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 Naked Lunch (1959)

  Even the most intelligent and genetically perfect replicas would in all probability constitute an unspeakable menace to life on this planet...." T.B.-- Tentative Bulletin-Liquefaction: "We must not reject or deny our protoplasmic core, striving at all time to maintain a maximum of flexibility without falling into the morass of liquefaction...." Tentative and Incomplete Bulletin: "Emphatically we do not oppose telepathic research. In fact, telepathy properly used and understood could be the ultimate defense against any form of organized coercion or tyranny on the part of pressure groups or individual control addicts. We oppose, as we oppose atomic war, the use of such knowledge to control, coerce, debase, exploit or annihilate the individuality of another living creature. Telepathy is not, by its nature, a oneway process. To attempt to set up a one-way telepathic broadcast must be regarded as an unqualified evil...." D.B.-- Definitive Bulletin: "The Sender will be defined by negatives. A low pressure area, a sucking emptiness. He will be portentously anonymous, faceless, colorless. He will -- probably -- be born with smooth disks of skin instead of eyes. He always knows where he is going like a virus knows. He doesn't need eyes." "Couldn't there be more than one Sender?" "Oh yes, many of them at first. But not for long. Some maudlin citizens will think they can send something edifying, not realizing that sending is evil. Scientists will say: 'Sending is like atomic power.... If properly harnessed.' At this point an anal technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and pulls the switch that reduces the earth to cosmic dust. ('Belch... They'll hear this fart on Jupiter.')... Artists will confuse sending with creation. They will camp around screeching 'A new medium' until their rating drops off.... Philosophers will bat around the ends and means hassle not knowing that sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like Junk . Try using junk as a means to something else.... Some citizens with 'Coca Cola and aspirin' control habits will be talking about the evil glamor of sending. But no one will talk about anything very long. The Sender, he don't like talking." The Sender is not a human individual.... It is The Human Virus. (All virus are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence.... They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, etc. So every species has a Master Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species. ) The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell.... Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus. The Human Virus can now be isolated and treated.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Besides that, the normally full-blooded administrator was now pale with a chalk-like, unhealthy pallor, and on this stifling night his neck was for some reason wrapped in an old striped scarf. Add to that the repulsive manner the administrator had acquired during the time of his absence of sucking and smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had become hollow and coarse, and the furtiveness and cowardliness in his eyes, and one could boldly say that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable. Something else burningly troubled the findirector, but he was unable to grasp precisely what it was, however much he strained his feverish mind, however hard he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could affirm, that there was something unprecedented, unnatural in this combination of the administrator and the familiar armchair. ‘Well, we finally overpowered him, loaded him into the car,’ Varenukha boomed, peeking from behind the paper and covering the bruise with his hand. Rimsky suddenly reached out and, as if mechanically, tapping his fingers on the table at the same time, pushed the electric-bell button with his palm and went numb. The sharp signal ought to have been heard without fail in the empty building. But no signal came, and the button sank lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was dead, the bell broken. The findirector’s stratagem did not escape the notice of Varenukha, who asked, twitching, with a clearly malicious fire flickering in his eyes: ‘What are you ringing for?’ ‘Mechanically,’ the findirector replied hollowly, jerking his hand back, and asked in turn, in an unsteady voice: ‘What’s that on your face?’ ‘The car skidded, I bumped against the door-handle,’ Varenukha said, looking away. ‘He’s lying!’ the findirector exclaimed mentally. And here his eyes suddenly grew round and utterly insane, and he stared at the back of the armchair. Behind the chair on the floor two shadows lay criss-cross, one more dense and black, the other faint and grey. The shadow of the back of the chair and of its tapering legs could be seen distinctly on the floor, but there was no shadow of Varenukha’s head above the back of the chair, or of the administrator’s legs under its legs. ‘He casts no shadow!’ Rimsky cried out desperately in his mind. He broke into shivers. Varenukha, following Rimsky’s insane gaze, looked furtively behind him at the back of the chair, and realized that he had been found out. He got up from the chair (the findirector did likewise) and made one step back from the desk, clutching his briefcase in his hands. ‘He’s guessed, damn him!

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A window on the second floor slammed so that the glass nearly broke, the tops of the maples and lindens rustled alarmingly. It became darker and colder. The administrator rubbed his eyes and saw that a yellow-bellied storm cloud was creeping low over Moscow. There came a dense, distant rumbling. However great Varenukha’s hurry, an irrepressible desire pulled at him to run over to the summer toilet for a second on his way, to check whether the repairman had put a wire screen over the light-bulb. Running past the shooting gallery, Varenukha came to a thick growth of lilacs where the light-blue toilet building stood. The repairman turned out to be an efficient fellow, the bulb under the roof of the gentlemen’s side was covered with a wire screen, but the administrator was upset that even in the pre-storm darkness one could make out that the walls were already written all over in charcoal and pencil. ‘Well, what sort of . . .’ the administrator began and suddenly heard a voice purring behind him: ‘Is that you, Ivan Savelyevich?’ Varenukha started, turned around, and saw before him a short, fat man with what seemed to him a cat-like physiognomy. ‘So, it’s me,’ Varenukha answered hostilely. ‘Very, very glad,’ the cat-like fat man responded in a squeaky voice and, suddenly swinging his arm, gave Varenukha such a blow on the ear that the cap flew off the administrator’s head and vanished without a trace down the hole in the seat. At the fat man’s blow, the whole toilet lit up momentarily with a tremulous light, and a roll of thunder echoed in the sky. Then came another flash and a second man emerged before the administrator—short, but with athletic shoulders, hair red as fire, albugo in one eye, a fang in his mouth . . . This second one, evidently a lefty, socked the administrator on the other ear. In response there was another roll of thunder in the sky, and rain poured down on the wooden roof of the toilet. ‘What is it, comr . . .’ the half-crazed administrator whispered, realized at once that the word ‘comrades’ hardly fitted bandits attacking a man in a public toilet, rasped out: ‘citiz . . .’—figured that they did not merit this appellation either, and received a third terrible blow from he did not know which of them, so that blood gushed from his nose on to his Tolstoy blouse. ‘What you got in the briefcase, parasite?’ the one resembling a cat cried shrilly. ‘Telegrams?

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  15. Absalom Jones: Abolitionist Priest Yellow Fever Epidemic The first cases of yellow fever in Philadelphia were recorded in July 1793. In that fall alone, 10% of the city died from the disease, 400 of them free Black people. Some 20,000 Philadelphians fled the city, and many of those who remained refused to work out of fear of contracting the disease. It was not understood then that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes and not through close contact with the sick. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Quaker physician, convinced the mayor that it was imperative that the free African American people of Philadelphia be hired to assist in relief efforts. This was based on his belief that those of African descent had a special immunity to the disease, a theory soon proven terribly wrong. Jones and the men and women of the FAS did heroic work that fall. But within weeks, Black volunteers began to fall sick, and Rush realized the enormity of his mistake. The epidemic finally ended in November, as cold weather killed off the mosquitoes. The mayor commissioned an official account of the epidemic and the city’s relief efforts from Mathew Carey, a printer and entrepreneur. His account contained slanderous accusations of wage extortion and theft by Black nurses. Jones and Allen teamed up to counter these incendiary accusations. Their rebuttal was published as a pamphlet, which is still being studied by scholars as a masterful treatise on the nature of citizenship. Jones’s Advocacy and Ministry In the aftermath of the epidemic and the pamphlet, clerical resistance to the new church evaporated. The African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas was dedicated on July 17, 1794, and its opening drew clergy from every denomination. Jones was ordained deacon in 1795 and began a period of intense political advocacy. In early 1797, four men sought his aid. They had been freed in North Carolina and made their way north, but a law passed in the state allowed the capture and re-enslavement of almost all manumitted Black people. The law incentivized the hunting of freed slaves. 115

• From The Girls (2016)

  How the mother must have begged, at the end. The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things. And then he was in front of me. Oh, I thought. Oh. Because he was just a normal man, harmless, nodding along to the white headphones nested in his ears. Just a man walking on the beach, enjoying the music, the weak sun through the fog. He smiled at me as he passed, and I smiled back, like you would smile at any stranger, any person you didn’t know. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI would like to thank Kate Medina and Bill Clegg for invaluable guidance. Thank you also to Anna Pitoniak, Derrill Hagood, Peter Mendelsund, Fred and Nancy Cline, and my brothers and sisters: Ramsey, Hilary, Megan, Elsie, Mayme, and Henry. BY EMMA CLINE The Girls Daddy The Guest [image file=Image00006.jpg] PHOTO: MEGAN CLINE EMMA CLINE is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Girls and the short story collection Daddy . The winner of the Plimpton Prize, she has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sunday Times Story Award. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. [image "Part One" file=Image00007.jpg] 1THIS WAS AUGUST. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day. Alex waited for a set to finish before making her way into the water, slogging through until it was deep enough to dive. A bout of strong swimming and she was out, beyond the break. The surface was calm. From here, the sand was immaculate. The light— the famous light— made it all look honeyed and mild: the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery unison. The cars in the parking lot. Even the seagulls swarming a trash can. On the shore, the towels were occupied by placid beachgoers. A man tanned to the color of expensive luggage let out a yawn, a young mother watched her children run back and forth to the waterline. What would they see if they looked at Alex? In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t. —WHEN SIMON HAD FIRST taken her to the beach, he’d kicked off his shoes at the entrance. Everyone did, apparently: there were shoes and sandals piled up by the low wood railing. No one takes them? Alex asked. Simon raised his eyebrows. Who would take someone’s shoes? But that had been Alex’s immediate thought— how easy it would be to take things, out here. All sorts of things. The bikes leaning against the fence. The bags unattended on towels. The cars left unlocked, no one wanting to carry their keys on the beach.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  He says that you wanted to fight him one day—that made me laugh awfully, it’s so like you, Stephen! He’s a good-looking person and rather a nice one. He tells me that his regiment’s stationed at Worcester, so I’ve asked him to come over to The Grange when he likes. It must be pretty dreary, I imagine, in Worcester. . . .’ Stephen finished the letter and sat staring at the sea for a moment, after which she got up abruptly. Slipping the letter into her pocket she buttoned her jacket; she was feeling cold. What she needed was a walk, a really long walk. She set out briskly in the direction of Newquay. 2 During those long, anxious weeks in Cornwall, it was borne in on Stephen as never before how wide was the gulf between her and her mother, how completely they two must always stand divided. Yet looking at Anna’s quiet ageing face, the girl would be struck afresh by its beauty, a beauty that seemed to have mollified the years, to have risen triumphant over time and grief. And now as in the days of her childhood, that beauty would fill her with a kind of wonder; so calm it was, so assured, so complete—then her mother’s deep eyes, blue like distant mountains, and now with that far-away look in their blueness, as though they were gazing into the distance. Stephen’s heart would suddenly tighten a little; a sense of great loss would descend upon her, together with the sense of not fully understanding just what she had lost or why she had lost it—she would stare at Anna as a thirsty traveller in the desert will stare at a mirage of water. And one evening there came a preposterous impulse—the impulse to confide in this woman within whose most gracious and perfect body her own anxious body had lain and quickened. She wanted to speak to that motherhood, to implore, nay, compel its understanding. To say: ‘Mother, I need you. I’ve lost my way—give me your hand to hold in the darkness.’ But good God, the folly, the madness of it! The base betrayal of such a confession! Angela delivered over, betrayed—the unthinkable folly, the madness of it. Yet sometimes as Anna and she sat together looking out at the misty Cornish coast-line, hearing the dull, heavy throb of the sea and the calling of sea-gulls the one to the other—as they sat there together it would seem to Stephen that her heart was so full of Angela Crossby, all the bitterness, all the sweetness of her, that the mother-heart beating close by her own must surely, in its turn, be stirred to beat faster, for had she not once sheltered under that heart?

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

  I freaked straight out, falling out of my chair, hitting my head on the desk, and making a loud thud as I landed on the floor. When I woke up again I was in my boo’s arms. My coworker Carol must have called him to come get me because Tears was looking down at me with big eyes. He had taken me home and put me in our bed. At first I thought everything had been one crazy dream, until I saw the gun in Tears’s hand. He gripped me by my neck and pushed the note Raheem had written me up in my face. “Bitch,” he said with the barrel pressed to my forehead. “You met a motherfucker in room 825 at the Sheraton Hotel? Ain’t no way you can fuckin’ explain this shit!” I opened my mouth to tell him it had only been a dream, but then I heard the trigger click, and just like Tears had promised, my life was over. LIFE OF SIN Joy “What’s your pleasure?” I purred into the phone. Being the sex kitten that I am, I knew I had the dog on the other end of the phone with his tail standing straight up. “Shit, you. You my pleasure, ma,” Papi said with his heavy Cuban accent. It was 12:01 A.M. Even before answering the phone I’d known it was Papi calling. He made sure that he was always the first man to call me upon the dawn of a new day. He loved being my first. “You know I hate sloppy seconds,” he always says. “I’m your pleasure, huh?” I asked. I wanted to hear him say it again. Well, actually, I wanted him to think that I wanted to hear him say it again. “Umm, you, puta. You’re my pleasure, you fuckin’ puta.” “I’m your puta, Papi. I’m your cunt,” I said, sticking my index finger in my mouth and sucking on it. I knew damn well he couldn’t see me, but he could hear my wet tongue slurping on it. The visual alone had his hands yankin’ off on his chilito by now. “What do you want to do to me, Papi? What do you want to do to this cunt of yours? Fuck it, huh? Is that what you want to do? Come on. Oooh, come on, Papi and just fuck it. Fuck it good for me, huh.” By now I had a smile a mile long on my face. I could hear Papi beating that stick like it was Rodney King and he was Five-O. It had been less than one minute and this nigga was ’bout to bust. This was a record-breaking time for me. I must say that I felt proud. But it was too premature to celebrate. So just to make sure that his call to me would be worth it, I decided to go hard in the paint.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffe skin upholstery.... Even the eyes and brain went with a horrible schlupping sound. The Duc de Ventre says he will carry that ghastly schlup to his mausoleum." Since there is no sure way to detect a disguised replica (though every Divisionist has some method he considers infallible) the Divisionists are hysterically paranoid. If some citizen ventures to express a liberal opinion, another citizen invariably snarls: "What are you? Some stinking Nigger's bleached-out replica?" The casualties in barroom fights are staggering. In fact the fear of Negro replicas -- which may be blond and blue-eyed -- has depopulated whole regions. The Divisionists are all latent or overt homosexuals. Evil old queens tell the young boys: "If you go with a woman your replicas won't grow." And citizens are forever putting the hex on someone else's replica cultures. Cries of: "Hex my culture will you, Biddy Blair!" followed by sound effects of mayhem, continually ring through the quarter.... The Divisionists are much given to the practice of black magic in general, and they have innumerable formulas of varying efficacy for destroying the Mother Cell, also known as the Protoplasm Daddy, by torturing or killing a captured replica.... The authorities have finally given up the attempt to control, among the Divisionists, the crimes of murder and unlicensed production of replicas. But they do stage pre-election raids and destroy vast replica cultures in the mountainous regions of the Zone where replica moon-shiners hole up. Sex with a replica is strictly forbidden and almost universally practiced. There are queer bars where shameless citizens openly consort with their replicas. House detectives stick their heads into hotel rooms saying: "Have you got a replica in here?" Bars subject to be inundated by low class replica lovers put up signs in ditto marks: " " " "s Will Not Be Served Here.... It may be said that the average Divisionist lives in a continual crisis of fear and rage, unable to achieve either the self-righteous complacency of the Senders or the relaxed depravity of the Liquefactionists.... However the parties are not in practice separate but blend in all combinations. The Factualists are Anti-Liquefactionist, Anti-Divisionist, and above all Anti-Sender. Bulletin of the Coordinate Factualist on the subject of replicas: "We must reject the facile solution of flooding the planet with 'desirable replicas.' It is highly doubtful if there are any desirable replicas, such creatures constituting an attempt to circumvent process and change.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  Mark walks over to her and she looks up from Johnny's half-eaten genitals, her face covered with blood, eyes phosphorescent.... Mark puts his foot on her shoulder and kicks her over on her back.... He leaps on her, fucking her insanely... they roll from one end of the room to the other, pinwheel end-over-end and leap high in the air like great hooked fish. "Let me hang you, Mark.... Let me hang you.... Please, Mark, let me hang you!" "Sure baby." He pulls her brutally to her feet and pins her hands behind her. "No, Mark!! No! No! No," she screams, shitting and pissing in terror as he drags her to the platform. He leaves her tied on the platform in a pile of old used condoms, while he adjusts the rope across the room... and comes back carrying the noose on a silver tray. He jerks her to her feet and tightens the noose. He sticks his cock up her and waltzes around the platform and off into space swinging in a great arc.... "Wheeeeee!" he screams, turning into Johnny. Her neck snaps. A great fluid wave undulates through her body. Johnny drops to the floor and stands poised and alert like a young animal. He leaps about the room. With a scream of longing that shatters the glass wall he leaps out into space. Masturbating end-over-end, three thousand feet down, his sperm floating beside him, he screams all the way against the shattering blue of sky, the rising sun burning over his body like gasoline, down past great oaks and persimmons, swamp cypress and mahogany, to shatter in liquid relief in a ruined square paved with limestone. Weeds and vines grow between the stones, and rusty iron bolts three feet thick penetrate the white stone, stain it shit-brown of rust. Johnny dowses Mary with gasoline from an obscene Chimu jar of white jade.... He anoints his own body... They embrace, fall to the floor and roll under a great magnifying glass set in the roof... burst into flame with a cry that shatters the glass wall, roll into space, fucking and screaming through the air, burst in blood and flames and soot on brown. rocks under a desert sun. Johnny leaps about the room in agony. With a scream that shatters the glass wall he stands spread-eagle to the rising sun, blood spurting out his cock... a white marble god, he plummets through epileptic explosions into the old Medjoub writhe in shit and rubbish by a mud wall under a sun that scar and grab the flesh into goose-pimples.... He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells, feeling the delight of prickly pubic hairs slide up his cock. John and Mary in hotel room (music of East St. Louis Toodleoo). Warm spring wind blows faded pink curtains in through open window....

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Gestas, deprived of reason, cried out fearfully as soon as the executioner came near him, but when the sponge touched his lips, he growled something and seized it with his teeth. A few seconds later his body, too, slumped as much as the ropes would allow. The man in the hood followed the executioner and the centurion, and after him came the head of the temple guard. Stopping at the first post, the man in the hood examined the blood-covered Yeshua attentively, touched his foot with his white hand, and said to his companions: ‘Dead.’ The same was repeated at the other two posts. After that the tribune motioned to the centurion and, turning, started off the hilltop together with the head of the temple guard and the man in the hood. Semi-darkness set in, and lightning furrowed the black sky. Fire suddenly sprayed out of it, and the centurion’s shout: ‘Raise the cordon!’, was drowned in rumbling. The happy soldiers rushed headlong down the hill, putting on their helmets. Darkness covered Yershalaim. Torrents of rain poured down suddenly and caught the centuries halfway down the hill. The deluge fell so terribly that the soldiers were already pursued by raging streams as they ran downhill. Soldiers slipped and fell in the sodden clay, hurrying to get to the level road, along which—now barely visible through the sheet of water—the thoroughly drenched cavalry was heading for Yershalaim. A few minutes later only one man remained in the smoky brew of storm, water and fire on the hill. Shaking the not uselessly stolen knife, falling from slippery ledges, clutching at whatever was there, sometimes crawling on his knees, he strained towards the posts. He now vanished in total darkness, now was suddenly illumined by a tremulous light. Having made his way to the posts, already up to his ankles in water, he tore off his heavy water-soaked tallith, remaining just in his shirt, and clung to Yeshua’s feet. He cut the ropes on his shins, stepped up on the lower crossbar, embraced Yeshua and freed his arms from the upper bonds. The naked, wet body of Yeshua collapsed on Levi and brought him to the ground. Levi wanted to heave it on to his shoulders straight away, but some thought stopped him. He left the body with its thrown-back head and outspread arms on the ground in the water, and ran, his feet slithering apart in the clayey mire, to the other posts. He cut the ropes on them as well, and the two bodies collapsed on the ground. Several minutes passed, and all that remained on the top of the hill was these two bodies and the three empty posts. Water beat on the bodies and rolled them over.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I didn’t think of what that dark space might be capable of, only a doubling of my desire to be near it. Suzanne took the lipstick from Donna but hadn’t yet pressed the tip to the ivory wall when we heard a noise in the driveway. “Shit,” Suzanne said. Donna’s eyebrows were raised in mild curiosity: What would happen next? The front door opened. I tasted my own stale mouth, the rancid announcement of fear. Suzanne seemed scared, too, but her fear was distant and amused, like this was a game of sardines and we were just hiding until the others found us. I knew it was Mrs. Dutton when I heard high heels. “Teddy?” she called. “You home?” They’d parked the ranch car down the road, but still: I’m sure Mrs. Dutton took note of the unfamiliar car. Maybe she thought it was a friend of Teddy’s, some older neighborhood pal. Donna was giggling, her hand pressed over her mouth. Eyes bulged in mirth. Suzanne made an exaggerated shushing face. My pulse was loud in my ears. Tiki clattered through the rooms downstairs and I heard Mrs. Dutton cooing to him, the heaving sighs he made in response. “Hello?” she called. The wake of silence that followed seemed obviously uneasy. She’d come upstairs soon enough, and then what? “Come on,” Suzanne whispered. “Let’s sneak out the back.” Donna was laughing silently. “Shit,” she said, “shit.” Suzanne dropped the lipstick on the bureau, but Donna kept the slip on, hitching the straps. “You go first,” she said to Suzanne. —There was no way out but to pass Mrs. Dutton in the kitchen. She was probably wondering at the pink mess of watermelon in the sink, the sticky patches on the floor. Maybe just starting to pick up the disturbance in the air, the itch of strangers in the house. A nervous hand fluttering at her throat, a sudden wish for her husband at her side. Suzanne took off down the stairs, Donna and I hustling behind. The racket of our footsteps as we plowed past Mrs. Dutton, barreling at full speed through the kitchen. Donna and Suzanne were laughing their heads off, Mrs. Dutton shrieking in fright. Tiki came barking after us, quick and hectic, his nails skittering on the floor. Mrs. Dutton backed up, nakedly afraid. “Hey,” she said, “stop,” but her voice wavered. She bumped against a stool and lost her balance, sitting down hard on the tile. I looked back as we banged past—there was Mrs. Dutton splayed on the floor. Recognition tightened her face. “I see you,” she called from the floor, struggling to right herself, her breath going wild. “I see you, Evie Boyd.” [image "Part Three" file=Image00004.jpg] J ULIAN RETURNED FROM H UMBOLDT with a friend who wanted a ride to L.A. The friend’s name was Zav. It seemed vaguely Rastafarian, how he pronounced it, though Zav was fishy white with a bog of orange hair held back by a woman’s elastic.

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

  I couldn’t believe how ruthless Smooth was. The game made him as cold as Alaska—even with me, the person who had tried to be his best friend. I wanted to drift off to sleep, but I couldn’t. I prayed that Smooth stayed knocked out and didn’t pull out that glock again. The next morning I got up and made Smooth breakfast while wearing a long, black Victoria’s Secret negligee with netted sides that hinted at my dangerous curves. “You still love Smooth, baby?” Smooth asked as bacon cooked in a skillet. “Yes,” I lied while flipping the strips of meat. What the fuck did he expect me to say after the crazy stunt he pulled? He didn’t know it, but I was ready to start plotting my escape from his reign of terror. “Good. I’ll drive you to work,” he said. An hour later Smooth drove me up to the curb of the building where I worked and made me sit in the car while he told me again what he was gonna do to me if I ever stepped out on him. After threatening my life, he ordered me to kiss him goodbye. I felt like a prisoner in my own body. He wanted to control my every move, down to my motherfuckin’ lips! I was early, and when I walked into my office I saw a familiar face. “I came down here ’cause I had to see you.” “How did you know I worked here? You really shouldn’t be here, Life.” “I parked my car up the street from your crib. I stayed in it all night because I wanted to make sure you were okay. This morning I followed Smooth’s ride here and came inside while y’all sat there talking. I ain’t scared of that nigga, but I’m afraid of you being with him.” Life moved closer, softly kissing each of my eyelids. I could feel his hard dick poking at me through my skirt. He roped me in by unzipping his pants and showing me that big, delicious dick again. The minute I peeked at it, I felt like I was standing in quicksand—my ability to continue saying no was sinking fast. I pulled him in my boss’s office and shut the door. Life finally kissed my lips once. He moved close to my mouth again and tasted my lips for a second time. This kiss sizzled just as much as the first one. I finally began returning it. I pressed my body firmly against his, sucking his tongue, as we played in each other’s warm mouths. I met Life halfway by pulling my stockings down and my skirt off, letting them both fall on the floor. I noticed that his eyes were blazing, full of life, and I finally allowed myself to get lost in those dark pools.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Elders were likely to be prominent local men, but still they were likely to represent a wider section of the community than nobility or gentry who were frequently the cause of lawlessness or disruptive behaviour. The system would seem repressive to us; for people in Reformed Protestant territories, it might seem levelling and liberating. [90] We have noted how Catholic laity in France were persuaded into endorsing the new strictness of clerical celibacy ( this page ), and figures for illegitimate births and pre-nuptial pregnancies are likewise very low in France. Baptism registers appeared in both Catholic and Protestant regions in the sixteenth century, no doubt partly to keep an eye on Anabaptists who would not bring their babies to church for christening. The statistics that they reveal on illegitimacy are striking: in England between the 1540s and 1700s, rates are nearly always below 3 per cent of the total, less than half the rate in the Victorian period. [91] * There were encouragements to sexual discipline. In the 1590s serious economic stress and bad farming conditions across Europe disrupted many wedding plans; in this decade England was probably typical in registering the one noticeable spike in its bastardy rate (and consequent need for parishes to support illegitimate children), which probably frightened the tax-paying population. It was the beginning of a period of cooler weather in the northern hemisphere that lasted till the mid-nineteenth century, the ‘little Ice Age’, during which agricultural shortages always threatened social cohesion. A further background alarm had emerged a century before: an apparently brand-new disease that spread frighteningly quickly across Europe from south to north and which was soon observed as connected to sexual intercourse. The coincidence of Europe’s first contacts with the Caribbean and the Americas by the expeditions of Christopher Columbus after 1492 has suggested an origin, but we have experienced a recent example of a killer disease suddenly emerging from insignificance through some accidental change of behaviour; the origins of this fifteenth– sixteenth century epidemic remain controversial. Certainly it had not figured in the consciousness of Graeco-Roman doctors, so inconveniently it lacked a widely recognized name until taking the title of a Latin poem of 1531 by an Italian doctor, Girolamo Fracastoro: Syphilis . Syphilis caused distressingly visible symptoms and was no respecter of social boundaries, particularly not apparent celibacy in clergy (it may or may not be coincidental that Fracastoro was later official physician to the Council of Trent). [92] One reaction to the pandemic therefore was for social elites, both lay and clerical, to rally to help sufferers. Like the religious renewal movements of the period, syphilis was at its most intense in urban settings: the disease was one major stimulus for the emergence in various Italian cities of the devotional and charitable activism of Oratories and Confraternities that were such an important part of the prehistory of the Italian Counter-Reformation.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Margarita asked, pressing herself to Woland and shuddering, but now from curiosity. ‘Ah, no, that’s impossible,’ Woland replied seriously and waved his hand at Abaddon, and he was no more. ‘What do you wish to say, Azazello?’ ‘Messire,’ replied Azazello, ‘allow me to say—we’ve got two strangers here: a beauty who is whimpering and pleading to be allowed to stay with her lady, and with her, begging your pardon, there is also her hog.’ ‘Strange behaviour for a beauty!’ observed Woland. ‘It’s Natasha, Natasha!’ exclaimed Margarita. ‘Well, let her stay with her lady. And the hog—to the cooks.’ ‘To slaughter him?’ Margarita cried fearfully. ‘For pity’s sake, Messire, it’s Nikolai Ivanovich, the ground-floor tenant. It’s a misunderstanding, you see, she daubed him with the cream . . .’ ‘But wait,’ said Woland, ‘why the devil would anyone slaughter him? Let him stay with the cooks, that’s all. You must agree, I cannot let him into the ballroom.’ ‘No, really . . .’ Azazello added and announced: ‘Midnight is approaching, Messire.’ ‘Ah, very good.’ Woland turned to Margarita: ‘And so, if you please . . . I thank you beforehand. Don’t become flustered and don’t be afraid of anything. Drink nothing but water, otherwise you’ll get groggy and it will be hard for you. It’s time!’ Margarita got up from the rug, and then Koroviev appeared in the doorway. CHAPTER 23: The Great Ball at Satan’s, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA CHAPTER 23 The Great Ball at Satan’s Midnight was approaching; they had to hurry. Margarita dimly perceived her surroundings. Candles and a jewelled pool remained in her memory. As she stood in the bottom of this pool, Hella, with the assistance of Natasha, doused her with some hot, thick and red liquid. Margarita felt a salty taste on her lips and realized that she was being washed in blood. The bloody mantle was changed for another—thick, transparent, pinkish—and Margarita’s head began to spin from rose oil. Then Margarita was laid on a crystal couch and rubbed with some big green leaves until she shone. Here the cat burst in and started to help. He squatted down at Margarita’s feet and began rubbing up her soles with the air of someone shining shoes in the street. Margarita does not remember who stitched slippers for her from pale rose petals or how these slippers got fastened by themselves with golden clasps. Some force snatched Margarita up and put her before a mirror, and a royal diamond crown gleamed in her hair.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  16. Elizabeth Ann Seton: Convert and Caretaker It was clear to Elizabeth that her husband did not have a head for business, and by early 1800, the business was clearly going under. In the nick of time, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Act, allowing businessmen to organize and discharge their debts in a highly structured process overseen by committee. The family managed to limp along thanks to the kindness of friends. They moved into the first of a long series of rental homes. It’s at this point that Elizabeth was drawn to organized religion. She and her sister-in-law Rebecca became regular attendees at Trinity Church, the parish for New York’s wealthy Episcopalians. They were particularly enthralled by an assistant rector there, John Henry Hobart, whose impassioned sermons stirred the women to form a private prayer circle. Elizabeth’s faith seems especially linked to fear of death—she had seen a good friend die recently, and William was increasingly showing signs of consumption, or tuberculosis. As they could no longer afford their rental home, Elizabeth and the children spent a summer with her father, who lived now in an isolated house as the quarantine officer for the Port of New York. It was his responsibility to inspect ships coming in and quarantine the passengers and crew if they showed signs of communicable disease. The entire family contracted typhus at the end of the summer. The children recovered quickly, but Richard Bayley died of it, and Elizabeth tended him in his final days. In the fall of 1803, Elizabeth, William, and their eldest daughter, Anna Maria, sailed to Livorno to stay with William’s business associates, the Filicchis. Their four younger children were parceled out to various relatives to await their return. In Italy, William’s symptoms meant that they were sent into a 30-day quarantine—not a field hospital with medical treatment, as Richard Bayley had run, but a cold stone room with three pallets on the floor, a locked door, and apologetic but firm Italian jailers. Her beloved William died only a week after their release from quarantine, and in his final days, Elizabeth cared for him alone. 120

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  4. Perpetua and Felicity: Mothers and Martyrs court. Kate Cooper has suggested that the Passion was edited later to make Perpetua into a less subversive figure, inserting claims of good birth and marriage, but that the original text may have depicted a poor concubine struggling to provide for her child. This would explain some of these oddities we’ve seen in the text. The group returned to the prison, where one of them, Secundulus, died, perhaps at the hands of the guards. It is during this part of the Passion that we finally learn a little about Felicity: She was estimated to be in her eighth month of pregnancy during their imprisonment. Roman law did not allow a pregnant woman to be executed. However, Felicity went into early labor in prison. We know almost nothing of Felicity’s child, save that she was a girl and was given to “one of the sisters”—presumably a fellow Christian woman—to raise. This, too, is incongruous with Roman law, which said that the child, born enslaved, was the property of Perpetua’s father. If the account is accurate, it is possible that Felicity’s arrest and condemnation provided her daughter with greater freedom than she might have had otherwise. Perpetua’s father pitiably begged her to perform a public sacrifice and save herself, but she calmly refused, breaking the ties to her birth family to claim her Christian family. To Romans, this would have been deeply shocking; to the Christian readership of the Passion, it was inspirational. 29

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

  Power stood. Gave Slim a pound. “Tell him I said he has to use the bathroom. Real bad.” • • • Flame arrived at her and Richard’s fuck spot two hours before their lunchtime date and played maid. Searching dresser drawers, under the bed, behind furniture, she packed everything that could prove she’d ever been there, dumped it in the incinerator, then called the super and pretended like she’d lost something to make sure the trash was already burning. With bucket after bucket of bleach and water, she scrubbed down everything, practically Cloroxing the place to death. At noon, Richard’s key clicked in the lock. Flame posted up on the sofa wearing nothing but a smile and the little black nightie he’d bought her from Vickie’s Secret that said everything but “Hush.” “Hello, my chocolate kitten,” he said, dropping his briefcase. Flame’s nerves were rattled again, but she pushed them aside knowing this would be the last day she’d be his “chocolate” anything. “What up, Rich,” she replied, emotionless. No longer did she have to coo and pretend, roll over and fuck. The game was over, and Enrique and his crew were hiding in the back room. Richard walked over to her, confusion etched on his face. “Bad day?” “Could be worse,” she said, then stood and switched up her mood a little. “I just need to take a shower, relax a little.” She ran her fingers through her wild hair. “Can you meet me in the room when you get settled and help me undress? Please, Daddy?” “Sure, I’ll be there as soon as I leave my client a message.” Flame closed the door behind her, nodded okay to Enrique when he pointed toward the closet, tossing her clothes to her. Huddling, her body began to tremble as she thought about the fear Richard would soon face. She hated to do it to him, but when it came down to it, it was either him or her. Reflecting on all the “chocolate whores” he’d called her, she shook the feeling and decided that he deserved what was coming to him. She heard the door open, a short scuffle, then a burner cocked. Enrique called her name, and she knew the game was over. Quietly, she opened the door as if creeping would make her less accountable. Keeping her eyes on Enrique, she stood there waiting for instructions. “Tell ’im what’chu want, mami.” Flame looked at Richard, forced a scowl on her face. “I want the deed to your house. Not the place you and your family live in, your vacation house. The deed.” Richard laughed nervously. “You can’t be—” Enrique’s henchman, Crazy Lucky, gun-butted him. “Shut da fuck up. Let’er finish.”

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

  48 Lecture 7: The Unpopular Cult—Persecution o Even when a cult enjoyed imperial recognition or official favor, it could be the target of local resentment and harassment. Ancient people were no less prone than we are to fear and resent that which is strange. • Two examples preceding Christianity show such premises at work and help explain the subsequent experience of Christ-believers when they became sufficiently numerous to be noticed by outsiders. o Although Judaism was granted imperial recognition as a national religion—and reciprocated by offering sacrifices and prayers for the emperor—there are instances of its being persecuted. o For example, the Maccabean books show that resistance to syncretism under Antiochus IV Epiphanes in Palestine led to executions, most famously that of the aged Eleazar and of the seven Maccabean brothers with their mother. Philo tells us of anti-Semitism in Alexandria that expressed itself in local riots against the Jews, requiring an appeal to the emperor for assistance. o Even among non-Jews, philosophers who challenged traditional beliefs or who withdrew from religious practices, such as the Epicureans, were suspected of subversion. Individual philosophers who challenged social mores or popular religious tenets were sometimes put to death (Socrates and Zeno) or exiled (Dio of Prusa, Epictetus, Seneca) as “enemies of the Roman order.” Early Christian Vulnerabilities • In its first centuries of its existence, Christianity was particularly vulnerable to attack from both Jews and Gentiles. It was sociologically underdetermined and ideologically oppositional. o As an intentional community, the Christian cult drew from both Jews and Greeks but had no secure place in the world. It did not meet in established temples or synagogues but in households.

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  "We regard it as a misfortune... a sickness... certainly nothing to be censored or uh sanctioned any more than say... tuberculosis.... Yes," he repeated firmly as if Carl had raised an objection.... "Tuberculosis. On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his own, become uh infected.... That is to say, of course, the minimum hardship compatible with adequate protection of other individuals who are not so infected.... We do not find obligatory vaccination for smallpox an unreasonable measure.... Nor isolation for certain contagious diseases.... I am sure you will agree that individuals infected with hurumph what the French call 'Les Maladies galantes' heh heh heh should be compelled to undergo treatment if they do not report voluntarily." The doctor went on chuckling and rocking in his chair like a mechanical toy.... Carl realized that he was expected to say something. "That seems reasonable," he said. The doctor stopped chuckling. He was suddenly motionless. "Now to get back to this uh matter of sexual deviation. Frankly we don't pretend to understand -- at least not completely -- why some men and women prefer the uh sexual company of their own sex. We do know that the uh phenomena is common enough, and, under certain circumstances a matter of uh concern to this department." For the first time the doctor's eyes flickered across Carl's face. Eyes without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion that Carl had ever experienced in himself or seen in another, at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal. Carl suddenly felt trapped in this silent underwater cave of a room, cut off from all sources of warmth and certainty. His picture of himself sitting there calm, alert with a trace of well mannered contempt went dim, as if vitality were draining out of him to mix with the milky grey medium of the room. "Treatment of these disorders is, at the present time, hurmph symptomatic." The doctor suddenly threw himself back in his chair and burst into peals of metallic laughter. Carl watched him appalled.... "The man is insane," he thought. The doctor's face went blank as a gambler's. Carl felt an odd sensation in his stomach like the sudden stopping of an elevator. The doctor was studying the file in front of him. He spoke in a tone of slightly condescending amusement: "Don't look so frightened, young man. Just a professional joke. To say treatment is symptomatic means there is none, except to make the patient feel as comfortable as possible. And that is precisely what we attempt to do in these cases." Once again Carl felt the impact of that cold interest on his face.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  his spirits rose, just as they did at home on Sunday afternoons; he sometimes even hummed to himself, and cracked the whip around the pony’s ears now and then. And these light and dark sides of the minister Elias were reflected in the mountainous landscape around us. I remember, said Austerlitz, how we were once driving through the endless Tanat valley, with nothing on the hillsides to right and left of us but crooked bushes, ferns, and rusty-hued vegetation, and then, for the last part of the way up to the col, only gray rock and drifting mist, so that I was afraid we were coming to the very ends of the earth. But on another day, when we had just reached the Pennant pass I saw a gap open up in the banked clouds towering high in the west, and the rays of the sun cast a narrow beam of light down to the valley floor lying at a dizzying depth below us. Where there had been nothing a moment ago but fathomless gloom, there now shone a little village with a few orchards, meadows, and fields, surrounded by black shadows but sparkling green like the Islands of the Blest, and as we walked down the road from the pass beside the pony and trap everything grew lighter and lighter, the mountainsides emerged from the darkness shining brightly, the fine grasses bending in the wind shimmered with light, the silvery willows gleamed down on the banks of the stream; before long we had descended from the barren heights and found ourselves among trees and bushes again, beneath the softly rustling oaks and maples, and rowans already laden with red berries. Once, I think when I was nine, I went away with Elias to a place in South Wales where the flanks of the mountains had been ripped open on both sides of the road, and the woods mauled and cut down. I don’t remember the name of the village we reached at nightfall. It was surrounded by pithead stocks of coal spilling down into the alleys here and there. We had been given a room in the house of one of the church elders, from which there was a view of a winding tower with a gigantic wheel turning now this way and now that in the gathering dusk, and further down the valley tall flames and showers of sparks shot high into the sky from the smelting furnaces of an iron and steel works, at regular intervals of about three or four minutes. When I was in bed Elias sat on a stool by the window, looking out in silence for a long time. I think that it was the sight of the valley first illuminated by the firelight, then sinking back into darkness, which inspired him to preach on a text from Revelation next morning, delivering a sermon on the wrath of the Lord, on the war and the devastation of the dwellings of men, a diatribe in which, so the elder told him when we left, he had surpassed himself. If the congregation had been almost petrified by terror during the sermon, I myself could hardly have had the divine power invoked by Elias more permanently impressed on my mind than by the fact that a bomb had dropped in broad daylight that afternoon in the little town at the end of the