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 From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Poochie was all up on me in five seconds flat. Lids still closed, I shuddered at the thought of his tongue all in my groove when he spread my booty cheeks apart and fingered the rim of my ass. Heat consumed me again, and I moaned—a sign of weakness as far as I was concerned. I looked at 12 to see if he heard. He just nodded, and I closed my eyes again, cocking my legs open an inch wider as I felt Poochie near my domain. He licked one thigh, then the other. “You want this, huh?” his deep voice asked, trailing his tongue toward my bottom. “Just make nice, niggah,” I shuddered, enjoying the longness of his lasher. Poochie gripped my thighs hard, and my eyes shot open. Bending over me, he had his dick in his hand. “I’m gonna give it to ya, a’ight.” I tried to sit up, but he pushed me back so hard I thought I’d cave the desk in. He pinned me with the weight of one of his arms, but it felt like I was being held down by five niggahs. He was that strong. I looked for 12, but was greeted by the click of the door closing behind him. That niggah had left me. Straight up bounced while a sistah was naked and vulnerable. I cried out when Poochie parted my pussy with calloused hands, but no one answered. The bakery had grown completely quiet of the voices normally blending in with the tunes. But now all I heard was the music. Loud. Blaring. Drowning out my calls for help. “Can’t nobody help you, Sweets,” Poochie said, inserting the tip of his dick inside my tunnel. “No . . .” he plunged the rest of it in me “. . . fuckin’ body!” Lying there helpless, I squirmed as he fucked me hard and fast, beating my already beaten and sore pussy, and prayed he was a two-minute niggah. And he was, I realized when he pulled out suddenly, then shot his cum into a Big Gulp cup I didn’t know he had. The door opened, spiraling freedom through me. I knew I was saved. “Finished?” 12 asked. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘finished’?” I yelled. “Do you know what this niggah—” “Yeah,” Poochie answered him, cutting me off. “Was some sweet pussy too. Just like you said.” I’d been set up. “What?!” 12 grinned at me, then turned and looked behind him. “Forty, you next.” He turned back to me. “Funny how much a niggah can tell when a pistol’s in his mouth. Whisky dropped dime on you.” He closed the door after Forty walked in with his dick out.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Jumping out of the bubbly water, Monique let the stopper out of the tub and dried off real quick. Then she sprayed cleanser all around the bathroom, especially the nasty-ass toilet that Pluto couldn’t seem to aim his dick into, and cleaned it until the room was sparkling and smelled like roses and vanilla. She had already cursed the landlord out and told him they were leaving and not to look for another fuckin’penny in rent, so she hated to waste her energy cleaning an apartment she was about to vacate, but she had to. She had stepped her ass outta pocket with herman, and there had been a killer edge in Pluto’s voice when he set her straight that told her there was more to come. She knew that niggah had a temper, and she knew he had a memory too. If she wasn’t careful he could either ride downI-95andleave her ass stuck in Harlem, or walk through the door swinging his fists and punching her lights out. Unless she got his mood right. Monique spent the next few hours preparing for her man to get home. She was gonna butter his ass up like a piece of toast. No, like some corn on the cob. He’d walk in the door and find a clean house, a hot meal, and best of all, a docile bitch who knew her proper place and how to keep her fuckin’ mouth closed. But when Pluto shot through the door around three o’clock in the morning his mood was too crazy. Monique had planned on holding her nose and sucking the membranes out of his fat, nasty dick, but he wasn’t having it. She’d been lounging on the sofa in a lavender silk robe, makeup in place and smelling real nice, but when she looked up and saw the expression on her man’s face she lost all of her cool and jumped to her feet because what she was seeing was truly impossible. “What’s the matter, baby? Baby, what’s wrong?” Pluto’s eyes were red and swollen like he had just finished crying or something. He must have wiped some serious snot from his nose because crusty green streaks had dried up all across his cheeks. Monique couldn’t imagine what could have her man looking so bent, but whatever it was, she was gonna make it go away. “Don’t worry about nothing, baby,” she cooed as Pluto pushed past her. She followed him into their bedroom. “Monique got you, Big Papa. And I’m here to make you feel good.” Pluto stopped in the bedroom doorway and cursed, then rushed over to the dresser and began throwing shit out the top drawer. Monique beamed as she looked around the spotless room that just hours ago had looked like a hurricane hit it. She had folded every stitch in all of his dresser drawers too, so there wasn’t shit he could complain about. “I did a good job, baby. Didn’t I?”

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  A portentously inconspicuous man, grey beard and grey face and shabby brown jellaba, sings in slight unplaceable accent without opening his lips: "Oh you dolls, you great big beautiful dolls." Squads of police with thin lips, big noses and cold grey eyes move into the Market from every entrance street. They club and kick the rioters with cold, methodical brutality. The rioters have been carted away in trucks. The shutters go up and the citizens of Interzone step out into the square littered with teeth and sandals and slippery with blood. The sea chest of the dead man is in the Embassy, and the vice consul breaks the news to mother. There is no... Morning... Daybreak... n'existe plus .... If I knew I'd be glad to tell you. Either way is a bad move to the East Wing.... He is gone through an invisible door.... Not here... You can look any place.... No good... No bueno... Hustling myself. ...C'lom Fliday. (Note: Old time, veteran Schmeckers, faces beaten by grey junk weather, will remember.... In 1920s a lot of Chinese pushers around found The West so unreliable, dishonest and wrong, they all packed in, so when an Occidental junky came to score, they say: "No glot.... C'lom Fliday....") ISLAM INCORPORATED AND THE PARTIES OF INTERZONE I was working for an outfit known as Islam Inc., financed by A. J., the notorious Merchant of Sex, who scandalized international society when he appeared at the Duc de Ventre's ball as a walking penis covered by a huge condom emblazoned with the A. J. motto "They Shall Not Pass." "Rather bad taste, old boy," said the Duke. To which A. J. replied: "Up yours with Interzone K.Y." The reference is to the K.Y. scandal which was still in a larval state at that time. A. J.'s repartee often refers to future events. He is a master of the delayed squelch. Salvador Hassan O'Leary, the After Birth Tycoon, is also involved. That is, one of his subsidiary companies has made unspecified contributions, and one of his subsidiary personalities is attached to the organization in an advisory capacity without in any way committing himself to, or associating himself with, the policies, actions or objectives of Islam Inc. Mention should also be made of Clem and Jody, the Ergot Brothers, who decimated the Republic of Hassan with poison wheat, Autopsy Ahmed, and Hepatitis Hal, the fruit and vegetable broker.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  166 Lecture 23: The Rise of Islam and the Threat of Iconoclasm o The Qur’ān provides a vision for the ordering of society, with legislation concerning every aspect of life; subsequent generations developed its statements and the hadith (example) of the prophet into a system of law (shariah) governing an Islamic state. o Unlike the earliest stages of Christianity, therefore, Islam was, from the beginning, prepared to provide a religious ordering to society as a whole. o A tradition holds that the prophet, before his death, issued a summons to the other empires of the world, demanding their submission to Allah. Whether or not the tradition is apocryphal, the story indicates that Islam saw a path of world dominance as grounded from the first in the ministry of the prophet. • After the prophet’s death, Arab armies spread Islam through a remarkable swath of conquest. o In 633, they attacked Persia. In the same year, the churches of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria were lost to Christianity because of Islamic conquest. o Between 634 and 637, Syria, Persia, Egypt, and Gaza were conquered. In 639, the kingdom of Armenia was attacked and, in 694, defeated. o Under this onslaught, Persia sought the aid of China in 638, but by 641, it fell to the Arab army. Once the East was secured, the Arab forces turned westward. In rapid order, Arab armies conquered Tripoli, Cyprus, North Africa, Carthage, Algeria, and Spain. o In 655, the Arab navies defeated the Byzantine fleet, and in 693, the Arab army defeated the Byzantine army at Sebastopolis in Cilicia. 167 • By 715, Islam extended from the Pyrenees to China, and its ambitions did not stop there; its eyes were on the complete subordination of Europe to the rule of Allah. In 716, Lisbon was conquered by Muslim troops, and in 720, the Muslim army reached France (Narbonne). • In the West, only Charles Martel, leader of the Franks and grandfather of Charlemagne, was able to stop the Muslim progress at the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732. In the East, this aggressive religious and political threat hovered at the edge of the Byzantine Empire until the eventual collapse of Constantinople in 1453. Byzantine Christianity • In the context of the political and religious pressure exerted by Persian and Muslim incursions, Byzantine Christianity continued its struggle to seek unity within a highly fractious context shaped by continuing adherence to the Christological position known as Immediately after the prophet Muhammad’s death, Arab armies began the spread of Islam through conquest; their progress was halted in the West at the Battle of Tours by Charles martel, leader of the Franks and grandfather of Charlemagne. © Photos.com/Thinkstock.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  18. Joan of Arc: Peasant-General during a retreat to the town of Compiègne, she was separated from her men and captured by the Burgundians. Joan was then only 18 years old. Her fantastic career had lasted no more than a year. No captain was more feared by the English than Joan. For a king’s ransom, the Burgundians turned her over to the English. At that point, her fate was sealed. The duke of Bedford organized a highly biased trial; there was never any hope that Joan would be acquitted. Joan’s trial brought together more than 100 clerics and was directed by the bishop of Beauvais, a tool of the English. It was common knowledge that hers was a show trial. Joan’s testimony, given over five months, was extensive and remarkable. She openly lied and prevaricated, even warning that she intended to do so, but she also fenced and parried with her interrogators with remarkable wit, sophistication, and bravery. We know from the trial records that Joan’s donning male clothing was heavily emphasized by her interrogators. This, however, may have led Joan’s biographers to overstate its importance during her career. It was also not unprecedented for a woman to lead troops. It was quite common, in fact, for aristocratic women to be trained in organizing siege defenses and to oversee military preparations. After interrogating her for months, her judges were split. Some found her boastful, vain, and a liar but did not support executing her. Others wanted to forward the case to the pope, which was the appropriate legal venue for an appeal. Instead, the English executed Joan by burning. The 19-year-old did not die well, or easily. Her death was described by witnesses as “long and dreadful,” and even her most ardent opponents were horrified by its cruelty. Twenty years later, seeking to rehabilitate her reputation, her mother pressed Charles VII for a new trial. These proceedings, called her nullification trial, overturned the heresy conviction on which she was executed and provided historians with hundreds of testimonies about her life and career. Interestingly, there was no talk of sanctity; she was not regarded as a saint until the mid-19th century, at the time of the second French revolution. Her path to canonization was begun in 1869 but not completed until 1920, in the nationalistic atmosphere of post–World War I Europe. Today, she is honored on May 30 and is the patron saint of soldiers and of France. 139 18. Joan of Arc: Peasant-General Reading DeVries, Kelly. Joan of Arc: A Military Leader. Cheltenham: The History Press, 2011. Fraioli, Deborah A. Joan of Arc and the Hundred Years War. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Pernoud, Régine, and Marie-Véronique Clin. Joan of Arc: Her Story. Translated by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998. 140

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Jumping out of the bubbly water, Monique let the stopper out of the tub and dried off real quick. Then she sprayed cleanser all around the bathroom, especially the nasty-ass toilet that Pluto couldn’t seem to aim his dick into, and cleaned it until the room was sparkling and smelled like roses and vanilla. She had already cursed the landlord out and told him they were leaving and not to look for another fuckin’penny in rent, so she hated to waste her energy cleaning an apartment she was about to vacate, but she had to. She had stepped her ass outta pocket with herman, and there had been a killer edge in Pluto’s voice when he set her straight that told her there was more to come. She knew that niggah had a temper, and she knew he had a memory too. If she wasn’t careful he could either ride downI-95andleave her ass stuck in Harlem, or walk through the door swinging his fists and punching her lights out. Unless she got his mood right. Monique spent the next few hours preparing for her man to get home. She was gonna butter his ass up like a piece of toast. No, like some corn on the cob. He’d walk in the door and find a clean house, a hot meal, and best of all, a docile bitch who knew her proper place and how to keep her fuckin’ mouth closed. But when Pluto shot through the door around three o’clock in the morning his mood was too crazy. Monique had planned on holding her nose and sucking the membranes out of his fat, nasty dick, but he wasn’t having it. She’d been lounging on the sofa in a lavender silk robe, makeup in place and smelling real nice, but when she looked up and saw the expression on her man’s face she lost all of her cool and jumped to her feet because what she was seeing was truly impossible. “What’s the matter, baby? Baby, what’s wrong?” Pluto’s eyes were red and swollen like he had just finished crying or something. He must have wiped some serious snot from his nose because crusty green streaks had dried up all across his cheeks. Monique couldn’t imagine what could have her man looking so bent, but whatever it was, she was gonna make it go away. “Don’t worry about nothing, baby,” she cooed as Pluto pushed past her. She followed him into their bedroom. “Monique got you, Big Papa. And I’m here to make you feel good.” Pluto stopped in the bedroom doorway and cursed, then rushed over to the dresser and began throwing shit out the top drawer. Monique beamed as she looked around the spotless room that just hours ago had looked like a hurricane hit it. She had folded every stitch in all of his dresser drawers too, so there wasn’t shit he could complain about. “I did a good job, baby. Didn’t I?”

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  22. Josephine Bakhita: Freed from Slavery Khartoum was at that time a sophisticated international city. It sits at a convenient location for trade, at the junction of the Blue Nile and White Nile. When Egypt established the Sudan as a subject territory in the 1820s, they chose the small market town as their capital and eventually the seat of the governor- general. It grew rapidly into a bustling city, made wealthy by the slave trade. Bakhita was bought by the Italian consul, Callisto Legnani. Once more, she hoped that new surroundings might bring her into contact with her lost sister, and once more, her hopes were dashed. After the fear and torment of the general’s household, she remembered her 2 years in the Legnani house as a time of comparative “peace and tranquillity.” In 1883, Bakhita’s life was thrown into upheaval, this time from the danger of invasion. The expatriate community of Khartoum was strongly encouraged to leave, as the city would almost certainly be overrun by the forces of al-Mahdī. Al-Mahdī, who claimed an illustrious lineage descended from Mohammed’s grandson Hassan, also publicly claimed to be the Mahdiyya, sent to prepare the second coming of the prophet Isa, or Jesus. He refused to be bought off by the governor-general, who offered him a generous pension to step down. He eventually raised most of Sudan in rebellion, unifying tribes and even non-Muslims with his cause. 168

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening. There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At that hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was empty. ‘Give us seltzer,’ Berlioz asked. ‘There is no seltzer,’ the woman in the stand said, and for some reason became offended. ‘Is there beer?’ Homeless inquired in a rasping voice. ‘Beer’ll be delivered towards evening,’ the woman replied. ‘Then what is there?’ asked Berlioz. ‘Apricot soda, only warm,’ said the woman. ‘Well, let’s have it, let’s have it! . . .’ The soda produced an abundance of yellow foam, and the air began to smell of a barber-shop. Having finished drinking, the writers immediately started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench face to the pond and back to Bronnaya. Here the second oddity occurred, touching Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart gave a thump and dropped away somewhere for an instant, then came back, but with a blunt needle lodged in it. Besides that, Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to flee the Ponds at once without looking back. Berlioz glanced around in anguish, not understanding what had frightened him. He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought: ‘What’s the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart’s acting up . . . I’m overworked . . . Maybe it’s time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk . . .’ 5 And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked jockey’s cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air . . . A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy. The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and thought in consternation: ‘This can’t be! . . .’ But, alas, it was, and the long, see-through citizen was swaying before him to the left and to the right without touching the ground. Here terror took such possession of Berlioz that he shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that it was all over, the phantasm had dissolved, the checkered one had vanished, and with that the blunt needle had popped out of his heart. ‘Pah, the devil!’ exclaimed the editor. ‘You know, Ivan, I nearly had heatstroke just now! There was even something like a hallucination . . .’

• From The Girls (2016)

  Where Gwen was wrapping her damp hair in a towel, smoothing lotion on her legs. Scotty clearing the hot tub filters of debris, the silent arc of the sprinkler, a song floating into the yard from a nearby radio. The letters I wrote my mother were willful acts of theater, at first. Then true enough. Class was interesting. I had friends. Next week we would go to the aquarium and watch the jellyfish gape and parry in their illuminated tanks, suspended in the water like delicate handkerchiefs. —By the time I’d walked the farthest spit of land, the wind had picked up. The beach empty, all the picnickers and dog walkers gone. I stepped my way over the boulders, heading back to the main stretch of sand. Following the line between cliff and wave. I’d done this walk many times. I wondered how far Sasha and Julian and Zav had gotten by then. Probably still an hour from L.A. Without having to think about it, I knew Julian and Zav were sitting in the front seats and Sasha was in the back. I could imagine her leaning forward from time to time, asking for a joke to be repeated or pointing out some funny road sign. Trying to campaign for her own existence, before finally giving up and lying back on the seat. Letting their conversation thicken into meaningless noise while she watched the road, the passing orchards. The branches flashing with the silver ties that kept away birds. —I was passing by the common room with Jessamine, on our way to the Tuck Shop, when a girl called, “Your sister’s looking for you downstairs.” I didn’t look up; she couldn’t be talking to me. But she was. It took me a moment to understand what might be happening. Jessamine seemed hurt. “I didn’t know you had a sister.” —I suppose I had known Suzanne would come for me. The cottony numbness I occupied at school wasn’t unpleasant, in the same way a limb falling asleep isn’t unpleasant. Until that arm or leg wakes up. Then the prickles come, the sting of return—seeing Suzanne leaning in the shade of the dorm entrance. Her hair uncombed, her lips bristling—her presence knocked the plates of time ajar. Everything was returned to me. My heart strobed, helpless, with the tinny cut of fear. But what could Suzanne do? It was daytime, the school filled with witnesses. I watched her notice the fuss of landscaping, teachers on their way to tutoring appointments, girls crossing the quad with tennis bags and chocolate milk on their breath, walking proof of the efforts of unseen mothers. There was a curious, animal distance in Suzanne’s face, a measurement of the uncanny place she’d found herself. She straightened when I approached. “Look at you,” she said. “All clean and scrubbed.” I saw a new harshness in her face: a blood blister under a fingernail. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I kept touching the ends of my hair.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  same time she feared that Maximilian’s letters to her had been detained by the security services on their arrival in Prague. And indeed the letterbox was always empty up to the winter of 1941, when Agata was still living in the Sporkova, so that as she said to me once, oddly, it was as if those messages in which we placed our last hopes were misdirected or swallowed up by the evil spirits abroad in the air all around us. It was only later, said Vera, that I realized how well this remark of Agata’s conveyed the invisible terrors beneath which the city of Prague lay cowering at the time, only when I learned of the true extent of the perversion of the law under the Germans, the acts of violence they committed daily in the basement of the Petschek Palace, in the Pankrac Prison, and at the killing grounds out in Kobylisy. After ninety seconds in which to defend yourself to a judge you could be condemned to death for a trifle, some offense barely worth mentioning, the merest contravention of the regulations in force, and then you would be hanged immediately in the execution room next to the law court, where there was an iron rail running along the ceiling down which the lifeless bodies were pushed a little further as required. The bill for these cursory proceedings was sent to the relations of the hanged or guillotined victim, with the information that it could be settled in monthly installments. Although little hint of it made its way out at the time, fear of the Germans spread through the whole city like a creeping miasma. Agata said it even drifted in through the closed doors and windows, taking one’s breath away. When I look back at the two years following the outbreak of the war, said Vera, it is as if at that time everything was caught in a vortex whirling downwards at ever-increasing speed. Bulletins came thick and fast over the wireless, read by the announcers in a curiously high-pitched tone of voice, as if forced out of the larynx: news of the never-ending exploits of the Wehrmacht, which had soon occupied the entire European continent, while its successive campaigns, with apparently conclusive logic, held out to the Germans the prospect of a vast world empire in which, thanks to the fact that they belonged to the chosen people, they would all be able to embark on the most glittering careers. I believe, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that even the last remaining German skeptics were overcome by a kind of euphoria, such as one feels at high altitude, in these years when victory followed upon victory, while we, the oppressed, lived below sea level, as it were, and had to watch as the SS pervaded the economy of the entire country, and one business firm after another was handed over to German trustees. They had even aryanized the fez and slipper factory in Sternberg. The means Agata still had at her disposal were barely enough for the necessities. Her bank accounts had been frozen ever since she was obliged to send in an eight-page statement of her assets, under dozens of headings. She was also strictly forbidden to dispose of

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And true to her traditions the beautiful city sought to hide stark ugliness under beauty, and she decked herself as though for a wedding; her flags streamed out on the breeze in their thousands. With the paraphernalia and pageantry of glory she sought to disguise the true meaning of war. But where children had been playing a few days before, troops were now encamped along the Champs Elysées. Their horses nibbled the bark from the trees and pawed at the earth, making little hollows; they neighed to each other in the watches of the night, as though in some fearful anticipation. In by-streets the unreasoning spirit of war broke loose in angry and futile actions; shops were raided because of their German names and their wares hurled out to lie in the gutters. Around every street corner some imaginary spy must be lurking, until people tilted at shadows. 304 THE WELL OF LONELINESS ‘ C’est la guerre,’ murmured women, thinking of their sons, Then they answered each other: ‘ Oui, c'est la guerre.’ Pierre said to Stephen: ‘ They will not take me because of my heart! ’ And his voice shook with anger, and the anger brought tears which actually splashed the jaunty stripes of his livery waistcoat. Pauline said: ‘I gave my father to the sea and my eldest brother. I have still two young brothers, they alone are left and I give them to France. Bon Dieu! It is terrible being a woman, one gives all! ’ But Stephen knew from her voice that Pauline felt proud of being a woman. Adèle said: ‘ Jean is certain to get promotion, he says so, he will not long remain a Poilu. When he comes back he may be a captain — that will be fine, I shall marry a captain! War, he says, is better than piano-tuning, though I tell him he has a fine ear for music. But Mademoiselle should just see him now in his uniform! We all think he looks splendid.’ Puddle said: ‘ Of course England was bound to come in, and thank God we didn’t take too long about it! ° Stephen said: * All the young men from Morton will go — every decent man in the country will go.’ Then she put away her unfinished novel and sat staring dumbly at Puddle. 2 Encuanp, the land of bountiful pastures, of peace, of mother: ing hills, of home. England was fighting for her right to ex- istence. Face to face with dreadful reality at last, England was pouring her men into battle, her army was even now marching across France. Tramp, tramp; tramp, tramp; the tread of Eng- land whose men would defend her right to existence.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Andreuccio, hearing this, raised his eyes and saw at the window one who, by what little he could make out, himseemed should be a very masterful fellow, with a bushy black beard on his face, and who yawned and rubbed his eyes, as he had arisen from bed or deep sleep; whereupon, not without fear, he answered, 'I am a brother of the lady of the house.' The other waited not for him to make an end of his reply, but said, more fiercely than before, 'I know not what hindereth me from coming down and cudgelling thee what while I see thee stir, for a pestilent drunken ass as thou must be, who will not let us sleep this night.' Then, drawing back into the house, he shut the window; whereupon certain of the neighbours, who were better acquainted with the fellow's quality, said softly to Andreuccio, 'For God's sake, good man, begone in peace and abide not there to-night to be slain; get thee gone for thine own good.' Andreuccio, terrified at the fellow's voice and aspect and moved by the exhortations of the neighbours, who seemed to him to speak out of charity, set out to return to his inn, in the direction of the quarter whence he had followed the maid, without knowing whither to go, despairing of his money and woebegone as ever man was. Being loathsome to himself, for the stench that came from him, and thinking to repair to the sea to wash himself, he turned to the left and followed a street called Ruga Catalana,[101] that led towards the upper part of the city. Presently, he espied two men coming towards him with a lantern and fearing they might be officers of the watch or other ill-disposed folk, he stealthily took refuge, to avoid them, in a hovel, that he saw hard by. But they, as of malice aforethought, made straight for the same place and entering in, began to examine certain irons which one of them laid from off his shoulder, discoursing various things thereof the while. [Footnote 101: _i.e._ Catalan Street.]

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The gentleman, going up, found his wife at the stairhead, all disordered and fearful, and said to her, 'What is all this? Whom goeth Messer Lambertuccio threatening thus in such a fury?' The lady, withdrawing towards the chamber where Leonetto was, so he might hear her, answered, 'Sir, never had I the like of this fright. There came fleeing hither but now a young man, whom I know not, followed by Messer Lambertuccio, hanger in hand, and finding by chance the door of this chamber open, said to me, all trembling, "For God's sake, madam, help me, that I be not slain in your arms." I rose to my feet and was about to question him who he was and what ailed him, when, behold, in rushed Messer Lambertuccio, saying, "Where art thou, traitor?" I set myself before the chamber-door and hindered him from entering; and he was in so far courteous that, after many words, seeing it pleased me not that he should enter there, he went his way down, as you have seen.' Quoth the husband, 'Wife, thou didst well, it were too great a reproach to us, had a man been slain in our house, and Messer Lambertuccio did exceeding unmannerly to follow a person who had taken refuge here.' Then he asked where the young man was, and the lady answered, 'Indeed sir, I know not where he hath hidden himself.' Then said the husband 'Where art thou? Come forth in safety.' Whereupon Leonetto, who had heard everything, came forth all trembling for fear, (as indeed he had had a great fright,) of the place where he had hidden himself, and the gentleman said to him, 'What hast thou to do with Messer Lambertuccio?' 'Sir,' answered he, 'I have nothing in the world to do with him, wherefore methinketh assuredly he is either not in his right wits or he hath mistaken me for another; for that no sooner did he set eyes on me in the road not far from this house than he forthright clapped his hand to his hanger and said, "Traitor, thou art a dead man!" I stayed not to ask why, but took to my heels as best I might and made my way hither, where, thanks to God and to this gentlewoman, I have escaped.' Quoth the husband, 'Go to; have no fears; I will bring thee to thine own house safe and sound, and thou canst after seek out what thou hast to do with him.' Accordingly, when they had supped, he mounted him a-horseback and carrying him back to Florence, left him in his own house. As for Leonetto, that same evening, according as he had been lessoned of the lady, he privily bespoke Messer Lambertuccio and took such order with him, albeit there was much talk of the matter thereafterward, the husband never for all that became aware of the cheat that had been put on him by his wife." THE SEVENTH STORY [Day the Seventh]

• From Trash (1988)

  All those stories were rising up my throat. Voices were echoing in my neck, laughter behind my ears, and I was terribly terribly afraid that I was finally as crazy as my kind was supposed to be. But the desire to live was desperate in my belly, and the stories I had hidden all those years were the blood and bone of it. To get it down, to tell it again, to make something—by God just once—to be real in the world, without lies or evasions or sweet-talking nonsense. I got up and wrote a story all the way through. It was one of the stories from the yellow pages, one of the ones I had rewritten, but it was different again. It wasn’t truly me or my mama or my girlfriends, or really any of the people who’d been there, but it had the feel, the shit-kicking anger and grief of my life. It wasn’t that whiny voice, but it had the drawl, and it had, too, the joy and pride I sometimes felt in me and mine. It was not biography and yet not lies, and it resonated to the pulse of my sisters’ fear and my desperate shame, and it ended with all the questions and decisions still waiting—most of all the decision to live. It was a rough beginning—my own shout of life against death, of shape and substance against silence and confusion. It was most of all my deep abiding desire to live fleshed and strengthened on the page, a way to tell the truth as a kind of magic not cheapened or distorted by a need to please any damn body at all. Without it, I cannot imagine my own life. Without it, I have no way to know who I am. One time, twice, once in a while again, I get it right. Once in a while, I can make the world I know real on the page. I can make the women and men I love breathe out loud in an empty room, the dreams I dare not speak shape up in the smoky darkness of other people’s imaginations. Writing these stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration. I write stories. I write fiction. I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life—the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed, working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

• From Trash (1988)

  The Boatwright children had bad dreams. After supper they were all required to wash again while their mama watched. “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” The children scrubbed and scrubbed, while Shirley rubbed her neck with one hand and her bulging belly with another. “I’d kill this thing, if I could,” she muttered. Her five sons and three daughters dreamed often of their mother, dreamed she came in to wash their faces with lye, to cut off the places where their ears stuck out, to tie down their wagging tongues, and plane down their purplish genitals. “You won’t need this,” they dreamed she told them, as she pulled off one piece or another of their flesh. “Or this, or this.” They dreamed and screamed and woke each other in terror. Sometimes Shirley beat on the stairs with a broom handle to remind them how much she and Tucker needed their sleep. She hated the way they cringed away from her. After all, she never hit them. A pinch was enough, if you knew how it should be done. But more than their shameful fear of her, she hated the way Mattie would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes. “You think you’re something, don’t you?” Shirley would push her face right up to her daughter’s flushed and sweating cheekbones. “You think God’s got his eye on you?” She would pinch the inside of Mattie’s arm and twist her mouth at the girl’s stubborn expression. “Wouldn’t nobody take an interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles—which you might. You might any day now.” She sent them all to bed early and came up to beat the foot of each bed with her broomstick until the children squeezed up near the top. “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred Boatwrights. My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive. I look at you and I swear you an’t no kin to me at all.” It was true that Shirley’s family took no interest in her children. Once a year Shirley would go alone to visit her mother, but neither her parents nor her brothers ever visited her. The only thing the children knew about their grandparents was Shirley’s stories about their house, how big and clean it was, how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired her mother and looked up to her daddy. By contrast, their father’s father, a widower, was nothing but a drunk. “Vegetables . . . hell!” That man sells whiskey out of that roadside stand, whiskey I tell you, not tomatoes and squash. He just has those runty old tomatoes there to keep the law off.” “Now Shirley, you know that an’t true,” Tucker always protested.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  3 Having taken off his clothes, Ivan entrusted them to a pleasant, bearded fellow who was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, sitting beside a torn white Tolstoy blouse and a pair of unlaced, worn boots. After waving his arms to cool off, Ivan dived swallow-fashion into the water. It took his breath away, so cold the water was, and the thought even flashed in him that he might not manage to come up to the surface. However, he did manage to come up, and, puffing and snorting, his eyes rounded in terror, Ivan Nikolaevich began swimming through the black, oil-smelling water among the broken zigzags of street light on the bank. When the wet Ivan came dancing back up the steps to the place where the bearded fellow was guarding his clothes, it turned out that not only the latter, but also the former—that is, the bearded fellow himself—had been stolen. In the exact spot where the pile of clothes had been, a pair of striped drawers, the torn Tolstoy blouse, the candle, the icon and a box of matches had been left. After threatening someone in the distance with his fist in powerless anger, Ivan put on what was left for him. Here two considerations began to trouble him: first, that his Massolit identification card, which he never parted with, was gone, and, second, whether he could manage to get through Moscow unhindered looking the way he did now? In striped drawers, after all . . . True, it was nobody’s business, but still there might be some hitch or delay. Ivan tore off the buttons where the drawers fastened at the ankle, figuring that this way they might pass for summer trousers, gathered up the icon, the candle and the matches, and started off, saying to himself: ‘To Griboedov’s! Beyond all doubt, he’s there.’ The city was already living its evening life. Trucks flew through the dust, chains clanking, and on their platforms men lay sprawled belly up on sacks. All windows were open. In each of these windows a light burned under an orange lampshade, and from every window, every door, every gateway, roof, and attic, basement and courtyard blared the hoarse roar of the polonaise from the opera Evgeny Onegin.

• From The Girls (2016)

  As if dredged from a lake. All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriends’ hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always—the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets—but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water. [image "Part One" file=Image00002.jpg] I T BEGINS WITH THE F ORD idling up the narrow drive, the sweet drone of honeysuckle thickening the August air. The girls in the backseat holding hands, the car windows down to let in the seep of night. The radio playing until the driver, suddenly jittery, snaps it off. They scale the gate, still strung with Christmas lights. Encountering, first, the dumb quiet of the caretaker’s cottage; the caretaker taking an evening nap on the couch, his bare feet tucked side by side like loaves. His girlfriend in the bathroom, wiping away the hazy crescents of eye makeup. Then the main house, where they startle the woman reading in the guest bedroom. The glass of water quivering on the nightstand, the damp cotton of her underpants. Her five-year-old son by her side, murmuring cryptic nonsense to fight sleep. They herd everyone into the living room. The moment the frightened people understand the sweet dailiness of their lives—the swallow of morning orange juice, the tilting curve taken on a bicycle—is already gone. Their faces change like a shutter opening; the unlocking behind the eyes. —I had imagined that night so often. The dark mountain road, the sunless sea. A woman felled on the night lawn. And though the details had receded over the years, grown their second and third skins, when I heard the lock jamming open near midnight, it was my first thought. The stranger at the door. I waited for the sound to reveal its source. A neighbor’s kid bumping a trash can onto the sidewalk. A deer thrashing through the brush. That’s all it could be, I told myself, this far-off rattle in the other part of the house, and I tried to picture how harmless the space would seem again in daylight, how cool and beyond danger. But the noise went on, passing starkly into real life. There was now laughter in the other room. Voices. The pressurized swish of the refrigerator. I trawled for explanations but kept catching on the worst thought. After everything, this was how it would end. Trapped in someone else’s house, among the facts and habits of someone else’s life. My bare legs, jotted with varicose veins—how weak I’d appear when they came for me, a middle-aged woman scrabbling for the corners.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  224 Lecture 31: The Crusades in the late 8th century, had invaded Spain in an effort to drive back the Muslim armies and had established the Spanish March as a buffer zone against Islam. • Further, some outlet was needed to channel the aggressive militarism of the ascendant Normans. o The Normans were descendants of the Vikings who settled on the western coast of France; the duchy of Normandy dates from 10 th century. o The Norman leader Robert Guiscard had already conquered the Saracens (Muslims) in Sicily and Malta—with the pope’s blessing—and in 1038–1040, we find Normans serving as mercenaries in the Byzantine army. o Again with the approval of the pope, William II of Normandy (William the Conqueror) overcame the Anglo-Saxons in England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Normans were great warriors and were spoiling for a fight. • Another strong incentive to undertake a military expedition was the loss of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire to the Seljuk Turks (who were Muslims) in 1071, which threatened not only Byzantium but potentially also the West. • Religious incentives were offered, as well: The papacy promised protection of property for participants, granted plenary indulgences, and promised to regard those who fell in battle as martyrs. o Indulgences were a feature of medieval Christianity that made sense only within the framework of a highly evolved view of the afterlife. o The theory was as follows: If Christians died in mortal sin, they would be punished forever in hell; if they died in a perfect state of grace, fully repentant of all their sins, they would go to heaven.

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  At first, Laura said this plan would never do. But, as we could devise nothing else, on my pressing her a little on the subject she admitted that before I came she had made up her mind to accept him if he proposed, but that she was afraid to do so now for two reasons: first, she feared he might discover on his first attack that someone had had access before him to the sanctuary of love, and secondly, from the dread that in the event of a child coming before the usual time he might denounce her and turn her adrift. I considered a little, and then asked her whether if these difficulties could be got over she would still be disposed to marry him. She said it was no use thinking of it, but that if it were not for the objections she had mentioned, she certainly would, as she thought she could live happily with him. I then told her that as to the first objection she might set her mind perfectly at ease, for from what I had already seen of Sir Charles, his instrument I knew was so much larger than anything that had found its way into her and he would find so much difficulty in getting it in for the first time that he would never suspect any intruder had been before him, and that if, as she easily might, she insisted in the operation being performed in the dark, I could supply her with a contrivance by which a little red liquid might be applied so as to produce the natural appearance of an effusion of blood. Then as to the second objection, I told her I thought there would be little fear of his making any complaint at least in public on the subject, if she had the power to hold out to him that she could bring forward a matter which it would be equally unpleasant for him to have disclosed. She said that in such a case the matter might perhaps be arranged, but she could not imagine how she was to obtain such a hold over him. I told her I thought she might leave that to me. I then explained to her that Sir Charles had taken a fancy to me on my arrival, and had shown me every kindness and attention, evidently wishing to be on an intimate footing with me.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I tried to pull Suzanne aside, hook my arm through hers like the old days, but she just smiled, low burning and unfocused, and shook herself loose, intent on following Russell. —I learned that Russell had been harassing Mitch for the last few weeks. Showing up unannounced at his house. Sending Guy to knock over his trash cans, so Mitch came home to a lawn junked with flattened cereal boxes and shredded wax paper and tinfoil slick with food scraps. Mitch’s caretaker had seen Russell there, too, just once—Scotty told Mitch he’d seen some guy parked at the gate, just staring, and when Scotty had asked him to leave, Russell had smiled and told him he was the house’s previous owner. Russell had also shown up at the recording engineer’s house, trying to cadge the tapes from his session with Mitch. The man’s wife was home. Later she’d recall being irritated at the sound of the doorbell: their newborn was asleep in the back bedroom. When she opened the door, there was Russell in his grubby Wranglers, his squinty smile. She’d heard stories of the session from her husband, so she knew who Russell was, but she wasn’t afraid. Not really. He was not a frightening man when first encountered, and when she told him her husband wasn’t home, Russell shrugged. “I could just grab the tapes real quick,” he said, straining to look past her. “In and out, just like that.” That’s when she got a little uneasy. Plowing her feet deeper into her old slippers, the fussing of the baby drifting down the hall. “He keeps all that at work,” she said, and Russell believed her. The woman remembered she heard a noise in the yard later that night, a thrash in the roses, but when she looked out the window, she didn’t see anything except the pebbled driveway, the stubble of the moonlit lawn. —My first night back was nothing like the old nights. The old nights had been alive with a juvenile sweetness in our faces—I’d pet the dog, who’d nose around for love, give him a hearty scratch behind his ears, my coursing hand urging me into a happy rhythm. And there had been strange nights, too, when we’d all taken acid or Russell would have to get in some drunk motorcycle guy’s face, using all his flip-flop logic on him. But I had never felt scared. That night was different, by the ring of stones with the barest of fires going. No one paid any attention when the flames dissolved to nothing, everyone’s roiling energy directed at Russell, who moved like a rubber band about to snap. “This right here,” Russell said. He was pacing, dinking out a quick song. “I just made it up and it’s already a hit.” The guitar was out of tune, twanging flat notes—Russell didn’t seem to notice. His voice rushed and frantic. “And here’s another one,” he said.