Nothing happened, and I went home. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] If it was a date, and it seemed like one, why hadn’t Laura wanted to kiss me? I’d done something wrong, though I wasn’t sure what or to whom. I’d been stupid. Even if it was a date, of course she didn’t want me once I’d admitted my inexperience, my confusion. She was on the rebound, didn’t need a project: a brand-new, straight-off-the-lot baby dyke. She’d shut me down accordingly.

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

  Nothing could be more terrifying than his face, the length of his nose, his wicked black eyes, his large ill-furnished mouth, his formidable high forehead, the sound of his fearful raucous voice, his enormous hands; all combined to make a gigantic individual whose presence inspired much more fear than reassurance. We will soon be able to decide whether the morals and actions of this species of centaur were in keeping with his awesome looks. After the most abrupt and cavalier scrutiny, the Count demanded to Know my age. "I am twenty-three, Monsieur," I replied. And to this first question he added some others of a personal nature. I made him privy to everything that concerned me; I did not even omit the brand I had received from Rodin, and when I had represented my misery to him, when I had proven to him that unhappiness had constantly dogged my footsteps: "So much the better," the dreadful man replied, "so much the better, it will have made you more pliable Ä adaptability counts heavily toward success in this household Ä I see nothing to regret in the wretchedness that hounds an abject race of plebeians Nature has doomed to grovel at our feet throughout the period allotted them to live on the same earth as we. Your sort is more energetic and less insolent, the pressures of adversity help you fulfill your duties toward us." "But, Monsieur, I told you that I am not of mean birth." "Yes, yes, I have heard that before, they always pass themselves off for all kinds of things when in fact they are nothing or miserable. Oh indeed, pride's illusions are of the highest usefulness to console fortune's ills, and then, you see, it is up to us to believe what we please about these lofty estates beaten down by the blows of destiny. Pish, d'ye know, it's all the same to me if you fancy yourself a princess. To my consideration you have the look and more or less the costume of a servant, and as such you may enter my hire, if it suits you. However," the hard-hearted man continued, "your welfare, your happiness Ä they are your concern, they depend on your performance: a little patience, some discretion, and in a few years you will be sent forth in a way to avoid further service." Then he took one after the other of my arms, rolled my sleeves to the elbows, and examined them attentively while asking me how many times I had been bled. "Twice, Monsieur," I told him, rather surprised at the question, and I mentioned when and under what circumstances it had happened. He pressed his fingers against the veins as one does when one wishes to inflate them, and when they were swollen to the desired point, he fastened his lips to them and sucked. From that instant I ceased to doubt libertinage was involved in this dreadful person's habits, and tormenting anxieties were awakened in my heart.