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)

  Grace laughs. It is of course a ridiculous sentiment. And anyway, if you looked at it hard enough, they were the same in a way. That way being that they wanted men. All the times Grace and Davis used to run to this man after being chased by the dog from down the road. Or the way they’d been chased by goats when they’d visited their cousins farther out in the country. Or the way they’d hidden their faces when they met their great-grandparents, skin like polished wood and ancient-looking, hunched forward under their shawls, smelling like astringent creams. When she was younger and sleeping upstairs, Grace had sometimes felt a pressure on her chest or on her shoulders, holding her down, doing nothing else but that, pressing her against the bed until she was perfectly flat. She had tried to scream, to holler for someone to come and help her, but the weight on her chest had prevented it. She’d lie there all night, frozen, stuck inside her body, unable to do anything to get free. When she told Big Davis about it, he said, What made them made you, didn’t it? They don’t mean you no harm. As if some common origin could negate terror of the unknown. Because we were all made of the same fearsome stuff, nothing in the world could scare you if you looked it in the eye and saw the part of it that was yourself. It was nonsensical in the way that only wisdom could be, Grace thought. Old men and their little stories. “What made you made him,” Grace replies. “You have bigger problems, little lady, than what your brother and me have between us. Mind your business.” Grace hums. Enid stares at her hard. Now who’s trouble? she can almost hear. It’s true that, growing up, Grace had been the one they watched like a hawk. Her grandmother used to say that boys made babies and girls brought them home, dropped them like kittens at the doorstep, and then who had to raise them but the parents or the grandparents? Nothing her grandmother hated more than the sight of a loose girl, which was to say every girl. When Grace was little, she was the one whose hair they combed all Sunday morning and the one they dressed in the stiff white polyester dress with a ruffle collar before church. She didn’t get to run through the woods that cut along by the cemetery. She didn’t get to crouch by the pews and play cars before the service started. No. Grace had to behave.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Milton finds a place under some trees and squats. Around the tree from him, some skinny kid is going at it with a girl. Their wet kissing sounds to him like slugs being peeled apart. Nolan’s standing with Abe and Tate, talking. He’s gesturing broadly with his hands, telling some story or another. Abe’s expression is placid and gentle. Abe used to be good—sweet, even. They were all in Sunday school together, the four of them. But then something had gone wrong in each of them, something turning suddenly hard and cold and malicious. A wildness in them waking up after a long hibernation. Milton hears Nolan’s voice over the music—he’s making a sound like gunfire, spraying all the people around them with bullets made of air. “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.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  My crowd had enjoyed my humiliation, so I started panhandling. My hat was filled with dollar bills within a few minutes. Word must have gotten around because I kept raking in cash all day. I awoke disoriented. For a few seconds I thought that I was safe at home in my own bed. The white walls betrayed themselves, as did the white hospital bed. My lower back burned, as did my upper arm. I climbed out of the bed to give my body a quick survey. I was wearing white thong underwear with little purple dots. A bandage covered my lower back and another wrapped my right bicep. I rushed to the toilet and lowered the thong underwear. My pubic hair was gone. My cock and balls were okay, but I had been shaved. So had my legs. Urgency claimed me. I pissed, washed my hands, sipped some water and turned toward the full-length mirror. I didn’t even recognize myself. Every hair on my body had been shaved—even my head was bald. “Shit,” I yelped as memories flooded back. Walking back to the parking structure after my profitable panhandling experience, I noticed a black limousine beside the curb, its driver lounging in the shadows. I’d heard plenty about shit like that. A homeless kid gets in the car and is never seen again. Maybe in a couple of months the authorities find his gang-raped body. I turned to flee. “Hey, Bottom. How’d you like the burger and fries? Did that shake taste good?” “What do you want?” I asked, neither fleeing nor approaching. He stepped out into the glare of the streetlights. He didn’t look threatening. “Pop Tingle likes the way you obeyed him.” That made me curious. I took a closer look at the guy. He was in his early thirties, a creamy-skinned mix of African American and red-haired Nordic ancestry with a hint of Asian tossed into the melting pot. He had a gym-sculpted body with natural attributes. Abruptly he smiled, which emboldened me to ask who he was. “You can call me Mr. Jack. I’m Pop Tingle’s assistant.” “Who the fuck is Pop Tingle?” “The best pop you’ll ever have, Bottom.” It didn’t take five minutes for Mr. Jack to talk me into the car. I sat beside him as we slid through the darkening streets. Mr. Jack described the delights of Pop Tingle’s home: great food, warm beds, gigantic televisions, gym memberships. “But first,” Mr. Jack said, “you need a medical checkup. After living on the streets, your health could be compromised.” The clinic was closed for the night, but Doctor Tartt met us at the back door. Mr. Jack slipped her an envelope and escorted me into an examination room. A male nurse came in, introduced himself, weighed me; took my temperature, pulse and blood pressure and handed me a hospital gown. “Take everything off,” the nurse, Armando, said. “The examination will be thorough.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Then he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as Chrysler’s Shell Gray, Chevrolet’s Thistle Gray, Dodge’s French Gray … The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little moustache and open shirt—or for his baldish pate and broad shoulders—led me to a profound study of all cars on the road—behind, before, alongside, coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist’s automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog’s head protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor’s tudor sedan crowded with suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up … The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us. We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had deepened and concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden, as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart’s pangs, we were slithering from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us. “You got a flat, mister,” said cheerful Lo. I pulled up—near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear wheel. The base of its tire was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my chance. I started to walk towards him—with the brilliant idea of asking him for a jack though I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a stone—and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck loomed from behind Trapp and thundered by me—and immediately after, I heard it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back—and saw my own car gently creeping away.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Some people didn’t know the danger they were in until years later, looking back. That was a kind of blessing, too, in a way. The ignorance of your own peril. “You smell like hell,” Alek said. “You smell like—” “Something awful,” Mats completed. Their voices were complementary: Mats very low, Alek higher, a dull tenor. “Generous,” Charles said. Mats yelped briefly. Farnland turned to them. “Is there something so funny about our fundamentals?” He let his arms hang down, his head tilted to the side. His mouth was furious. “No,” Charles said, squaring up his shoulders and facing ahead. “Nothing funny at all.” “No,” the other two said. “Oh, good. I’d hate to miss out.” Charles was not as afraid of him as he had been of other ballet teachers. There was something truly terrible about that species of human. They were farsighted by nature, seeing not what you did, only what you might do or, more often, what you might do wrong. The moment you completed a gesture, they were already looking ahead to the moment you made a mistake, and it was that fear and frustration that drove them to punish you. Again and again you drilled, again and again you dipped and turned and spotted and turned out and rotated and lifted, and higher, please, higher!, until their voices were as much a part of you as your own interior static. Charles saw Farnland for what he was, though: a preening, declining old man with a mean streak. They gazed at each other then, caught in a bitter contest of wills. At a party the previous year, Charles had seen Farnland whispering in Viktor’s ear, his hand at the small of Viktor’s back, pulling at the oversize burgundy silk shirt he wore. Viktor with a plastic cup of champagne, giggling, his hand on Farnland’s chest. Charles had seen it, and the Farnland had seen him see it. But what was there to do about it? “Nothing to miss,” Charles said. “He hates you,” Mats said with glee. “He hates you so much.” “You run over his cat or what?” Alek asked pointedly. “Keep me out of the splash zone.” “Maybe he wants to fuck,” Mats said. “Oh, most definitely,” Alek said. “And to skin Charlie alive. Maybe it’s a Buffalo Bill thing. He wants to wear you.” “I’m not his type,” Charles said, but then, his eyes falling on Viktor at the front of the room, he felt a bit of regret. “You did show up late.” “Smelling like last night’s garbage.” “It wasn’t garbage, trust me,” Charles said, turning to look over his shoulder at Alek. “Oh, Sophie is going to love that.” “Say more. Don’t leave us hanging.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Kevin and his family stayed on three more days. Mr. Cork became incoherent with drink one night and cracked the banister as he reeled up to bed. Mrs. Cork exploded the next morning and told my stepmother she loathed eggs “swimming in grease.” Katy, the Hungarian cook, locked herself in her room and emerged red-eyed and sniffling two hours later. Kevin and Mrs. Cork argued with each other, or rather she nagged him and he ridiculed her; when they made up, their embrace was shockingly intimate—prolonged, wordless nuzzling. On a rainy afternoon the boys roughhoused until Peter overturned the table and smashed one of the hand-painted tiles set into the top; his parents seemed almost indifferent to the damage and allowed the pushing and shoving to continue. Mrs. Cork’s way of conspicuously ignoring the pandemonium was to vocalize, full voice. Each night Kevin came to my bed, though now I no longer elaborated daydreams of running away with him. I was a little bit afraid of him; now that he knew I was a sissy, he could make fun of me whenever he chose to. Who knew what he’d do? After witnessing his vituperation against his mother, followed by the weird nuzzling, I could not continue to think of him as the boy next door. The last night I tried kissing him again, but he turned his head away. On the afternoon they left, Mrs. Cork flushed a deep, indignant red and chased Kevin halfway up the stairs. He crouched and shouted, his face contorted, “You scumbag, you old scumbag,” and pushed her down the stairs. My father was furious. He lifted the woman from the floor and said to Kevin, “I think you’ve done enough for one day, young man.” Mr. Cork, not completely sober, kept counting the pieces of luggage. He pretended he hadn’t noticed the outbreak. His wife took on an injured silence as though in heavy mourning. She barely said good-bye to us. But once she had gone through the door and was on the steps to the garage, I saw her flash a crooked little smile at her son. He rushed into her open arms and they nuzzled and stroked each other.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  At last we were under way. Mr. Wellington, unlike my father, was a smooth, competent sailor. He pulled the boat around so that the wind was behind us and he asked me to attach the spinnaker pole to the jib sail, but I became frightened when I had to lean out over the coursing water and Tommy filled in for me, not vexed at me but, I suspect, worried about what his father would think. And what was I afraid of? Falling in? But I could swim, a rope could be tossed my way. That wasn’t it. Even my vertigo I had overcome on the seawall for Tom’s sake. It was, I’m sure, Mr. Wellington’s disapproval I feared and invited, that disapproval which, so persistent, had ended by becoming a manner, a way of being, like someone’s way of holding his head to one side, something familiar, something I would miss if it were absent. Not that he bestowed his disapproval generously on me. No, even that he withheld and dispensed in only the smallest sums. The wind blew higher and higher and Mr. Wellington, who’d taken in sail, was holding close to it. We gripped the gunwales and leaned back out over the cold, running waves, the water brushing, then soaking the backs of our shirts. The sun solemnly withdrew into its tent of cloud, disappointed with the world. By the slightest turn of my head I could change the moan of the wind into a whistle. There we were, just a father and his teenage son and the son’s friend out for a sail, but in my mind, at least, the story was less simple. For I found in this Mr. Wellington a version of myself so transformed by will and practice as to be not easily recognizable, but familiar nonetheless. He had never been handsome, I was certain, and his lack of romanatic appeal shaded his responses to his glamorous son, the muted, wary adoration as well as the less than frank envy.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Again, that recurring awareness of strangeness, to stand, just stand waiting in the darkness. Again, the brushing depression—as figures lurk, pause, move on. The man in leather chaps—who did not advance earlier—is here again. Jim is about to leave, not wanting to extend the waiting game. But the other gropes Jim's cock with one hand, the other guides Jim's hand to his back. Exploring, Jim's fingers discover that the man's pants have been cut out at the buttocks; the open chaps expose his naked ass. As the other sucks him cursorily, Jim's fingers part the buttocks. The man in chaps pushes his bending body against Jim's erect cock. Instead, Jim shoves his middle finger in. The man jerks—“Oh, yes!” Jim pushes another finger. Both farther. The man whispers: “Oh, yeah, baby, fuck me big!” Jim withdraws his fingers. The other pushes his ass forcefully against Jim's hard prick. Jim grasps him roughly by the shoulders, pushing him back and forth, allowing his cock to slide into the parted ass, its movements expertly matching the thrusting of Jim's. He feels the tight ass squeezing out his cum. He pulls away. The man came too. Across the street. Past other shadows in the lot. To the bathroom left open nightly in the garage at the corner. The sound of splashing water, as he soaps his cock, obscured— until he finished washing—the sexsighs coming from the lone cubicle. Outside, Jim decides he'll go home—hours before the purgatory of violet dawn. But as he walks through the thickening area—new hunters cruising, cars driving up and down frenetically—the nerve of his sexuality is re-awakened still again. Whrrrrrrrrrr! Whrrrrrrrrrr! The roar of the cop helicopter cuts the night. The wide shaft of its light pounces on the darkness. The outlaws move for cover, into areas sheltered by walls, into partitions between buildings, under trees—but even so, they move slowly, not violating the hypnotic quality of the hunt. Cold light floods the invaded area eerily, a threatened island of light in the dark. In the shadowed fringes, the hunt continues. Captured momentarily by the helicopter's light, his shadow swirling strangely about him, Jim moves out of the round pool. Beyond the illumined circle, a man waits in a car for him. He's well-built, wearing no shirt. Challenged as always, Jim removes his vest. The man gets out—he's more muscular than Jim thought at first. The helicopter's shifting light illumines both muscular bodies dramatically. Jim moves beyond the sidewalk, against sheltering trees bunched before a locked building. Following, the other stops within feet of him. The man flexes, clenched fist to forehead, biceps bulging in imitation of magazine poses. Challenged anew, Jim flexes back. Again, the brushing light of the helicopter accents their defined muscles. The man shifts into another pose, leg rigid at an angle, one arm tensed hard.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red shadow—as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with our shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him. O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek. A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets—at half-past-four P.M. in a factory town—was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on, and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb. When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared. Lola snorted and said: “If he is what you think he is, how silly to give him the slip.” “I have other notions by now,” I said. “You should—ah—check them by—ah—keeping in touch with him, fahther deah,” said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. “Gee, you are mean,” she added in her ordinary voice. We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling above us. “I am not a lady and do not like lightning,” said Lo, whose dread of electric storms gave me some pathetic solace. We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Simon drew the blanket around himself. “Well, all right,” he said. “I’ll get that beer,” Hartjes said. Simon was looking at the trees. Hartjes stooped low in the kitchen and tore two cans from the plastic yoke. He held them in his palm, which was wide and paler than the rest of him. He counted the containers of food, the vegetables, the soups, the stock, the meat tumescent in its plastic wrap. He saw the jars of moonshine, the bottle of wine from two weeks earlier with a plastic stopper jammed into its neck, and gelatinous cubes of gristle and fat, which Simon used for broth and for taste. The light was off, but they had left a candle going on the table. He turned in Simon’s kitchen and looked back through the house into the living room, where the furniture slept like guests and where the windows were filled with the soft white glow of distant stars. He hovered near the window by the stairs and pressed his face into the bristling curtain, inhaled its dust, and closed his eyes. There had been a time when Hartjes hated the dark. No, it wasn’t hatred. It was fear—he was scared both of what he couldn’t see and what might see him. He touched his lips to the cold glass of the window and summoned the clearest image of his mother he could bear to hold in his mind, as though he were laying her within the glass itself, passing her off to the house like a benediction. The thing that he never told anyone at any of the parties in college or elsewhere, the thing he had told Simon on the third and final night they’d slept together, was that his mother had been furious at him because, two days before that afternoon at his aunt’s house, she had caught him on top of Francisco in the church bathroom. He’d had his hands around Francisco’s throat, and Francisco had been kicking silently under him. It had started because Francisco had let him into the bathroom, said, “Hey, come in, pee, it’s fine,” and it was the first brotherly thing Francisco had said to him since they’d been living together. It made Hartjes feel wanted. So, with them pissing into the toilet, hitting one another with their spray, Hartjes said to Francisco, Do you want to play Mercy Me? And Francisco, shaking off and tucking back into his slacks, had shaken his head, and Hartjes said, Me first . Then he wrapped his hands around Francisco’s neck, and Francisco squirmed and said, You didn’t wash your hands, and Hartjes said, Shut up .

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  The passengers loved it when she called them by name. Mrs. Iverson held up a tiny sweater she was knitting. “Do you think babies need sweaters in Miami?” “I’m sure they do. I’ve worn sweaters, myself, especially in the evening.” She gave Mrs. Iverson two years, max, before she, too, made Florida her home. When Mrs. Iverson reached for Gaby’s hand, Gaby let her hold it. “The weather’s perfect all the way down,” she said in a reassuring voice. “You’ll get to see the moon. You just relax and breathe through your nose.” Mrs. Iverson nodded. Gaby patted her hand. “It will be so smooth you’ll probably fall asleep and when you wake up you’ll be in Miami.” —SHE HANDED OUT silver wings to the children, always a big hit, and a deck of playing cards to anyone who wanted them. A mother and her teenage daughter took a pack. “Gin?” the mother asked her daughter, as she shuffled the cards. “You know I always beat you,” the daughter said. “Maybe tonight’s my lucky night,” the mother said, laughing. So far, no drunks. That was good news. A late-night flight meant drinking at the bar in the departure lounge before boarding, which could translate into trouble on board. Tomorrow Gaby could lie on the beach all day, soaking up the winter sun. Never mind what her mother said about the sun ruining her skin. How would her mother know? She’d never sunbathed. She’d never been to Miami. One more time down the aisle checking to make sure the passengers had their seat belts fastened. She turned off the dome lights and switched on the night-lights. Most passengers kept their reading lights on, except for the ones who were already asleep or planning to be asleep. Gaby didn’t like sitting in the rear jump seat, facing away from the passengers. She preferred to keep an eye on them. But rules were rules, and she strapped herself in for takeoff. The wheels of the four-engine DC-6 lifted off at 12:18 a.m., carrying fifty-nine passengers, a crew of four, and 2,953 pounds of mail, baggage and air-freight parcels. The plane climbed to what she thought was 1,000 feet or less. One of the engines didn’t sound right. Gaby had been on other flights where engines had conked out but this was different. It made a horrible sputtering sound. She couldn’t be sure but it might have been two engines, because besides the sputtering noise, she heard what sounded like firecrackers. The plane dropped one hundred feet, and with it her stomach. The captain put full force on the power but the plane kept losing altitude. Right then, she knew they would crash. ChristinaChristina rested her head on Jack’s shoulder as he drove her home. She was already late, half an hour past curfew. She’d better have a good story ready for Mama.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  A few nights later I woke up with a fever. My throat was so sore I couldn’t swallow. My sheets were wet and cold with sweat. Even when I lay still I could feel the blood running through my veins; a metronome was ticking loudly within me and with each tick an oar of sensation cut into the water and pulled against it. No, now I could detect a line of divers jumping off the prow to the right, the left, right, left—the columns of marching boys advanced across the floor of the chlorinated pool. I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat pluck a string in the harp of my chest. Was the night really so cold? I had to get help; the infirmary; otherwise pneumonia. My roommate was propped up on his elbow speaking giddy nonsense to me (“I like, I like, I like the Lackawanna”) until I opened my eyes and saw him serenely asleep, his face the cutting edge of the prow as it parted a sea of liquid mercury. The flow, clinging to itself, boiling but cold, had swept me overboard with a chipmunk who was singing snatches from the Top Ten through the painful red hole in his neck—I sat up. I could barely swallow. I whispered my roommate’s name. When he didn’t respond I put on my regulation cotton robe and regulation black slippers and walked up and down the raw clay roads between the rows of tents. Was that the first streak of dawn or the lights of a town? Should I wait till reveille? Or should I wake our captain up now? I walked and walked and watched the night sky phosphoresce like plankton in the August sea. Gold would glimmer at the horizon and then feed its way up through delicate glass circuits into the main switchboard, where it would short out in a white explosion that would settle into a fine jeweler’s rouge. Were those bats overhead? I’d heard that bats lived in the school towers. Here they were: blind, carnivorous and getting closer, lacing their way from eye to eye up the tongue.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  After the recessional, when the choir marched out singing “Joy to the World,” Miri tried to find someone who could tell her what happened to Natalie. Mrs. Domanski, the choir director, explained that Natalie had suffered stomach pains, probably brought on by stage fright, and had gone home with her mother. Miri knew that Natalie never suffered stage fright, though she often had stomach pains. She hadn’t expected to see Henry. “Thank you for coming,” she said, hugging him. She knew how busy he was. “I was in the last row. Missed the processional, but caught the change of Marys onstage. What was that about?” Miri shrugged. “I don’t know.” Henry was the only one in their family to own a car—a ’38 green Chevy coupe with a rumble seat. But today was no day to sit in a rumble seat, unless you wanted to wind up frozen to death, so Miri sat up front with Henry and asked him to drop her at Natalie’s house. He glanced over at her but didn’t ask any questions. —MRS. BARNES WAS TALL, with excellent posture, and wore her silvery hair pulled back in a bun. “Natalie is upstairs, resting,” Mrs. Barnes told Miri, when Miri rang the bell. Miri didn’t ask for permission to go up. She took the wide stairs two at a time, but before she reached the landing, Mrs. Barnes called, “Miri!” Miri stopped. “I hear you were there when the plane crashed.” She nodded. Mrs. Barnes said, “My son Tim is a pilot.” She nodded again. Mrs. Barnes was always talking about her son, the pilot. “He says the pilot of that plane tried to avoid the residential area. That’s why he brought it down in the riverbed. He saved a lot of lives.” “I know. My uncle wrote about it in the Daily Post. ” “I forgot your uncle is a reporter. He should talk to Tim. He says it was maintenance. That’s the problem with those non-scheduled airlines—you don’t know who’s doing the maintenance. They don’t have the same standards as the majors. It’s a risk to fly them. Tim flies with American. Top-notch. You can trust them.” “I’ve never flown,” Miri said. “When you do.” “I doubt I will.” “Of course you will.” Miri shook her head. When she learned the fiery thing that fell from the sky was a plane, she vowed she would never set foot on one. Natalie was lying on her bed, her pale curls fanned out on the pillow. She looked like an angel, her cheeks still rosy from stage makeup, the Pixie Pink lipstick not yet worn off. Miri sat on the edge of the bed and reached for Natalie’s hand. “I made a complete fool of myself,” Natalie said. “I’ll never be able to go back to school.” “Everyone will understand.” “Understand what?” “You know.” Natalie looked at Miri, waiting for her to spell it out. “Understand that you’re…” Miri began.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then he glanced up at his friend aloft: it was like a prearranged signal, though it couldn’t have been. The boy reached into the bin, fished out a bottle—brown glass, Cyprus sherry, some pensioner’s empty—and dropped it down to him. Gripping me more tightly, smiling more broadly, the big boy swung the bottle round and knocked off the foot of it on the wall. I bucked backwards to get free, to retreat down the serviceway, swinging my sports-bag ineptly round to buffet him. But his skinny mate rushed me, grabbing my jacket collar and shoving me forward into the enclosed space of the bin-yard, where we could not be seen. I lashed around with my right arm, catching him in the stomach with my elbow. He gasped, spat out ‘Cunt’—and as the leader held me from the other side, brought up his knee in the small of my back. I lurched forward, but my attacker had hold of my jacket, half ripping it off, and pinning my arms behind me in its sleeves. I was completely helpless and exposed. The leader passed the broken bottle-end backwards and forwards in front of my eyes and under my nose. ‘I don’t think we like you,’ was his reasonable summary. The two of them pushed me down till I was almost kneeling in subjection, my legs twisted under me. Very carelessly, as if getting into bed or dropping into water, the boy on the bin slid forward, fell for a fraction of a second and hurled me over backwards, my head smacking against the concrete floor, a tearing pain in my knees, and a sack of rubbish toppling after him and bouncing down on us, sodden paper and peelings bursting over the ground. It was actually happening. It was actually happening to me. I twisted my whole body sideways to throw him off, and he did tumble half over. The other two were standing over me. The skinny boy, as if slyly taking a tag in Winchester Football, kicked me sharply in the stomach. I was tensed and fit for it, but could not help curling up. I saw two things: my beautiful new copy of The Flower Beneath the Foot had been jerked from my pocket in the scuffle. It was just in front of my eyes, standing on end, its pages fanned open. There was a peculiar silence of several seconds, in which I thought they might be calling it off. I read the words ‘perhaps I might find Harold …’ two or three times. That must have been enough to show how I cared for it. A boot slammed down on it, buckling the binding, and then again and again, grinding the pages into the warmsmelling spilt rubbish, scuffing to pulp the lachrymose saint on the wrapper.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I twisted my whole body sideways to throw him off, and he did tumble half over. The other two were standing over me. The skinny boy, as if slyly taking a tag in Winchester Football, kicked me sharply in the stomach. I was tensed and fit for it, but could not help curling up. I saw two things: my beautiful new copy of The Flower Beneath the Foot had been jerked from my pocket in the scuffle. It was just in front of my eyes, standing on end, its pages fanned open. There was a peculiar silence of several seconds, in which I thought they might be calling it off. I read the words ‘perhaps I might find Harold …’ two or three times. That must have been enough to show how I cared for it. A boot slammed down on it, buckling the binding, and then again and again, grinding the pages into the warmsmelling spilt rubbish, scuffing to pulp the lachrymose saint on the wrapper. The second thing, as my head was jerked back by the hair, my cheek squashed and grazed on the ground, was a boot drawn back, very large and hard, then slamming towards my face. ‘But darling, I was going to give it to you.’ James was terribly upset about the book. ‘I haven’t got one with the wrapper. It was probably worth £100—more, if it was as mint as you say.’ He sat beside me on the sofa, holding my hand. It was rather awful to see him so cheated of his treasure, his aghast look of cupidity and disbelief. ‘I’m afraid the dustmen will have cleared it away by now.’ I spoke thickly, as though I were very drunk. By a miracle I had only lost one tooth, but as it was right in the front it gave me the fatuous air of a defaced advertisement. My left cheek was purple, my mouth swollen and lopsided, and my left eye narrowed to a gluey slit in a bed of tenderest black, like an exposed mollusc. Over the bridge of my beautiful nose, broken and cut, an apache stripe of dressing was stuck.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  We are never really in suspense about Leucippe’s fate, and—what makes the scene so revealing—neither is she. At the tension grows, Leucippe tells Thersander to “bring the lash, bring the rack, bring the fire, bring the sword.… For though I be naked, for though I be alone, for though I be a woman, my one shield is my freedom [eleutheria], and not blows, nor blade, nor blaze shall prevail against it!” Leucippe is protected by her freedom, her eleutheria, at the very moment when her control over her body seemed most elusive. Her rhetoric speaks on two levels. Most directly, Leucippe means that she will be saved from her imminent distress because she is, in reality, free. She is the knowing heroine, confident her objective status will somehow ensure that she is not the victim in this tale. Eleutheria was a powerful word, conjuring not only free status but sexual respectability; for the Greeks and Romans, the two were inseparably fused. The eleuthera was the sexually honest woman, a virgin until marriage, chaste within marriage. The opposite of the eleuthera was the prostitute, and Leucippe is consoled in the midst of apparently insuperable danger by the truth of her nature and by the rules of romance, which, she seems to know, will not allow her to be violated. Her faith depends on her knowledge that the narrative logic of the Greek romance will ultimately obey the expectations of the social order.2 At the same time, Leucippe’s grand speech positions this novel within a matrix of cultural reflection on the perennial problem of free will and fate. Few cultures have been so pervasively fixated on the limits of human agency within a vast, impersonal cosmos as the inhabitants of the high Roman Empire. The Greek novels, on questions of sexuality and cosmology alike, were in direct dialogue with the homiletic and philosophical literature of the age. The novels explore the very themes that occupied sages and sophists across the Mediterranean. Freedom in the face of an overwhelming fate was the byword of Stoicism, and Achilles Tatius is, surely, manipulating the Stoic idea of an internal faculty, independent from any external cause, that Leucippe can exercise regardless of her circumstance. But the allusion to the problem of fate is hardly an endorsement of Stoicism—quite the opposite. Whereas the Stoics advised a carefully studied indifference to eros in a universe so vast that mankind’s pleasures were dwarfed by the unfathomable enormity of the heavens, the novels present a world keenly knit by the gods so that mankind might find in erotic fulfillment nothing short of salvation. Like the Stoic, Achilles appreciates the limited range of motion allotted to the individual by the cosmos; unlike the Stoic, he would locate selfhood and salvation in the movement of erotic energy through the heated clay of the human body. The novelist had the discretion to let art speak for itself, but his romance stands as an intricate rebuttal to the gloomy fastidiousness of his philosophical contemporaries.3

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Mrs. Hays, the brisk, brickly rouged, blue-eyed widow who ran the motor court, asked me if I were Swiss perchance, because her sister had married a Swiss ski instructor. I was, whereas my daughter happened to be half Irish. I registered, Hays gave me the key and a twinkling smile, and, still twinkling, showed me where to park the car; Lo crawled out and shivered a little: the luminous evening air was decidedly crisp. Upon entering the cabin, she sat down on a chair at a card table, buried her face in the crook of her arm and said she felt awful. Shamming, I thought, shamming, no doubt, to evade my caresses; I was passionately parched; but she began to whimper in an unusually dreary way when I attempted to fondle her. Lolita ill. Lolita dying. Her skin was scalding hot! I took her temperature, orally, then looked up a scribbled formula I fortunately had in a jotter and after laboriously reducing the, meaningless to me, degrees Fahrenheit to the intimate centrigrade of my childhood, found she had 40.4, which at least made sense. Hysterical little nymphs might, I knew, run up all kinds of temperature—even exceeding a fatal count. And I would have given her a sip of hot spiced wine, and two aspirins, and kissed the fever away, if, upon an examination of her lovely uvula, one of the gems of her body, I had not seen that it was a burning red. I undressed her. Her breath was bittersweet. Her brown rose tasted of blood. She was shaking from head to toe. She complained of a painful stiffness in the upper vertebrae—and I thought of poliomyelitis as any American parent would. Giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her up in a laprobe and carried her into the car. Kind Mrs. Hays in the meantime had alerted the local doctor. “You are lucky it happened here,” she said; for not only was Blue the best man in the district, but the Elphinstone hospital was as modern as modern could be, despite its limited capacity. With a heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit, thither I drove, half-blinded by a royal sunset on the lowland side and guided by a little old woman, a portable witch, perhaps his daughter, whom Mrs. Hays had lent me, and whom I was never to see again. Dr. Blue, whose learning, no doubt, was infinitely inferior to his reputation, assured me it was a virus infection, and when I alluded to her comparatively recent flu, curtly said this was another bug, he had forty such cases on his hands; all of which sounded like the “ague” of the ancients. I wondered if I should mention, with a casual chuckle, that my fifteen-year-old daughter had had a minor accident while climbing an awkward fence with her boy friend, but knowing I was drunk, I decided to withhold the information till later if necessary.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  He’d sent both Grigori and Igor pictures of the tub and the room with its decent but kind of soft mattress. And they’d texted back cool and nice and faggot style :). When they were younger, Grigori’s favorite pastime was to pull hairs from Alek’s body. Igor held him while he twisted and tried to get loose. Then Grigori plucked out his eyelashes one at a time, fine white hairs invisible the moment they left his body. Alek remembered the little shooting stars of pain with each hair. He remembered Igor’s sweaty hands holding him down. He remembered the damp odor of their panting filling the closet. As they grew older, the punishments evolved. Soon, it wasn’t enough to pull the hairs out of Alek’s body. They had to burn him, too. By then, both Igor and Grigori were smoking in the alleyway behind their apartment building after and before school, when their parents weren’t watching, sending up white trails. Alek caught them one day and ran to tell their parents, his body thrumming with the pleasure of finally having a secret on them, some measure of power. But as he turned to run, he didn’t see their bodies growing taut with pursuit. They caught him before he even reached the end of the alley. Grigori came around first, pushed Alek up against the wall. A cigarette jutted out of his thick lips. “Ah, Sasha,” he taunted. “Sasha with his pretty hair.” Igor whistled as he came up next to him. He flicked some ashes to the ground. Grigori first pinched Alek’s nose and then caught him under the chin, gripping his throat. “What are you going to do, huh?” “Nothing,” Alek said hoarsely. Grigori had grown five inches that year, and he was terrifying. His body smelled musky, like fear itself. Grigori shoved Alek’s head back against the wall, and suddenly the alley, the ground, the sky, his brother’s faces, and even the very stench of the garbage swam, started spinning around and around. The dull thud of his skull on concrete filled his ears. He felt then that Grigori could have done him any kind of harm without the slightest bit of remorse. Grigori, his own brother, could have kept hitting his head against the wall until there was nothing left on his little shoulders but a meaty pulp. He was seven or eight then, and they were older and stronger. Back then, strength seemed to be the only justification anyone needed to do anything. Grigori took the cigarette from Igor’s mouth. Igor looked disappointed and angry. Then Grigori pushed its burning tip into Alek’s arm. The pain was immediate and infinite, and it hurt so bad that he was sure it would never stop, that it would go on burning him forever and ever.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  There was no sign of the plane, or the people on it. She was stuck in a nightmare where something terrible was happening but she was powerless. She willed herself to move but she couldn’t. Her feet were too heavy, as if they were encased in wet cement and she couldn’t lift them. When she looked down she saw her feet were covered in mud up to her ankles—mud from the rain and the fire hoses. Jack is safe, she told herself, working for the electric company in Westfield or Cranford or some other nearby city. Jack is safe. Unless, because of the weather, he’s not. No, he is. He has to be. Christina, who never showed her emotions in public, didn’t try to restrain herself this time. She cried out as she saw a woman, her own clothes on fire, frantically pushing a small child rolled up in a rug at a neighbor. The woman tried to rush back into the flaming house, screaming, My baby, my baby, but others held her away. People were running from the burning houses. A boy with his jacket on fire was grabbed by a man, who threw off his overcoat and wrapped the boy in it, putting out the flames. The girls from the modern dance club in their blue leotards were on the scene, with the gym teacher. Groups of other students who had club meetings after school were hugging each other and crying. A few of them called to her, but she didn’t answer. She caught a glimpse of Jack’s landlady, and in an instant she was chasing after her. “Mrs. O’Malley…Mrs. O’Malley…” Christina called, until Mrs. O’Malley stopped. “Mrs. O’Malley, I’m Jack McKittrick’s friend, Christina. Was he home? Is he okay?” Mrs. O’Malley gave her a puzzled look. “Jack?” “Yes, Jack McKittrick. He rents from you.” “Are you his sister?” “No, I’m his friend, Christina.” “I always thought you were his sister.” What was she talking about? “He’s not home,” Mrs. O’Malley said. “I don’t know where he is.” “At work,” Christina said. “He’s at work. Right?” “I hope so, dear.” —THE WORLD MAY HAVE BEEN falling apart but at Dr. O’s office everything was serene. Christina pulled down the hastily scribbled note taped to the office door apologizing for the emergency that had taken both Daisy and Dr. O away. She got out of her muddy shoes before unlocking the door with the key Daisy had given to her at Christmas. She was safe now. She prayed Jack was safe, too. She scrubbed her feet in the toilet, flushing again and again, wiped herself clean with disposable towels and changed into her white lab coat and shoes. She had no clean socks, no stockings. She’d have to wear her shoes with bare feet. She pinned up her dark hair, washed her face and gargled with Lavoris.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  19 Interea quidam senex de summo colle prospectat, quem circum capellae paseentes opilionem esse pro- fecto clamabant. Eum rogavit unus e nostris ha- beretne venui lactem vel adhue liquidum vel in ca- seum recentem inchoatum. At ille diu. capite quassanti ** Vos autem " inquit * De cibo vel poculo vel omnino ulla refectione nunc cogitatis? An nulli scitis quo loco consederitis?" Et cum dicto conductis oviculis conversus longe recessit. Quae vox eius et fuga pastoribus nostris non mediocrem pavorem incussit : ac dum perterriti de loci qualitate sciscitari gestiunt nec est qui doceat, senex alius, magnus ille quidem, gravatus annis, totus in baculum pronus et lassum trahens. vestigium, ubertim lacrimans per viam proximat, visisque nobis cum. fletu maximo singulorum iuvenum genua contingens sic adorabat : 20 ''Perfortunas vestrosque genios, sic ad meae senec- tutis spatia validi laetique veniatis, decepto seni sub- sistite meumque parvulum ab inferis ereptum canis meis reddite. | Nepos namque meus et itineris huius suavis comes dum forte passerem- incantantem saepiculae consectatur arripere, delapsus in proxumam foveam, quae fruticibus imis subpatet, in extremo iam vitae consistit periculo, quippe cum de fletu ac voce 316 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK VIII sought. for medicines to heal their bodies: some washed away their blood with the water of the running river, some laid upon their bruises sponges steeped with vinegar, some stopped their wounds with clouts; in this manner every one provided for his own safety. In the mean season we perceived an old: man that looked from the top of an hill, who seemed to be a shepherd by reason of the goats and sheep that fed round about him : then one of our company demanded whether he had any milk to sell, whether new drawn or freshly made into cheese. To whom he made answer, shaking his head, saying: * Do you think now of any meat or drink, or any other refection here? Know none of you in what place you be?" And therewithal he took his sheep and drove them away as fast as he might possible. This answer and his fleeing away made our shepherds greatly to fear, so that they thought of nothing else but to enquire what country they were in: howbeit, they saw. no manner of person of whom they might demand. At length, as they were thus in doubt, they perceived another old man very tall and heavy with years, with a staff in his hand and very weary footsteps, who, approaching nigh to our company, began to weep greatly and complain, embracing the knees of every one and saying :