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 Filthy Animals (2021)

  At Marta’s house, Lenny walked her to the door, though she told him it wasn’t necessary. She pulled out her key and put it in the lock, and she felt his stomach against her back, and he pushed against her. The world was dim under his shadow. His hand was on her arm, its coarse heat. She stiffened, like some stupid, frightened animal. She turned to him and looked up, and he was coming in for a kiss. She turned her head and his lips landed on her cheek, and she knotted her hand into a fist. “Thanks for the evening,” she said. “I enjoyed myself.” Lenny looked faintly stunned by what she had said. She opened the door and went into the dark of her apartment, and for a moment, just before the door closed completely, she was afraid he would stop it with his hand. She was afraid he’d push his way inside. She was afraid of him. “Yeah, see you around,” he said. And she heard his footsteps go down the walkway, thudding. The next day, Lenny was at her cubicle again. He asked her to come back to his place for a couple of beers, knock a few back. He lived not too far from her, he said, it turned out. He was close enough that she could walk back if she felt like it. It wasn’t far at all. Or, hey, if she got too drunk, she could stay over. Marta said that it wasn’t a good day, maybe. Lenny just put his thick arm on the top of her cubicle, stood there with his legs crossed and a look of sad, aspirational confidence. “Didn’t we have a good time last night? Didn’t we? Let’s do it again. Come over.” She said she’d think about it. But Lenny kept coming back, and so she went over there. Just for a few minutes. She went over there, and she brought a six-pack and she sat on his couch, which was so worn out that it almost swallowed her up the moment she sat on it. They watched a taped recording of the Daytona. They talked about the plant, about the boys. And Marta felt like she was in college again. She had not realized how few friends she had until that very moment. Or maybe she had realized it, in small bits here or there, but, sitting on Lenny’s couch, talking to him about things they both knew about, about the common matter that made up their lives, she was suddenly aware of how lonely she’d felt after college. Lenny caught her looking at him in that moment. She could see his face change. It opened. His eyes widened. He stopped talking. His smile turned shy. He leaned in and kissed her, and she bolted up from the couch. “No, Lenny. No. We can’t,” she said.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Milton’s gut drops. Tate leaps up, breathing hard. Abe watches him, perfectly still despite having been jarred suddenly into motion. Nolan hangs over him. He’s still holding the rock in his hands. It’s the size of an apple. His face is pale and smooth. Then Milton sees it all happen, as if at once: Tate rushing, Abe tumbling backward, Nolan reaching out to grab him, and that horrible, horrible burst of sound, a guttural roar, and then there is blood running along the edges of Abe’s face. It’s hard to tell where it’s coming from. His scalp? His nose? His eyes? His cheeks? Where, where is the source? It’s warm and slick, sticky as it oozes out of him, gathering into torrents that fill with dirt as he moans and writhes. Milton gets his sweater off and blots the blood the best he can. He tries to get Abe’s face clean. Abe’s eyes dart around quickly, in fear, in flight, in pain. He’s on the ground, laid out, twitching, convulsing, and the three of them are trying their best to get the bleeding under control, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s hard to know, in the dark, with their clumsy hands, where to press to stop the insides from leaking out. Abe fights them, thrashes on the ground. Tate keeps muttering, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” And Nolan’s straddling Abe to try to keep him still, saying, “Abe, please Abe, stop, chill, fuck, chill.” But it’s Milton with the sweater trying to find and plug the source of the blood. It’s Milton who eventually feels the loose plate of bone shifting under his scalp, and when he looks up, Nolan’s staring right at him, his pupils wide, as if he’s been suddenly thrust into the light from some vast, deep water. Abe’s hand lands on Milton’s arm again, his fingers stiff, his nails piercing Milton’s skin. Abe’s eyes widen, and his groans turn to something like the lowing of cattle. His eyes then roll to the back of his head, and he seizes one hard time, goes so still and rigid that for a moment, none of them dares to breathe, dares to do anything. They wait, holding on to Abe, as if that alone could bring him back to himself. He jerks again. Fills with motion, and they all exhale. Nolan turns to Tate and says, “Call a fucking ambulance.” Milton holds his sweater to Abe’s head, holds it as still as he can and tries, with his eyes squeezed shut, to imagine himself far away from all of this. From Abe and Tate, from Nolan, from his parents, from himself. Anywhere else. Anywhere else. • • •

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It was the last summer they stayed with their grandparents. The last summer that her father was alive. So much had come to an end that summer. Grace should move to the bed, but she is so tired. She’s got one of her grandmother’s old blankets tossed over her legs. The window emits a cold chill that turns the room bluish in its light. She will regret falling asleep in this chair. Her body will torment her in the morning. But her legs refuse to cooperate. Her arms too heavy. She sinks low in the old chair and closes her eyes. She will rest a moment. Just a moment. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance. One of those rickety white boats out back, the kind she and Davis had taken across the pond, shouting and squealing so loud, they scared all the fish away. Such a boat had no purpose on the sea or a river, where the water was too wild and would rend it to pieces. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance, disintegrating all the way, leaving behind a trail like a comet, the shrapnel that a life leaves behind as it burns itself out. And now she feels herself beneath the weight of the invisible world, stuck. After all these years, stuck. She might have known it would happen, might have known to prepare herself for this, but she did not. Beyond the periphery of the dream, though her eyes are still closed, Grace feels suddenly that she is not alone. There is some sort of presence in the far corner of the room. Some barely there shift in the room’s air pressure, the impression of space being taken up. She cannot make her body move, cannot get her eyes to open. Instead, she turns the whole of her concentration toward the presence in the corner. It reaches back toward her, as if it were using her concentration to pull itself hand over hand in her direction. A sensation, heavy, dragging up the length of her leg, the quilt rumpling under this unseen force. She forces her eyes open with all her willpower. What is this, what is this, what is this, she chants to herself. The presence has always been amorphous. Her tongue is stuck to the roof her mouth, her throat full of static fuzz. She floats beneath the surface of her skin, staring at the ceiling, the white globe of the lamp overhead. The door creaks open. There is a change in the shape of the darkness as it lightens fractionally, insignificantly, but perceptibly, if only just so. There is another presence now, coming on from the distance, coming across the void toward her. She swallows thickly. Something is reaching for her, and there, suddenly, contact. Warmth like a human hand. MEAT They were lying in lionel’s bed again, facing each other.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Abe hisses, leans forward to inspect his hand, which must be hurting him now, the impact of it. Milton tenses, glances at Nolan, who is looking at them all as if from some vast distance, as if he’s already on the other side of what is to come and is looking at them with pity. Nolan leans forward and puts his chin in his hands. Milton feels a hot, hard knot press down against the back of his throat. “Pussy,” Abe says to Tate, who is not crying, just blotting the blood from his mouth with his fingertips. “Fuck you,” Tate says, spitting. “You can’t take a lick? One little slap and you’re bleeding like a pussy. Fuck.” “That’s enough,” Nolan says. “Oh, that’s enough.” “Abe,” Nolan says. “Abe. Listen to you. You’re a bigger faggot than Millie and Titty Tate both.” Heat fills Milton’s nostrils, and his vision momentarily blurs. He puts his knuckles into the bulk of his thigh and grunts. “Just a couple of little nigger fags,” Abe spits. The light from the fire is distant and inadequate. Milton leans forward to catch Abe by his throat. Abe’s eyes switch to him suddenly, widen, and then go slender with hatred. He smirks, the heft of his shoulders opening up. He’s leaning toward Milton, too. Their fingers brush, but before they can get a solid hold on each other, something hard strikes the back of Abe’s head and he gives a little jerk. The impact is dull, abbreviated. There and gone again, hardly discernible at all. Milton’s gut drops. Tate leaps up, breathing hard. Abe watches him, perfectly still despite having been jarred suddenly into motion. Nolan hangs over him. He’s still holding the rock in his hands. It’s the size of an apple. His face is pale and smooth. Then Milton sees it all happen, as if at once: Tate rushing, Abe tumbling backward, Nolan reaching out to grab him, and that horrible, horrible burst of sound, a guttural roar, and then there is blood running along the edges of Abe’s face. It’s hard to tell where it’s coming from. His scalp? His nose? His eyes? His cheeks? Where, where is the source? It’s warm and slick, sticky as it oozes out of him, gathering into torrents that fill with dirt as he moans and writhes. Milton gets his sweater off and blots the blood the best he can. He tries to get Abe’s face clean. Abe’s eyes dart around quickly, in fear, in flight, in pain. He’s on the ground, laid out, twitching, convulsing, and the three of them are trying their best to get the bleeding under control, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s hard to know, in the dark, with their clumsy hands, where to press to stop the insides from leaking out. Abe fights them, thrashes on the ground. Tate keeps muttering, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  His father believed in the optimal, and if you weren’t able to get to the highest level, then you were doing something for which you were not optimally suited. Good was an insult. Good was mediocre. And so, every lesson, Alek tried to be more than good. Every lesson, he tried to be perfect. Every position, every line, every angle, every turn, everything perfect. If he didn’t get something right, he tried harder, again and again, each time imagining himself going sharper and sharper, until he was so sharp he felt he might cut himself. It was a ferocity in him that he’d never known he possessed—a ferocity that gave him something—and for the first time, he felt his parents were proud of him, that he wasn’t just messing up. It was not an original story. Every ballet parent was a monster of ambition. Every ballet parent knew the terrible math. Only a few people got to be elite dancers. Everything else was just preparation for a time when dance would be something they used to do, a person they used to be. Starting ballet was like entering a second, more intense gravitational field. At any moment, an injury could end it all. Or the mind could snap and there you went, done, burned out, exhausted. A mass in his body meant that something had gone wrong, and if that was true, he might not be able to dance again. If he couldn’t dance again, what would he do? And there was the possibility that the mass meant cancer, and cancer might mean death. What would he tell his mother? What would she do? How could he tell her this, so soon after his father had died in a way that was somehow both slow and quick? He’d be betraying her. Alek climbed out of the bath and wrapped a towel around himself. He made a sandwich and sat on his bed. The afternoon was over. He had a view of the lake from his window. People were skating. Their voices were lost to him, but he could hear the sounds of their happiness. • • • THE REHEARSAL HALL was empty when he arrived. How long would it be before the evening class began? True, there were fewer people in the evening class because, unlike the morning class, attendance was not compulsory. Instead of one of the main ballet masters, evening class was led by a retired senior soloist. The evening class was mainly a way of working out things that had gone wrong during the day or had been skipped in the morning. It was during an evening class that he had first begun to cough, back in the summer. The cough had come on slowly, small little fits of tension in his chest, an irritating heat, a scratchiness in his throat and chest. At first, he didn’t notice at all, or he didn’t think very much of it.

• From Escape (2007)

  Rulon, who was shy and apparently almost stuttering, said, “Is Rebecca here?” One of the girls said, “Yes, she is, and she is right there.” She then pointed to the youngest sister in the room. That girl quickly exclaimed, “It’s not me, it’s her!” before pointing to someone else who looked way too young for marriage, even in the FLDS. Rulon looked red and embarrassed when he realized the game that was being played at his expense. Finally Rebecca stood up laughing and said, “Yes, I am here. I’m the one you have come for.” Rebecca was one of Merril’s and Ruth’s most beautiful daughters. She had long black hair and green eyes. She had a vibrant and engaging personality. But she was stunned by her arranged marriage, I later learned. She simply told Rulon that her sisters were heartbroken that she was leaving the family and couldn’t resist giving him a hard time. They were married the next day. I went home, eager to settle into the few quiet days of August that remained. When I had free time I would try to go over to my father’s home and help out with the children. Ever since my marriage, it had been difficult for my mother to adjust to having less help around the house. There were still nine small children at home. One slow, sultry day in August, my sixteen-year-old sister, Annette, offered to take the children on a picnic to a place we called Indian Bathtubs. It was about five miles from town where big rocks with holes in them caught the rainwater. It was peaceful and safe, the perfect place for a picnic with a lot of little children. My cousin Bonnie brought six of her siblings and Annette brought nine of hers. All fifteen children were loaded in the back of my father’s pickup truck and left for the day. The kids loved riding in the truck, even though the hot, dusty wind that blew across the desert plateau we lived on kicked up sand that stung their eyes and made a mess of their hair. Annette was driving, and Bonnie kept her eye on the children through the open window that faced the back of the truck. Suddenly the truck came over a crest on the road and hit a bump. Even though it wasn’t going too fast, the truck flipped when it hit an embankment of sand and landed with an enormous thud on top of several children. The children trapped under the truck were panicked and those who had been thrown from it were screaming in terror. The truck was smoking. Annette told me later she knew it was going to explode.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  10. Ingens exinde verberonem corripit trepidatio et in vieem humani coloris succedit pallor infernus, per- que universa membra frigidus sudor emanabat: tunc pedes incertis alternationibus commovere, modo hanc modo illam capitis partem scalpere, et ore semiclauso balbutiens nescioquas afannas effutire, ut eum.nemo prorsus a culpa vacuum merito crederet. Sed revalescente rursus astutia constantissime negare et accersere mendacii non desinit medieum. ‘Qui praeter iudicii religionem cum fidem suam coram lacerari vi- deret, multiplicato studio verberonem illum contendit redarguere, donec iussu magistratuum ministeria pub- lica contrectatis nequissimi servi manibus annulum ferreum deprehensum cum signo sacculi conferunt, quae comparatio praecedentem roboravit suspicionem. Nec rota vel equuleus more Graecorum -tormentis eius apparata iam deerant, sed offirmatus mira prae- sumptione nullis verberibus ac mne ipso quidem ‘succumbit igni. 490 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X and sealed up the money; wherefore understanding that.he was brought present before you -this:day, I hastily commanded one of my servants to fetch the purse from my house, and here I bring it unto you to see whether he shall deny his own sign or no : and you may easily conject that his words are untrue, which he alleged against the young man touching the buying of the poison, considering he bought the poison himself." When the physician ‘had spoken these words, you might perceive how the traitorous knave changed his colour, becoming deathly pale from the natural complexion of'a man, how he sweated cold for fear, how he trembled in-every part of ‘his ‘body, how:he set one leg uncertainly before another, scratching - now this, now that part of his head, and began to stammer forth some foolish trifles, his lips but half open, whereby there was no person but would judge him.culpable. In the end when he was somewhat returned to his former subtilty, he began to deny all that was said, and stoutly affirmed that the physician did lie. ‘But the physician, besides the oath which he had sworn to give true judgement, perceiving that he was railed at and his words denied, did never cease to confirm his sayings and to disprove the varlet, till such time as the officers, by the command- ment of the judges, seized his hands ‘and took the ring wherewith he had sealed the. purse, and laid it by the seal thereon : and this augmented the suspicion which was conceived of him first. Howbeit neither the wheel northe rack nor any other torment (accord- ing to the use of the Grecians) which were done unto him nor stripes, no nor yet the fire, could enforce him to confess the matter, so obstinate and grounded ‘was hein his mischievous mind. 491 LUCIUS APULEIUS

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She smelled like limes. “What got up your asses?” she asked. “Nothing,” Lionel said. “That’s your favorite word, isn’t it? Nothing. ” “I should go,” he said. It was not especially late. A few minutes after eight. But he had a longish trip home, and the thought of the cold air on his face and all around him was comforting. “Why?” she asked, though she was yawning. Charles said nothing. He scrolled on his phone. “Charlie? Do you have something to say about this?” “No,” Charles said. “If he wants to go, he can go.” “It’s freezing outside,” Sophie said. “It’s okay.” “He can’t walk. Tell him to stay. Use your common sense, Lionel.” Sophie turned to him. She smiled. Her eyes were warm, caring. It was a kindhearted gesture. But then, beneath it, he sensed something else. Not meanness. But something prickly and alive. “I can, it’s okay.” “I’ll drive him,” Charles said. “I’ll drive him if he wants to go.” “No, that’s not necessary. He’s staying,” she said. Lionel twisted his scarf in his hands. Charles had looked up and was making direct eye contact with Sophie. They were exchanging some form of information. But Lionel wanted to go. He felt it necessary to leave. Sophie’s head turned very slowly to Lionel. “What are you afraid of, Lionel?” “Nothing. I just want to go home,” he said. “We have been nice to you. I let you fuck Charlie, didn’t I? What’s there to be so afraid of?” Lionel felt a chill race up his spine. Sophie sat up fully then. She put her feet on the floor, but then crossed her legs elegantly. She tilted her head to the side, rested her chin on her hand. “Do you think I’ll eat you?” She snapped her teeth playfully at him. “Sophie, leave him alone,” Charles said. “You can see he’s about to piss his pants.” “Don’t make fun of me,” Lionel said. “Yeah, Charlie, don’t make fun of him.” She was still smiling when she said it. “You know the problem with you and also you ,” she said, gesturing to each of them in turn, “is that you’re both selfish.” Charles stood up. He reached behind Lionel for his coat. As he was putting it on, Sophie lay back down and closed her eyes. “I made you a nice dinner, didn’t I?” “It was great,” Lionel said. “When are you going to thank me for the rest of it?” she asked, and Lionel frowned. Charles was kneeling to put on his boots. He shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.” “For letting you have Charlie. When are you going to thank me for that?” she asked, and Lionel flushed. His mouth went dry. And he looked to Charles and then back to Sophie. He felt ill. Charles stood up, awkwardly. He winced.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He floated on a warm cloud. Lionel lived on Hancock, so he cut a path through Orton Park. The playground looked a little sad and eerie. The swings moved in the wind. The gazebo had white-blue lights going, but snow had piled up to the benches. The neighborhoods and their mismatched houses. Queen Anne and modernist and Dutch colonial, all mixed together, side by side. During his first year in graduate school he had taken a walk with a friend through one of the East Side neighborhoods, and the friend, from Denmark, kept saying, You have turrets on one end and Frank Lloyd Wright on the other. It makes no sense. No flow. At night, the houses made a kind of sense. As if they were embedded in a shared context. Lionel almost missed the chatter of the party, missed talking to Sophie and Charles. Charlie . It hadn’t felt comfortable, exactly. But he’d felt good talking to them. Sparring a little. It was easier to forget what lay in wait for him at his apartment: The dishes in the sink. The laundry he’d left. The dust covering all his possessions. Not for long—just a week and a half—but still. When he’d come home from the hospital, his apartment was stale and unfamiliar. Like it belonged to someone else. It had been the water sitting in the sink, he knew. The crusty dishes and soggy pasta. He’d done the dishes before the potluck, at least. His phone vibrated, and he checked the screen. He did not recognize the number. where r u? Lionel looked up the long gray street. The little houses finally giving way to stone-and-brick apartment buildings. Near the capitol but not on the square. The snow had dampened the cuffs of his jeans and soaked through his socks. The drifts were high and thick. He checked the cross streets and saw that he was almost home. He had been walking for fifteen minutes without realizing how much time had passed. He texted his location to the number he did not recognize, feeling a kind of drugged, silly courage. His phone pulsed again: on my way This was different. This was not a question but an answer. Something was on its way toward him, and he did not know what or who it was. He had texted his location as a joke, almost, but here was its echo, bounding back at him, and he felt a prick of something, a little bee-sting sensation at the base of his skull. Then another text: c u soon Lionel went on walking, texting briefly: who are you? Another pulse, another text from the ether: ;) Lionel looked behind himself along the street from which he’d come. He felt a pale version of fear. As if his whole body were numb, but trying to wake up, registering sensation only through a dense haze.

• From Escape (2007)

  Merril had heard about the storm in Page and knew I was driving home. He’d called my apartment in Cedar and talked to his daughters there, who said I’d left a few hours before. Then he called my parents to see if they had heard from me. No one had. Merril told my dad there had been a lot of accidents on the road. Dad decided to look for me. He had to make his way through the storm, which was still wreaking havoc in the area. He started following the route he thought I’d have taken and spotted Merril’s van in Hurricane, where it had been towed. He was stricken by the sight of the damaged van. He flagged the driver down and asked if he knew what had happened to me. But the driver of the tow truck had no idea of my whereabouts. Ambulances were coming in from everywhere. My father got back in the car and told my mother that they’d just have to go home and wait for a phone call with news. When my parents got home at midnight, they learned I was safe and had called about an hour before. The first thing I did when I got home was hold Arthur in my arms. He was now just over a year and nothing on earth was more precious to me than him. The warmth of his small body against mine began to melt some of my awful fear. It took me more than twenty-four hours to feel warm again. But I still didn’t know about my pregnancy. I hadn’t started bleeding, which I thought was a good sign. Maybe, just maybe, the baby had been spared. When I was stranded, I’d prayed and prayed to God to save my baby. I went back to school and started studying again. College gave me a focus. The days were fine, but I started having terrible nightmares. I would see the steering wheel spinning out of control and feel the van skidding out from under me. The terror was unshakably alive in me. I stopped driving, but I just didn’t tell anyone about it. I made up excuses about why I didn’t want to drive. In large families, there is always someone who is willing and eager to drive. I was too traumatized, but no one ever suspected the real reason I never drove. There would be times when I had to drive between school and Merril’s house, but they were few and far between. Once I graduated, I never wanted to drive again.

• From Escape (2007)

  My mother and I came up with a plan. I would spend the days hiding out at my father’s house and the nights at Merril’s. I could not risk getting my father into trouble with the FLDS, which had very strong beliefs against a father interfering in his daughter’s marital life, even if he felt she was being physically or emotionally abused. It is a sin for a woman to talk about abuse; if she’s being abused, it is because she is not in harmony with her husband. My parents would be considered sinners in the FLDS for listening to me talk about the abuse. Their job was to talk me into being more obedient to my husband’s will. One day when I was at my father’s house, he came back from church and said that Warren had closed the public school system permanently. Everyone in the community had been ordered to educate their children in private religious schools. This affected roughly two thousand children. As a teacher, I had seen what happened academically when families in our culture home-schooled their children. It amounted to no school. Families were now to band together in small groups and create their own religious schools. There was no uniform curriculum. Warren would tell each school what to teach. Warren didn’t want credentialed teachers teaching. He believed we had been contaminated by worldly knowledge. Anyone with an education was seen as a threat because we were too involved with the ways of the world. It was no secret that Warren Jeffs closed the public schools; it was covered in local newspapers as well as the Salt Lake City Tribune. But, inexplicably, there was no public outcry or state action. Education, which I prized, had almost no value in Warren Jeffs’ FLDS. The changes were dramatic but had occurred incrementally. First no one was allowed to get a college education. Then the public schools were closed and those of us who took pride in working there were seen as a threat. I continued to stay at my father’s every day until very late at night. Then we’d return home after everyone was asleep in Merril’s house. I would lock my children into my room with me. Harrison would sleep for about two hours and then by early morning we’d head back to my parents’. Merril cornered me in the family sewing room one afternoon when I was getting some material and patterns to take to my parents’ house to make back-to-school dresses for Betty and LuAnne, who were then eleven and nine years old. He insisted on talking to me. All I said was, “I don’t want to.” I think this was the first time in my entire married life that I had ever intimidated Merril.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Keep the change, you filthy animal,” Nolan says, and more gunfire rains down on them. It’s that scene from Home Alone where there’s a movie playing, an old movie, and the man on the screen pulls out a gun and shoots someone who had come to betray him or something like that. Nolan aims his fingergun squarely at Milton’s chest and fires as if he, too, were nothing more than an animal. The gesture’s cruelty jolts him momentarily, and in an instant, an awful transfiguration: Nolan, the hunter, fierce and terrible, come to shoot them all down. Milton digs his fingers into the ground to steady himself. There’s a hand on his shoulder, and Milton jumps. A girl he doesn’t know. “Hey,” she says, “isn’t it your birthday?” “How did you know?” “I saw it online. We’re friends there.” “We are?” Milton strains to remember where he has seen her face before. At school, maybe, or out with everyone like tonight. But she is plainly pretty, pale and blond with delicate features. He’s familiar with the look, everything straightened and cleared, frosted and dyed and perfect. “We are,” she says. Her voice is musical and high. “I’m Edie.” “Milton.” “Oh, I know. Happy birthday, by the way.” “Thanks,” he says. Even though he doesn’t ask her to or make a gesture that’s welcoming or open, she sits next to him. “Shouldn’t you be out celebrating?” “What do you think I’m doing?” he asks, and she rolls her eyes at him. “Some celebration.” “I know, it’s great.” “Then why are you here?” she asks. “Nolan wanted to come, and I couldn’t tell him no.” “That boy,” she says, and it makes Milton lean toward her. “What do you mean?” “Oh, I don’t know. People have a hard time telling him no. Or he has a hard time hearing it, I should say.” There’s something resigned about the way that sounds to him, and Milton wants to press her on it, but before he can, Abe and Nolan have made their way over. “You can’t sit around here talking all night. We gotta get you high,” Nolan says. Then, noticing Edie, he smiles. “Hello, Edie.” “Nolan,” she drawls. “How you been?” “Oh, you know.” She shrugs. “How’s your sister?” Nolan asks, and something mean catches the underside of his words. But Edie sighs, rises from the ground. Abe snickers to himself nearby. Edie turns her head subtly, her eyes ranging over all their faces. They are not alone. They are at the edge of the crowd. The holler and hoop of the others. The music pressing down on them all, percussive, driving in the way Nolan remembers church music to be. So solid in its presence that he had once asked his mother if it was the Holy Spirit, and she had laughed and said, No, boy, that’s just the drums. Edie’s shoulders open and she tilts her chin up stiffly. “Better every day,” she says firmly.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He wanted to withdraw from her but didn’t. It was another of those moments when he had a clear choice but chose not to act. She came closer to him then, until she was kneeling on his folded legs. Her weight felt good against him. She stroked the back of his neck, and his hands tingled, as with the feather sticking out of Charles’s coat. It was like a premonition of an act. A presentiment of what he might do. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Isn’t it what you want?” “No,” he said, but his mouth was dry. Her lips were on his, her tongue parting, sinking. She kissed him again on the corner of his mouth, and then on his cheek. She bit his lip, and the sharpness was a jolt. “Are you a good boy, Lionel?” “No.” He tried to lean away from her. She swayed. She didn’t need him to stay upright. She withdrew as if she’d made up her mind about him. And she climbed back onto the sofa. “I think you’re right about that,” she said. She shrugged, sighed. “I don’t think you’re good at all.” The words crackled in the dim apartment like blue static. He saw them flare to life and then vanish. Charles returned, his wrists still soapy from the dishes. He leaned over the back of the couch, looking down at them. “I was trying to get Lionel to tell me what he’s thinking,” Sophie said. “But he won’t.” “What are you thinking?” Charles asked. Lionel stood up and cleared his throat. He wanted to be anywhere but there. They were both watching him very closely, so much so that their eyes felt like a single organ through which every one of his actions, no matter how small, was being categorized and stored away. “I should go,” he said. “Why?” Sophie asked. “It’s cold out.” “It’s fine.” “You’ll freeze,” Charles said. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” “You don’t mind freezing?” Charles asked with a bewildered smile. “Are you crazy? Sit down, Lionel.” “I should be going,” he said. “Sit down, Lionel,” Charles said again, firmer this time. Something in Lionel responded to that firmness, used it as a guide as he let himself settle back on the floor. Charles smiled at him and came around the couch. He sat next to Lionel and put his arm across Lionel’s shoulders. He drew him closer, inspecting the bruise. Lionel was awash in Charles’s body heat, in the proximity of his touch. He felt he’d come undone under the insistent stroking of Charles’s finger back and forth across the bruise on his cheek, back and forth across that place that had been marked with a promise of violence. Lionel tried to get away from Charles’s hand, but he couldn’t. Charles gripped the back of his neck tightly.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “You’re not much of an Anne Boleyn,” Sigrid said, and the name darted through Marta’s mind like a swift silver fish. There was something there, a glimmer of recognition—or, no, maybe just a desire to have the conversation over with. She had not thought much about history in some time, in years, really. She had studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate and now she worked at a waste-processing plant in Baraboo. She might have told Sigrid this, except that the look on Sigrid’s face, with its precise concentration, wedged inside her like a splinter. “Definitely not Catherine Howard.” “I don’t know who they are, but I’ll take your word for it,” Marta said. The wine was too sweet for her. She didn’t much like wine. She preferred Coors or Old Milwaukee, beer of the pale, weak variety. It may have been the result of spending all her time in college around engineers, who drank shitty beer and leaned over their notebooks and parsed their calculations long into the night. She had often woken up on their couches smelling sour and raw, with rulers stuck to her thighs. That’s how she had met Peter and fallen in with him: they saw each other so much that it seemed natural that they should date, and when he asked her to the movies, she’d said, Okay, all right, sounds good. On that first date with Sigrid, she was still sad about Peter, and uneasy, and if this was how dating women was going to be, a series of increasingly esoteric questions, she wasn’t sure she liked it that much, either. “This won’t work,” Sigrid said, and Marta felt a little pulse of fear. “What won’t work?” “This,” she said, gesturing wildly. “You retreating, falling into silence. It won’t work.” “I’m sorry,” Marta said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say or do. I don’t know anything about Henry the Eighth, or whoever.” “That’s fine,” Sigrid said. “You say that, except I told you before, when you asked me, that I didn’t know much about it. And you kept going, so I don’t know.” “It’s fine,” Sigrid said, and she leaned over the table and crossed her arms.

• From Escape (2007)

  What could I do when everyone insisted there was no problem? Nothing. I went back to the office. When Merril came back that night he told Ruth to make an appointment with the dermatologist, even though part of her nose was breaking away from the burned area. When she finally returned home she was extremely upset. The dermatologist said she’d burned her nose off with the chemicals, which would continue burning until she neutralized them with vinegar. The doctor had demanded that Ruth tell him who had given her the chemicals. But she refused. The doctor said they could only be obtained illegally, and he’d seen several other cases of severe burns in people who tried to treat their own skin cancer. But the dermatologist also told Ruth that she did burn off the cancer along with everything else. He made an emergency appointment for her to see a plastic surgeon in Salt Lake City to begin to reconstruct her nose. It was a cheap job and looked terrible. The side that was burned so badly was very misshapen. I felt bad for her. Ruth’s nose was bizarre. But I knew I never would do something so mindless. I’d also continue to take my children to the doctor at the first sign of serious illness, Merril be damned. I felt that in this area, I was immune from Warren’s extremism. But it frightened me when I realized how pervasive extremism was becoming in ways I could not have anticipated. I was in the kitchen one night making dinner and I overheard Merril’s daughter Merrilyn say, “When Dee took that pig’s heart out it squealed so loud you could hear it for blocks.” I shuddered, then left the kitchen to find out what Merrilyn meant. Information was power to me. If I knew what was happening, I felt reasonably confident I could figure out a survival strategy. Merrilyn was talking about the survival classes Warren was holding at his private school in Salt Lake City. Dee Jessop was Ruth and Barbara’s nephew and just a few years older than I was. He’d been making regular trips to Salt Lake from Colorado City and killing animals in front of students. He did this to show students how many different ways an animal could be killed. Very few people talked about what they had seen. I think the children were too traumatized. The parents who knew what was going on also knew to keep their mouths shut. No one stood up to Warren, even then. This was happening under Warren’s orders. I knew him well enough to know that there was always a reason behind his actions. He never did things on a whim. But I couldn’t fathom how torturing animals fit into the picture.

• From Escape (2007)

  Six weeks after the surgery he started turning blue. I called his doctor and rushed him in. She did an X-ray and then admitted him immediately to the hospital. It had seemed to me he’d been getting worse, not better, since his surgery. Now we knew why. His entire chest was filling up with lymphatic fluid. Every lobe of his lungs had collapsed except one, and that wasn’t providing him with enough oxygen. A surgeon was called in to drain some of the fluid from his lungs. Once the fluid was drained we were medivaced back to Phoenix. Harrison was admitted to the ICU for pediatric cardiac care. He was sedated and slept for a long time. I was so terrified that he might die, I rarely left his side. I felt anguished at the level of suffering he must have endured during the past three weeks. Harrison had an X-ray every day for the next two weeks to make sure the fluid was not filling up again in his lungs. Also, amazingly, we saw that the rib the surgeon had removed was beginning to regenerate. I could see the progression on the X-rays as it grew back into a rib. I asked the doctor if he’d ever seen anything like this before and he said that he hadn’t. But he added that he had seen some amazing things happen when it came to healing in children. Two weeks later, Harrison and I went home again. He had made remarkable progress. When we’d first arrived I was told we might be there for six weeks, certainly at least three. But he was doing better than anyone had ever expected. The gladness I felt knew no bounds. Cathleen Comes Home Coming home with Harrison from Phoenix Children’s Hospital the second time was a relief at one level, but at another it was the beginning of an even more intense ordeal. Harrison had survived a complicated surgery, but his regime of pain medication was not working. Harrison screamed almost nonstop. When he went into one of his spasms, he would bite his arms and hands. It was almost a constant effort to keep him from hurting himself. His doctor prescribed a higher dose of Versed, a potent relaxant and anticonvulsant used to treat seizures and as premedication in some surgical procedures. It’s fast-acting and has a short half life in the body. I could give Harrison three doses of Versed within an hour, but then I would have to wait for two hours until I could medicate him again. He usually calmed down after the second dose, but not always. Sometimes it took three. The IV therapy was finally stopped because the doctors felt it wasn’t helping Harrison enough, and his Port-a-Cath—the direct line into his body that was used for his IV therapy—was removed. I was relieved to see that go because it meant one less risk of infection.

• From Escape (2007)

  But no one intervened. Most of us in the community felt that Ruth could not have picked a better person to brutalize. When Dee managed to break free, he got into his truck and drove home. The rest of us felt that justice had been served. But Ruth continued on her downward spiral. Word reached Uncle Rulon that she was out of control, and he sent Merrilyn to help take care of her. But Merrilyn hated being in charge of her mother. One morning Tammy came down for breakfast and heard Ruth screaming like a child. She walked into Merril’s office and saw Merrilyn beating her mother. Ruth finally sank into the corner of the office, sobbing and hugging herself. Tammy was shocked. “Why are you slapping your mother like that?” Merrilyn shrugged. “That’s the way Father handled her ever since I was a little girl. When she gets out of control, he beats the hell out of her until she comes to her senses.” Ruth was finally hospitalized for two weeks. Patrick’s Abuse One of the moments I’d do over in my life if I could is this: Patrick, my four-year-old son, was trying to wake me up at ten-thirty one weekend night. Merril had called family prayers and we were all to assemble upstairs in the living room. One of his older children had tried to rouse me from sleep. When that failed, he sent Patrick. “Mother, Father wants you to come pray,” Patrick said. I rolled over and said that I was too tired. Merrilee was only a few weeks old and I still had not recovered from her birth. I was so depleted and wiped out that I’d fallen into bed after tucking in my children. But apparently Merril had called for prayers, and all my sleeping children were dragged from their beds. I was sick from exhaustion and told Patrick I could not get out of bed to pray. There had been a period of relative stability in our home after Merril’s heart attack. Barbara continued to cause problems for the five other wives, but we were making a determined effort not to engage with her in hopes of minimizing stress at home while Merril recuperated. After a few weeks this strategy seemed to set Barbara off. She thrived on tension and on reporting on our shortcomings to Merril. To stir up trouble, Barbara encouraged the children to act up to get us to respond abusively. One day I lost it with several of Merril’s daughters. They’d been making my life miserable by being argumentative and resistant. When I overheard them acting shocked about a girl who was being bullied and sent dog food as a symbol of her worth, I lit into them.

• From Escape (2007)

  The G-button would go directly into Harrison’s stomach, instead of the temporary nasogastric tube that went through his nose. A fundoplication prevents vomiting because the upper part of the stomach is wrapped around the esophagus and secured in such a way that it works like a valve to prevent the stomach contents from coming up through the esophagus. This was a huge help to Harrison because he stopped getting pneumonia from all the vomiting and he no longer needed to have the nasogastric tube inserted every day. The doctors at Phoenix Children’s had seen only one other patient like Harrison. That child was still having spasms after three years. Some kids with spinal neuroblastoma stopped having spasms immediately after the tumor was removed. For others, the spasms lasted for years until they finally subsided. I couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to him. I hated that he needed more surgery, but he had to have relief from the constant vomiting. He was always on the brink of starvation because he couldn’t get enough nutrition to grow. The emergency trips to St. George were becoming more frequent. Harrison had almost died several times and I couldn’t keep pressing our luck. He had to eat, he had to stop vomiting, and he had to be able to breathe. It was hard to imagine his condition getting any worse. Surgery was our only option. I began making arrangements for his surgery in the spring of 2001. Harrison was almost two and had been having spasms for nearly a year. When I started vomiting that April, I thought it might be the flu. But I didn’t have any other symptoms and after a few days I bought a pregnancy kit. I knew what the result would be. I’d missed my last Depo-Provera shot because I was so consumed with Harrison’s care. The test was positive. I was pregnant for the eighth time. If this became another life-threatening pregnancy, it could kill Harrison. No one in Merril’s family would help with Harrison’s care. We could all die: me, my unborn baby, and my sick son. Merril’s daughter Audrey had moved back to our FLDS community a year before. Dear, sweet Audrey, who had taken me on those long bike rides out to the reservoir when I first married Merril and tried to teach me about the family’s dynamics, now became a real ally. Audrey had worked in the ER at University Hospital in Salt Lake City. She was well trained in critical care and knew that Harrison’s condition was a medical problem, not a punishment for my sins. Audrey herself had fallen ill when she was living in Salt Lake City. As soon as she was diagnosed and treated, she stabilized. Audrey did well.

• From Escape (2007)

  But as I was so often forced to learn, happiness was not something I could hold on to. I had to leave the private high school with my friends after only a year. Uncle Roy started a small public high school for his followers, and I was forced to go. Once more I had to say goodbye to my friends and sever myself from what mattered to me most. My life felt like it was moving in the wrong direction, but I felt powerless to stop it. But my sister Linda’s life had become desperate. Linda’s Flight to Freedom Linda had a sense that someone was watching her. He was an old man in the community who was about three times older than she was at seventeen. My father would come home and start asking Linda questions. Why was she wearing a skirt that was too short? Why was she walking down the street in heels that were too high? Why had she combed her hair a certain way before? Dad told Linda who had seen her doing these things. Linda realized that this man was spying on her and reporting back to my father. When my mother got wind of this she was very upset and told my father that she didn’t trust this man. This was highly out of order, and my father ignored her. A woman had no right to speak out like this, even if the goal was protecting her daughter. Linda and I both could see that even when Mother wanted to protect us she had no power to do so. Mother’s fear was that he was angling to marry Linda. Linda feared the same thing. She knew he was a man of power and influence within the community who, if he went to the prophet, could have nearly any woman he wanted. Once he locked onto Linda, there would be no escape. Linda also knew that Mother would drop her concerns about the marriage if the prophet decreed that she should become this man’s fifth wife. These marriages were like live-animal traps. Linda knew her only hope was to flee before the trap snapped shut and there was no escape. She would be eighteen in the fall, which would give her a measure of legal protection. Linda had a childhood friend in the community who was also desperate to escape. Claudel was terrified that she was going to be forced to marry her stepfather. Claudel had been living with her mother in Salt Lake City for several years. Her mother, who was no longer married to Claudel’s biological father, treated her like an indentured servant, forcing her to do all the cooking, cleaning, and babysitting. Claudel feared that if she was forced to marry her stepfather, she would become her mother’s slave for life and resigned to a life of bitterness—a living death.

• From Escape (2007)

  The changes Warren Jeffs mandated were obeyed because it was believed he was the voice of the prophet, Uncle Rulon. People did not resist the more oppressive policies he advocated. Instead, it was widely believed that we were being called to a higher way of living the gospel. This wasn’t oppression, this was grace. God was giving us a new and better way of being more faithful to him via the prophet and his mouthpiece, Warren Jeffs. People who feared these changes and sensed danger, like me, kept quiet. It wasn’t safe anymore to talk about what you were feeling. Women now were not even supposed to go into town without the company of a man. Our husband was our lord and supreme master, holding exclusive power over our lives. It was seen as no longer acceptable for a woman to enter the same room as her husband without first saying a personal prayer asking God to put the same spirit on her as on her husband. I saw this as a real dilemma because most of the time when I entered the same room as Merril he was in a very bad mood. If I had the same spirit that he had, one of us might get hurt. This doctrine was one I decided to ignore. Charter School There was no aspect of our lives that Warren Jeffs left untouched. Education was one of the first areas where his imprint was punitive and spiteful. Warren’s father had put a stop to higher education after he became the prophet. The only exceptions were those of us who had been given permission to attend college by his predecessor, Uncle Roy, before he died. So a few of us were allowed to go on to college, but most could not. This created a population that was even more isolated by its lack of exposure to reading, critical thinking, and the arts. It also meant there was a real shortage of trained teachers. We couldn’t hire teachers from out of town because no one was willing to work for such low salaries. Teachers made, at most, twenty thousand dollars a year. Some families were home-schooling their children because they felt public schools were too contaminated with worldly influence. The education the home-schooled got was abysmal. But the number of kids being taught at home did not have any impact on the teacher shortage. Classrooms were overcrowded, teachers overwhelmed. Several of the second-grade teachers talked about this problem at our monthly meeting. We knew families were getting bigger, not smaller. Our brainstorming produced no answers. But the next week I heard about charter schools that were starting in Arizona. The state was accepting proposals for additional schools that would open in the following years. I started doing research to see what a charter school might mean for us, and it was breathtaking.