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.

Page 148 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark—hub of bicycle wheel—moved, shivered, and she was gone. It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian’s dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and run three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed—no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on. Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter leads to the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw—with what melody of relief!—Lolita’s fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered. Look out! Some ten paces away Lolita, through the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube, confidentially hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a flourish. “Tried to reach you at home,” she said brightly. “A great decision has been made. But first buy me a drink, dad.” She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke, add the cherry syrup—and my heart was bursting with love-ache. That childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction. J’ai toujours admiré I’oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower. “Look,” she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, “look, I’ve decided something. I want to leave school. I hate that school. I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we’ll go wherever I want, won’t we?” I nodded. My Lolita. “I choose? C’est entendu?” she asked wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl. “Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you’ll get soaked.” (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.) She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashion, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird. Miss Lester’s finely groomed hand held a porch-door open for a waddling old dog qui prenait son temps. Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree.

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  While I appreciated calling out half the population for creating a situation in which many women rarely feel safe, and I understood how tempting it was to pin it all on men, I didn’t have the energy to be angry all the time. I also wasn’t gay, despite how easy it seemed to be gay at Smith—especially after what I’d been through, after what a lot of women go through. Trying to be gay, though, seemed like a way, perhaps, to be protected from violence, from abuse, from my own distorted view of my body and my sexuality. And I thought women wouldn’t hurt me. But it wasn’t true, and there was neither comfort nor safety in pretending to be something I was not. Women are just people, for better, for worse, as the Mrs. Olesons had shown. Evil is evil wherever you go, and I encountered a lot of it at Smith, too. Men weren’t the problem. For a while when I was in my twenties, I faked orgasms with men, just wanting the sex (on the rare occasions I had it) to be over. I wanted to be loved but not touched. I wanted to want sex, and I settled for the small comfort being close to someone brought me, but the assault, the rape, and the silences around them had created an almost total disconnect between my mind and my body. It wasn’t until the guy I eventually married made it clear that he knew I was faking, and wanted me to stop, that I started to care if I was enjoying sex or not. I knew only that my body was useful for other people’s desires, not my own. There had been moments here and there when I sensed something like physical attraction or sexual arousal, glimpses or sips of something delicious but elusive. It wasn’t enough, though, for me to believe that anything good could come of trusting those feelings or even exploring them, of willingly surrendering my body to someone else. There was pleasure in being wanted; that, I could control. There was no pleasure in wanting. I was too afraid. A clown had gotten into my head and a man had put his penis in my vagina when I didn’t want him to, and the world, I had learned, was a place that didn’t condemn sexual violence; it accepted and excused it. I had wanted to believe that each day without sex would get me farther and farther away from the man in the clown mask, the football player in the car, the bloody condom. I wanted those things to fade into such distant memory as to dissolve permanently.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  In speaking these words, and devising with my selfe of our departing the next morrow, lest Meroe the witch should play by us as she had done by divers other persons, it fortuned that Socrates did fall asleepe, and slept very soundly, by reason of his travell and plenty of meat and wine wherewithall hee had filled him selfe. Wherefore I closed and barred fast the doores of the chamber, and put my bed behinde the doore, and so layed mee downe to rest. But I could in no wise sleepe, for the great feare which was in my heart, untill it was about midnight, and then I began to slumber. But alas, behold suddenly the chamber doores brake open, and locks, bolts, and posts fell downe, that you would verily have thought that some Theeves had been presently come to have spoyled and robbed us. And my bed whereon I lay being a truckle bed, fashioned in forme of a Cradle, and one of the feet broken and rotten, by violence was turned upside downe, and I likewise was overwhelmed and covered lying in the same. Then perceived I in my selfe, that certaine affects of the minde by nature doth chance contrary. For as teares oftentimes trickle downe the cheekes of him that seeth or heareth some joyfull newes, so I being in this fearfull perplexity, could not forbeare laughing, to see how of Aristomenus I was made like unto a snail [in] his shell. And while I lay on the ground covered in this sort, I peeped under the bed to see what would happen. And behold there entred in two old women, the one bearing a burning torch, and the other a sponge and a naked sword; and so in this habit they stood about Socrates being fast asleep. Then shee which bare the sword sayd unto the other, Behold sister Panthia, this is my deare and sweet heart, which both day and night hath abused my wanton youthfulnesse. This is he, who little regarding my love, doth not only defame me with reproachfull words, but also intendeth to run away. And I shall be forsaken by like craft as Vlysses did use, and shall continually bewaile my solitarinesse as Calipso. Which said, shee pointed towards mee that lay under the bed, and shewed me to Panthia. This is hee, quoth she, which is his Counsellor, and perswadeth him to forsake me, and now being at the point of death he lieth prostrate on the ground covered with his bed, and hath seene all our doings, and hopeth to escape scot-free from my hands, but I will cause that hee will repente himselfe too late, nay rather forthwith, of his former intemperate language, and his present curiosity. Which words when I heard I fell into a cold sweat, and my heart trembled with feare, insomuch that the bed over me did likewise rattle and shake.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  What mysterious ignorance leaked out of Charles’s words to poison them and render them worthless, inedible? For Charles, like me, haunted the library; I watched his shelf of books in the basement rotate. And Charles was a high deacon of his church, the wizard of his tribe; when he died his splendid robes overflowed his casket. That his nonsense made perfect sense to me alarmed me—was I, like Charles, eating the tripe of knowledge while Dad sat down to the steak? I suppose I never wondered where Blanche or Charles went at night; when it was convenient to do so, I still thought of the world as a well-arranged place where people did work that suited them and lived in houses appropriate to their tastes and needs. But once Blanche called us in the middle of an August night and my father, stepmother and I rushed to her aid. In the big Cadillac we breasted our way into unknown streets through the crowds of naked children playing in the tumult of water liberated from a fireplug (“Stop that!” I shouted silently at them, outraged and frightened. “That’s illegal!”). Past the stoops crowded with grownups playing cards and drinking wine. In one glaring doorway a woman stood, holding her diapered baby against her, a look of stoic indignation on her young face, a face one could imagine squeezing out tears without ever changing expression or softening the wide, fierce eyes, set jaw, everted lower lip. The smell of something delicious—charred meat, maybe, and maybe burning honey—filled the air. “Roll up your windows, for Chrissake, and lock the doors,” my father shouted at us. “Dammit, use your heads—don’t you know this place is dangerous as hell!” A bright miner’s lamp, glass globe containing a white fire devoid of blues and yellows, dangled from the roof of a vendor’s cart; he was selling food of some sort to children. Even through the closed windows I could hear the babble of festive, delirious radios. A seven-foot skinny man in spats, shades, an electric-green shantung suit and a flat-brimmed white beaver hat with a matching green band strolled in front of our car and patted our fender with elaborate mockery. “I’ll kill the bastard,” Dad shouted. “I swear I’ll kill that goddamn ape if he scratches my fender.” “Oh-h-h …” my stepmother sang on a high note I’d never heard before. “You’ll get us all killed. Honey, my heart.” The man, who my father told us was a “pimp” (whatever that might be), bowed to unheard applause, pulled his hat down over one eye like a Parisian and ambled on, letting us pass.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Pnin is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures. Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.” Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and Krug in Bend Sinister (1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in Speak, Memory, are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of The Eye, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Pale Fire, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Tyrants Destroyed [1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  After that, a wife’s income, health insurance, and retirement benefits flowed through her male partner. As did her purchasing power: If a married woman wanted a credit card, her application needed to be cosigned by her spouse. An unmarried woman was usually compelled to produce some kind of male guarantor, like her father or her brother, if she had any chance of taking out a card in her own name. It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that lenders legally had to approve female credit card applicants if their finances were viable. Until then, and for a long while after, a good marriage was sometimes the only thing standing between a woman and the poverty line. When a divorce blew through, it was terrifying. “They were really sort of economically displaced,” Kahn said of these mostly middle-class women after their breakups. Like Judy, they had made all the “right” choices up until that point, and the fear and disappointment of being financially gutted mobilized them. “They start to organize and a lot of them find a home at some of the biggest feminist organizations of the twentieth century, like the National Organization for Women,” Kahn said. “They really start advocating for shifts in the social insurance system that gives them access to all these economic resources they’ve lost.” The movement welcomed them with open arms. “If there is any one thing that makes a feminist it is to grow up believing somehow that love and marriage will take care of you the rest of your life—and then to wake up at forty or fifty or even at thirty and find out it isn’t so,” Friedan wrote in It Changed My Life . She found that women whose marriages had crumbled needed the teachings of Second Wave feminism to help them make sense of what had happened. “They were suffering not only loneliness and guilt and hostility—the psychological scars of that inequality that had been responsible for destroying so many of the marriages in the first place—but real economic deprivation.” In other words, women were ending their marriages—only sometimes by choice—and then watching helplessly as their quality of life plummeted. Even more heartbreaking, they couldn’t provide for their kids in the same way the entire family had come to expect. And so the movement was clear: in the future, married women should not leave their jobs. In order to make that feasible, the government had to step up and offer families the kinds of services that would allow mothers to flourish in the workplace. “Women should be educated to do the work society rewards, and should be paid for that work,” Friedan writes. “And since women are the people who do have children, there should be maternity leaves—and paternity leaves—and child-care centers, and full income tax deductions for child care and home maintenance.” And advocates wanted other things, too.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A simple child, Lo would scream no! and frantically clutch at my driving hand whenever I put a stop to her tornadoes of temper by turning in the middle of a highway with the implication that I was about to take her straight to that dark and dismal abode. The farther, however, we traveled away from it west, the less tangible that menace became, and I had to adopt other methods of persuasion. Among these, the reformatory threat is the one I recall with the deepest moan of shame. From the very beginning of our concourse, I was clever enough to realize that I must secure her complete co-operation in keeping our relations secret, that it should become a second nature with her, no matter what grudge she might bear me, no matter what other pleasures she might seek. “Come and kiss your old man,” I would say, “and drop that moody nonsense. In former times, when I was still your dream male [the reader will notice what pains I took to speak Lo’s tongue], you swooned to records of the number one throb-and-sob idol of your coevals [Lo: “Of my what? Speak English”]. That idol of your pals sounded, you thought, like friend Humbert. But now, I am just your old man, a dream dad protecting his dream daughter.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  «Now when I was alone to keep the corpse company, I rubbed mine eyes to arm them for watching, and to the intent that I would not sleep I solaced my mind with singing, and so I passed the time till it was dark, and then night deeper and deeper still, and then midnight, when behold, as I grew already more afraid, there crept in a weasel into the chamber, and she came against me and fixed a sharp look upon me and put me in very great fear, in so much that I marvelled greatly of the audacity of so little a beast. To whom I said: ‘Get thee hence, thou filthy brute, and hie thee to the mice thy fellows, lest thou feel my fingers. Why wilt thou not go?’ Then incontinently she ran away, and when she was quite gone from the chamber, I fell on the ground so fast in the deepest depth of sleep that Apollo himself could not well discern whether of us two was the dead corpse, for I lay prostrate as one without life, and needed a keeper likewise, and had as well not been there. ; «At length the cocks began to crow declaring night past and that it was now day, wherewithal Í 87 2 lod ~ LUCIUS APULEIUS cristatae cohortis ; tandem expergitus et nimio pavore perterritus cadaver accurro et admoto lumine revelataque eius facie rimabar singula, quae cuncta convenerant: ecce uxor misella flens cum hesternis testibus introrumpit anxia, et statim corpori super- ruens multumque ac diu deosculata sub arbitrio luminis recognoscit omnia. Et conversa Philo- despotum requirit actorem : ei praecipit, bono custodi redderet sine mora praemiuni, et oblato statim ‘Summas’ inquit ‘Tibi, iuvenis, gratias agimus et Hercule ob sedulum istud ministerium inter ceteros familiares dehine numerabimus.’ ^ Ad haec ego insperato lucro diffusus in gaudium et in aureos refulgentes, quos identidem manu mea ventilabam attonitus, * Immo' inquam * Domina, de famulis tuis unum putato, et quotiens operam nostram desiderabis, fidenter impera. Vix effatum me statim familiares omnes nefarium exsecrati raptis cuiusquemodi telis insequuntur: pugnis ille malas offendere, scapulas alius cubitis impingere, palmis infestis hic latera suffodere, calcibus insultare, capillos distrahere,vestem discindere. Sic in modum superbi iuvenis Adonei vel musae vatis Pimpleidos! laceratus atque dis- cerptus domo proturbor. “Ac dum in proxima platea refovens animum in- fausti atque improvidi sermonis mei sero reminiscor, 1 The MSS found great difficulties in these proper names, and had produced a corruption something like Adoni vel mustei vatis Pipletis. Pimpleidos is Beroaldus suggestion, 88 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK II

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I suppose I never wondered where Blanche or Charles went at night; when it was convenient to do so, I still thought of the world as a well-arranged place where people did work that suited them and lived in houses appropriate to their tastes and needs. But once Blanche called us in the middle of an August night and my father, stepmother and I rushed to her aid. In the big Cadillac we breasted our way into unknown streets through the crowds of naked children playing in the tumult of water liberated from a fireplug (“Stop that!” I shouted silently at them, outraged and frightened. “That’s illegal!”). Past the stoops crowded with grownups playing cards and drinking wine. In one glaring doorway a woman stood, holding her diapered baby against her, a look of stoic indignation on her young face, a face one could imagine squeezing out tears without ever changing expression or softening the wide, fierce eyes, set jaw, everted lower lip. The smell of something delicious—charred meat, maybe, and maybe burning honey—filled the air. “Roll up your windows, for Chrissake, and lock the doors,” my father shouted at us. “Dammit, use your heads—don’t you know this place is dangerous as hell!” A bright miner’s lamp, glass globe containing a white fire devoid of blues and yellows, dangled from the roof of a vendor’s cart; he was selling food of some sort to children. Even through the closed windows I could hear the babble of festive, delirious radios. A seven-foot skinny man in spats, shades, an electric-green shantung suit and a flat-brimmed white beaver hat with a matching green band strolled in front of our car and patted our fender with elaborate mockery. “I’ll kill the bastard,” Dad shouted. “I swear I’ll kill that goddamn ape if he scratches my fender.” “Oh-h-h …” my stepmother sang on a high note I’d never heard before. “You’ll get us all killed. Honey, my heart.” The man, who my father told us was a “pimp” (whatever that might be), bowed to unheard applause, pulled his hat down over one eye like a Parisian and ambled on, letting us pass. We hurried up five flights of dirty, broken stairs, littered with empty pint bottles, bags of garbage and two dolls (both white, I noticed, and blond and mutilated), past landings and open doors, which gave me glimpses of men playing cards and, across the hall, a grandmother alone and asleep in an armchair with antimacassars. Her radio was playing that Negro music. Her brown cotton stockings had been rolled down below her black knees. Blanche we found wailing and shouting, “My baby, my baby!” as she hopped and danced in circles of pain around her daughter, whose hand, half lopped off, was spouting blood. My father gathered the girl up in his arms and we all rushed off to the emergency room of a hospital.

• 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 Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Were you alone when you saw the man? Did the man masturbate or just expose himself? If he masturbated, did you see cum? Did he say something cryptic while he masturbated? Did he say something benign? Was the incident in your neighborhood? Have you previously been described as “unflappable”? Have you previously been described as “chickenshit”? WHEN YOU DON’T WALK ALONE AT NIGHT, YOU ARE SAFE. YOU are safe, you are safe, you are safe. You are safe from men in sweatpants, each with one hand around his penis. You are safe from that other man who once trailed you home, forcing you to run fast and slam your apartment door behind you. You are safe from the ponytailed gawker who—just a week ago—rode past you on a bike and yelled, “I’d have that for lunch!” You are also safe from the man who ordered a “pussy burger” from you at your high school job (Why do you still remember how his tongue pointed when he stuck it out?). You are safe from any man who’s ever thought you were food. From anyone who ever thought you were a resource, less than human, available for theft. And because you believe you are safe, you must admit complicity to a faulty logic: When you don’t walk alone at night, you don’t get raped. You hate this logic. This logic skews blame and ignores reality. And yet you must believe it, because this logic accounts for your caution. This logic has shaped your behavior. This logic is part of the problem, but you wear it as protection. It is a dangerous kind of double thinking, a face-off between understanding and fear. When you don’t walk alone at night, you think a lot about contradictions. Still Five Years After, and Counting I’m living back in my hometown again, in a new neighborhood now. Recently, I took the train to visit my parents, and I rode past that old platform. And, like I do every time I pass it, I looked at the bushes, half expecting to see someone standing there. I waited for the flash of skin between leaves, for the realization of a body where a body shouldn’t be. The station has lost any sense of familiarity it once held for me: it is someone I once knew, who has since grown cold to me. There have been thousands of nights since that night. Some of them, I’ve been at home. Others, I’ve been out and about, awaiting the moment when I’ll have to leave. When I’ll be, once again, caught in the space between two perceived safeties. Not home, then home. Not safe, then safe. I think about that imagined in-between because I don’t know how to stop thinking about it. It’s a lie I can’t talk myself out of. That night on the train platform remains unflinchingly recent: it is of the past, but immune to nostalgia.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She’d tell her there was an accident on the road and she and her friends were stuck in traffic, waiting for the tow truck to remove the cars. She was never late coming home without calling to explain, so she hoped Mama would give her some leeway. How could she call when she was stuck on Newark Avenue? she’d say. She felt herself drifting off when, suddenly, a big silver ship sailed by so low she swore she could see inside, swore she could see the passengers, their faces pressed against the windows. She wasn’t sure at first if she was dreaming. She hoped she was dreaming. But no—she was wide-awake now, pointing to the sky as Jack swerved to the side of the road. The noise was thunderous. “What is it?” Her voice sounded as if it was coming from far away. And why was she asking, anyway? She already knew. She’d seen it before. Jack shouted, “It’s going down.” He revved up the engine, and followed the plane’s path, which seemed to be heading for Westminster. “Jesus!” he cried, nearing Janet Memorial, as the plane fell from the sky. “Mason!” NatalieNurse K had dozed off but not Natalie. She was looking out the window when something flashed in the sky. “What was that?” “What?” Nurse K asked, awakening. “In the sky. Didn’t you see it?” “No, dear. Now turn away from the window. Concentrate on something warm and beautiful. Do you like the beach?” “Yes. I love going down the shore.” “Close your eyes and pretend that’s where you are. Can you feel the warm sand under your feet?” “Yes.” “And the sun on your back?” “Yes.” “Dip your toes in the ocean. The water is very warm today.” “Should I swim?” “Only if you want to. Only if the ocean is where you’d like to be.” Phil SteinPhil was walking Fred before hitting the sack. School tomorrow, then a day off for Lincoln’s birthday. Usually when he kept Fred overnight Fred did his stuff, and that was it until morning. But tonight Fred broke away, dragging his leash behind him, racing in and out of hedges. Phil chased him, catching glimpses of his red and yellow doggie sweater, as Fred jumped over low shrubs, scooting in and out of yards. What was wrong with that dog? “Damn it, Fred! Come back here.” Phil heard a terrible noise, so loud his hands went to his ears. He looked up and saw a plane. Not again, please, God, not again. A loud explosion. The flames shot up. What are you doing to us, God? “Fred…Fred!” Phil cried, terrified that he’d lost the dog, terrified of what was happening. All at once the neighbors were out of their houses, coats thrown over their nightgowns and pajamas. Everyone was running, running toward the burning, mangled mess. He caught a glimpse of his parents. Until then he’d never seen his mother run. Didn’t know she could. He gave one more anguished cry.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “What were you doing in New Jersey?” Lily asks. “Visiting old friends.” “Was it fun?” Miri thinks before answering. “In a way it was. Yes.” The flight attendant stands at the front of the cabin. “May I have your attention?” She demonstrates the proper way to fasten your seat belt. Then she says, “In the unlikely event...” Lily leans close and says, “This is the part I don’t like. Why do they have to say that?” “It’s just a safety rule,” Miri tells her, trying to sound as if she means it. “Are you scared?” Lily asks. “No. Why would I be scared?” “You’re digging your fingernails into your armrests.” Miri tries to laugh. “Just an old habit,” she tells Lily. But Lily can see right through her. She reaches for Miri’s hand. “Will you hold my hand until we’re up?” “Sure,” she says. Lily reminds her of Fern on their first flight to Las Vegas. But she doesn’t tell her that. Instead, she says, “I have a daughter. She’s fifteen. Her name is Eliza.” “Do I remind you of her?” “A little.” “Is she dead?” “What? No! Why would you say that?” “Because you seemed sad when you said her name.” “I’m not sad. I just miss her. She’s at school. I’ll see her next weekend.” Miri closes her eyes. Who is Lily, really? What are the odds that the two of them would be seated together on this flight? In the unlikely event...she hears the flight attendant saying in her head. Life is a series of unlikely events, isn’t it? Hers certainly is. One unlikely event after another, adding up to a rich, complicated whole. And who knows what’s still to come? Lily looks out the window, then back at her. “My dad says unlikely events aren’t all bad. There are good ones, too.” “Like meeting you on the plane,” Miri says, making Lily smile.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  What answer could I make to that? I could scream and yell that I was a baby too, that I’d fall apart if he left me, that I’d crack up. Maybe I would. But I wasn’t Adrian’s child, and it wasn’t his business to rescue me. I was nobody’s baby now. Liberated. Utterly free. It was the most terrifying sensation I’d ever known in my life. Like teetering on the edge of the Grand Canyon and hoping you’d learn to fly before you hit bottom. — It was only after he’d left that I was able to gather my terror in my two hands and possess it. We did not part enemies. When I knew I was truly defeated, I stopped hating him. I began concentrating on how to endure being alone. As soon as I ceased expecting rescue from him, I found that I could empathize with him. I was not his child. He had a right to protect his children. Even from me—if he conceived me to be a threat to them. He had betrayed me, but I had sensed all along that this would happen and in some way I had used him as a betrayer just as surely as he had used me as a victim. He was, perversely, an instrument of my freedom. As I watched him drive away, I knew I would fall back in love with him as soon as the distance between us was great enough. He hadn’t left without offering help, either. We had inquired together about airline tickets to London and found that all the planes were booked for the next two days. I could wait till Wednesday or inquire about boat trains the following day. Or I could go to the airport and wait to be called as a standby. I had options. All I had to do was endure the insane pounding of my heart until I could find Bennett again—or someone. Perhaps myself. — I dragged my suitcase back to the café on the Place St. Michel. Suddenly, being without a man, I realized how heavy it was. I had not packed with the expectation of traveling alone. My suitcase was full of guidebooks, a small tape recorder for the article I’d never written, notebooks, my electric hair-setter, ten copies of my first book of poems. Some of these were to be given to a literary agent in London. Others were simply carried out of insecurity; badges of identity to put on for anyone I might meet. They were designed to prove that I was not just an ordinary woman. They were designed to prove that I was exceptional. They were designed to prove that I was to be given safe conduct. I clung pitifully to my status as an exception, because without it, I would be just another lonely female on the prowl. “Do I have your address?” Adrian asked before he took off in the Triumph.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  That is, everything suspenseful and mutable about the society of lovers had been eliminated in favor of an embrace as simple and unvarying (as eternal) as it had necessarily to be cold. Or perhaps I worried that if I had a real, living lover I’d wound him, subject him to all the rage I’d been saving up. Yes, I spent my days thinking about male bodies, each of which was as varied, as sequential as a long Chinese scroll through which the minuscule pilgrim travels in his straw hat, followed by a servant and a horse, now standing back from the steaming falls, now meditating cross-legged under a grass roof held up by bamboo poles as he surveys the valley filling up with mist or as he throws his head back in wild spiritual hilarity in response to the grandeur of the mountain or here, down here, where he’s picking at his rice in the company of monks in the long, narrow hall opened up to the sweet, gasped Oh! of the full moon and the long exhaled Ah-h-h of its reflection in the pond. If I could have lain in a bed beside any of these boys I jostled past every day, whose feet I had to sit on while they did sit-ups or whom I sat beside, shoulder to shoulder, during chapel, I would have explored him just as the Chinese pilgrim traversed that majestic, intimidating terrain to whose rhythm he hoped to adjust himself and from which he expected to take a wisdom not quite tenable. At night I’d pull the covers up to my chin in the cold and listen to the momentary gust of laughter outside as a master and his wife bade farewell to another couple after a late dinner (“Thanks, Rachel.” “So long, Hal”). Car doors slammed. A cold motor struggled to turn over. Success. Lights on. Motor in gear. Final farewells. Then a handkerchief of brightness was drawn across my ceiling, next the magician pulled a beige out of the white, a gray out of the beige, finally black from gray. On that ultimate cloth I tossed the dice: I began to meditate. I threw back the blankets, took off my pajama top and, shivering but determined to master mere flesh, sat cross-legged on my cot. I knew nothing of bonafide Oriental procedures, but I made up my own from scraps of information I’d gathered here and there, overheard table talk at the banquet of bliss. Not limber enough to hook my feet over my thighs, I contented myself with a drooping lotus and pressed my hands together in my lap, thumb tip to thumb tip, second joints of my fingers united (the “people” inside the “church” of a more Christian childhood game).

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  We hurried up five flights of dirty, broken stairs, littered with empty pint bottles, bags of garbage and two dolls (both white, I noticed, and blond and mutilated), past landings and open doors, which gave me glimpses of men playing cards and, across the hall, a grandmother alone and asleep in an armchair with antimacassars. Her radio was playing that Negro music. Her brown cotton stockings had been rolled down below her black knees. Blanche we found wailing and shouting, “My baby, my baby!” as she hopped and danced in circles of pain around her daughter, whose hand, half lopped off, was spouting blood. My father gathered the girl up in his arms and we all rushed off to the emergency room of a hospital. She lived. Her hand was even sewn back on, though the incident (jealous lover with an ax) had broken her mind. Afterward the girl didn’t go back to her job and feared even leaving the building. My stepmother thought the loss of blood had somehow left her feeble-minded. In the hospital parking lot my father fussed over the blood on his suit and on the Cadillac upholstery, though I wondered if his pettiness wasn’t merely a way of silencing Blanche, who kept kissing his whole hand in gratitude. Or perhaps he’d found a way of reintroducing the ordinary into a night that had dipped disturbingly below the normal temperature of tedium he worked so hard to maintain. Years later, when Charles died, my father was the only white man to attend the funeral. He wasn’t welcome, but he went anyway and sat in the front row. After Charles’s death my father became more scattered and apprehensive. He would sit up all night with a stopwatch, counting his pulse. That had been another city—Blanche’s two rooms, scrupulously clean in contrast to the squalor of the halls, her parrot squawking under the tea towel draped over the cage, the chromo of a sad Jesus pointing to his exposed, juicy heart as though he were a free-clinic patient with a troubling symptom, the filched wedding photo of my father and stepmother in a nest of crepe-paper flowers, the bloody sheet torn into strips that had been wildly clawed off and hurled onto the flowered congoleum floor.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Some alien thing is trying to take over Earth. ANGELO VENETTI: UFOs—they’ve been sighted in New Mexico. The Martians want to turn us into zombies so they can control our planet. DERISH GRAY: They want to take dead children to the past, or the future, to show what life was like in the mid-twentieth century on a planet called Earth. Miri tried not to listen, tried to believe what Henry had told her—that both crashes were accidents. But she wasn’t convinced. That wouldn’t explain why three schools were almost hit, first Hamilton, and now Battin and St. Mary’s. And she remembered Leah telling them how close the first plane had come to the Elks Club on the day one hundred little kids were at a holiday party. But why would Martians come to Elizabeth, New Jersey? What was so special about them that made these creatures from outer space come here? Or was it a mistake? Did they mean to land in New York? Were they after only dead children to carry back in their spaceships or did they want living children, too? Is that what they were going to do with Penny, who liked to dress up in her pink ballet slippers and leotard, showing Miri and Suzanne what she’d learned in dance class that week—were they going to turn her into a zombie? She wasn’t even sure what a zombie was. Something undead. Something that feasted on human brains. They’d probably all be dead by June, Miri thought. Forget prom and graduation. She just hoped it would be a quick death so they wouldn’t suffer, so they wouldn’t wind up horribly burned or blinded, or left without arms and legs. It was coming. She didn’t know what it was but it was just a matter of time. She was beginning to believe they were jinxed. DONNY KELLEN: McCarthy’s doing the right thing, going after all the pinko Jew bastards like the Rosenbergs. They’re the ones behind it. They should all be fried. SUZANNE: Leave the Jews out of this. This has nothing to do with Jews. Plenty of Jews were killed on those planes. DONNY KELLEN: You’re such a Jew lover. That was just a cover to make it look like they’re not responsible. CHARLEY KAMINSKY ( to Donny ): You’re an asshole, you know that? Stick your finger up your butt and take a whiff. That’s you. A piece of shit! Donny came after Charley but Charley socked him first, giving him a bloody nose. The other boys held Donny and Charley apart. ELEANOR ( shouting ): It’s sabotage, you idiots! We’re under siege. Get it through your heads. Korea is nothing compared to what’s happening here. Korea is a distraction. You don’t hear Eisenhower saying nominate me for president, and I’ll stop these crashes tomorrow. No, because he can’t. Sure, he can stop the war in Korea. But he can’t stop this one. Because our side doesn’t know who we’re fighting.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He would go into stores and ask the storekeepers to take down various items, then handle each one, talk elatedly about each one, and then walk out. He would go into a coffee shop and play with the sugar pourer on every table before he sat down. People kept staring at him. Sometimes the storekeepers or waiters would say, “Take it easy buddy, relax buddy” or sometimes they’d throw him out. Everyone sensed that something was wrong. His agitation jangled the air. To Brian, this was only proof of divinity. “You see,” he said, “they know I’m God and they don’t know how else to react.” It was doubly hard for me because I half believed Brian’s theory. Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world. If God did come back, he would probably wind up in the psycho ward. I was a Laingian way before Laing began publishing. But I was also scared to death. When we finally got home at 2 a.m. , Brian was still frantic and wide-awake, though I was exhausted. He wanted to show me his power. He wanted to prove he could satisfy me. He hadn’t screwed me in about six weeks, but now he wouldn’t stop. He fucked like a machine, refusing to succumb to an orgasm himself but urging me to come again and again and again. After the first three times I was sore and wanted to stop. I begged him to stop but he wouldn’t. He kept banging away at me like an ax murderer. I was crying and pleading. “Brian, please stop,” I sobbed. “You thought I couldn’t satisfy you!” he screamed. His eyes were wild. “You see!” he said, lunging into me. “You see! You see! You see!” “Brian, please stop!” “Doesn’t that prove it? Doesn’t that prove I’m God?” “Please stop,” I whimpered. When he stopped at last, he withdrew from me violently and thrust his still-hard penis into my mouth. But I was crying too hard to blow him. I lay on the bed sobbing. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to stay alone with him, but where could I go? For the first time I really began to be convinced he was dangerous. Suddenly Brian broke down and started to cry. He wanted to castrate himself, he said. He wanted our marriage to be purified of all carnality. He wanted to be like Abelard, and me to be like Héloïse. He wanted to be purified of all fleshly desires so that he could save the world. He wanted to be soft like a eunuch. He wanted to be soft like Christ. He wanted to be shot full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He threw his arms around me and sobbed in my lap.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  just now from one4 who was a neighbour of theirs on the other side; would I still were covered with him, for I should not fear claw nor hook!” And Libicocco cried: “Too much have we endured!” and with the hook seized his arm, and mangling carried off a part of brawn. Draghignazzo, he too, wished to have a catch at the legs below; whereat their Decurion wheeled around with evil aspect. When they were somewhat pacified, my Guide without delay asked him that still kept gazing on his wound: “Who was he, from whom thou sayest that thou madest an ill departure to come ashore?” And he answered: “It was Friar Gomita, he of Gallura, vessel of every fraud, who had his master’s enemies in hand, and did so to them that they all praise him for it: money took he for himself, and dismissed them smoothly, as he says; and in his other offices besides, he was no petty but a sovereign barrator. With him keeps company Don Michel Zanche of Logodoro;5 and in speaking of Sardinia the tongues of them do not feel weary. Oh me! see that other grinning; I would say more; but fear he is preparing to claw my scurf.” And their great Marshal, turning to Farfarello, who rolled his eyes to strike, said: “Off with thee, villainous bird!” “If you wish to see or hear Tuscans or Lombards,” the frightened sinner then resumed, “I will make them come. But let the evil claws hold back a little, that they may not fear their vengeance; and I, sitting in this same place, for one that I am, will make seven come, on whistling as is our wont to do when any of us gets out.” Cagnazzo at these words raised his snout, shaking his head, and said: “Hear the malice he has contrived, to throw himself down!” Whereat he, who had artifices in great store, replied: “Too malicious indeed! when I contrive for my companions greater sorrow.” Alichino held in no longer, and in opposition to the others said to him: “If thou stoop, I will not follow thee at gallop, but beat my wings above the pitch; let the height be left and be the bank a screen, to see if thou alone prevailest over us.” O Reader, thou shalt hear new sport! All turned their eyes toward the other side, he first who had been most unripe for doing it. The Navarrese chose well his time; planted his soles upon the ground, and in an instant leapt and from their purpose freed himself. Thereat each was stung with guilt; but he most who had been cause of the mistake; he therefore started forth, and shouted: “Thou’rt caught!” But little it availed him; for wings could not outspeed the terror the sinner went under; and he, flying, raised up his breast: not otherwise the duck suddenly dives down, when the falcon approaches, and he returns up angry and defeated.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “What’s to be afraid of, darling?” “You know.” “It’s going to be fine. I promise.” Irene gave Miri her most reassuring smile. “But you’ve never flown,” Miri said. “How can you promise when anything could happen, anything could go wrong?” “Anything could go wrong any day of the week. What’s the point of worrying in advance?” “How do you stop yourself from worrying?” “I think of all the good things in my life.” “What about the bad things?” “There’s no room for them inside my head. Not anymore. Now I say live and let live, and I kick those other thoughts away. You can do that, too.” “I’m trying, Nana. I swear, I’m trying.” Irene squeezed her hand. “That’s my girl.” — SHE DID NOT want to flash back to six months ago, to that frigid December day when the ball of fire fell from the sky, exploding not once, but twice. She had pains in her stomach now, maybe from not eating anything since yesterday afternoon, when Suzanne had hosted a going-away lunch for her. Tuna salad and deviled eggs, all arranged on a pretty platter with pale blue ribbons tying up the napkins. The girls were careful not to mention Mason’s name. Robo, who had come from Millburn, brought up the subject once. “Good riddance to him.” Without saying a word Suzanne and Eleanor let her know she was out of bounds. Miri handed the panda bear from its shelf in her now-empty closet to Suzanne, asking her to give it to Betsy in person as soon as Mrs. Foster said it was okay to visit. Suzanne promised she would. They’d chipped in to give Miri a going-away present from Oakley’s, a double box of stationery with a western motif—cowboys, cacti, broncos—decorating the lower-right-hand corner of each sheet, plus an Esterbrook pen in pastel green, with a bottle of green ink, exactly what she’d been hoping someone would give her for Hanukkah. “Something to remember us by,” Suzanne said. “As if I could forget any of you,” Miri told them, choking up. She promised to write. They promised they’d write, too.