Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 190 of 529 · 20 per page

• 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 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

• From Naked Lunch (1959)

  The black wind sock of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve.... Population blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide.... Any number can play.... The Liberal Press and The Press Not So Liberal and The Press Reactionary Scream approval: "Above all the myth of other-level experience must be eradicated...." And speak darkly of certain harsh realities... cows with the aftosa... prophylaxis.... Power groups of the world frantically cut lines of connection.... The Planet drifts to random insect doom.... Thermodynamics has won at a crawl... Orgone balked at the post.... Christ bled.. Time ran out.... You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point.... I have written many prefaces. They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan Hound.... Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book... Black insect lusts open into vast, other planet landscapes.... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cajones.. How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall.... Doors that only open in Silence .... Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse.... Robert Christie knew The Answering Service... Kill the old cunts... keep pubic hairs in his locket ...wouldn't you? Robert Christie, mass strangler of women -- sounds like a daisy chain -- hanged in 1953. Jack The Ripper, Literal Swordsman of the 1890s and never caught with his pants down... wrote a letter to The Press. "Next time I'll send along an ear just for jolly.. Wouldn't you?" "Oh be careful! There they go again!" said the old queen as his string broke spilling his balls over the floor.... 'Stop them will you, James, you worthless old shit! Don't just stand there and let the master's balls roll into the coal-bin!" Window dressers scream through the station, beat the cashiers with the Fairy Hyp. Dilaudid deliver poor me (Dilaudid is souped up, dehydrate morphine). The sheriff in black vest types out a death warrant: "Gotta make it legal and exempt narcotic...." Violation Public Health Law 334... Procuring an orgasm by the use of fraud.... Johnny on all fours and Mary sucking him and running her fingers down the thigh backs and light over the outfields of the ball park.... Over the broken chair and out through the tool-house window whitewash whipping in a cold Spring wind on a limestone cliff over the river... piece of moon smoke hangs in China blue sky... out on a long line of jissom across the dusty floor.... Motel... Motel...

• 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 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 Girls (2016)

  Linda was beautiful, though I’m sure her face would’ve grown bawdy or cheap. She slept in bed with her golden-haired little boy, like a teddy bear. —I was so lulled into feeling that the world had winnowed itself around Suzanne and me, that Mitch was just the comic fill—I didn’t even consider other possibilities. I’d gone to the bathroom, used Mitch’s strange black soap and peeked in his cabinet, loaded with bottles of Dilaudid. The enamel shine of the bathtub, the cut of bleach in the air so I could tell he had a cleaning lady. I had just finished peeing when someone opened the bathroom door without knocking. I was startled, reflexively trying to cover myself. I saw the man sliver a glance toward my exposed legs before he ducked back into the hallway. “Apologies,” I heard him say from the other side of the door. A chain of stuffed marigold birds swung gently from where they hung by the sink. “My deepest apologies,” the man said. “I was looking for Mitch. Sorry to bother you.” I sensed him hesitate on the other side of the door, then tap the wood lightly before he walked away. I pulled up my shorts. The adrenaline that spread through me lessened but didn’t disappear. It was probably just a friend of Mitch’s. I was jumpy from the coke, but I wasn’t frightened. Which made sense: nobody thought until later that strangers might be anything but friends. Our love for one another boundless, the whole universe an extended crash pad. —I’d realize a few months after that this must have been Scotty Weschler. The caretaker who lived in the back house, a tiny white-paneled cabin with a hot plate and a space heater. The man who cleaned the hot tub filters and watered the lawn and checked that Mitch hadn’t overdosed in the night. Prematurely balding, with wire glasses: Scotty had been a cadet at a military academy in Pennsylvania before dropping out, moving west. He never shook his cadet idealism: he wrote letters to his mother about the redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, using words like “majestic” and “grandeur.” He’d be the first. The one who tried to fight back, to run. I wish I could squeeze more out of our brief encounter. To believe, when he opened the door, that I had felt a shiver of what was coming. But I’d made out nothing but the flash of a stranger, and I thought of it very little. I didn’t even ask Suzanne who the man was. —The living room was empty when I came back. The music blaring, a cigarette leaching smoke in the ashtray. The glass door that led out to the bay was open. I was surprised by the suddenness of the water when I went out on the porch, the wall of woolly lights: San Francisco in the fog. No one was out on the bank. Then I heard, over the water, a distorted echo.

• From The Girls (2016)

  But in a few days, ok? Alex had assumed, at first, that some solution would turn up. It always did. So she kept putting Dom off. He checked in almost daily. Alex? Things escalated. Dom calling again. Dom leaving voicemails. Acting lighthearted, even jokey, as if this was a low-key misunderstanding. Then swinging wildly into aggression, his voice going to some eerie psycho register, and she was genuinely afraid. She remembered the time—last year. Or it must have been before that, before he left the city. When he woke her up with his hands on her throat. Her eyes locked onto his— his hands tightened. His expression was one of mild concentration. She didn’t look away until he pressed hard enough that her eyes closed and she felt them roll back in her head. Alex could change her number, but what about the ads she’d already paid for, ads that were linked to this phone number? She told herself Dom would get tired of this eventually. He’d require fresh blood. But then, leaving her place one morning, she’d spotted Dom across the street. Dom lingering on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets. It was Dom, it had to be. Maybe not. Or was it just a coincidence? She hadn’t given him her new address. She was suddenly paranoid. The stye was coming back. Her roommates no longer acknowledged her in the common areas. They changed the Wi-Fi password. The bathroom cabinet had been emptied of every medication, even ibuprofen. Alex had the disorienting sense that she was infectious. [image "Ad for Daddy Stories by Emma Cline" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "Penguin Random House publisher logo." file=Image00011.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _142857084_

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

  • Little is known of Clement’s life. Born in Athens, he became a student of the Platonic philosopher Pantaenus in Alexandria. In the late 2nd century, he became head of the Christian catechetical school in that city. The only other biographical fact we know about Clement is that he fled from persecution in 202. • Clement forged a “thinking person’s” version of Christianity. He sought a middle way between the extreme elitism of Gnosticism and the ignorance of simple believers. He thought in terms of a “Christian Gnosticism” that was orthodox and connected to the larger tradition. He affirmed the lines of the developing rule of faith and despised the compositions of Valentinus and Basilides. • Clement’s project took the form of a three-stage presentation using the forms of ancient Greek rhetoric and philosophy. The Protrepticus (“Exhortation”) is a classic call to conversion, o such as was issued by Greco-Roman philosophers. We see an example in Lucian of Samosata’s Nigrinus, which castigates false philosophers and calls for adherence to the teaching of Nigrinus. Clement similarly attacks pagan errors—especially in religious matters—and argues for the truth of Christianity. The Paidogogos (“Instructor”) in Greek education was the o one who taught young children their morals and manners. Clement’s book by this title offers an extensive catalogue of Christian moral behavior. Clement’s most ambitious work, the Didaskalos (“Teacher”), o was never completed; however, the compilation of notes for that work, the Stromateis (“Fragments”), itself constitutes a major and deeply learned statement on Christianity’s use of Scripture and its relationship to philosophy. • Clement’s work represents a much more ambitious and systematic effort than Justin’s not only to render Christianity as reasonable but to make it a serious contender in ancient philosophical discourse. 87