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 Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I have always felt strong emotions, but I have never known what to do with them. When they were sad or hard emotions, I would try to contain them. For years, I would experience a shaking in my belly when I was locking my jaw tight to keep from crying or showing that I was scared or hurt. I could tell that there was tension in a room through quivering in my belly and knees. Good feelings didn’t go much better. I would use biting humor to move through intimacy with family and friends, not aware of how sharp my teeth were, how powerful my mood could be. With lovers, I would often be in my head trying to think my way to happiness or to orgasm instead of breathing into the actual sensations of my body, especially in my heart and below the waist. In 2009, my beloved movement comrade Malkia Cyril invited me to a course called Somatics and Social Justice being offered by a group called Generative Somatics. The word Somatics comes from the Greek root soma which means “the living organism in its wholeness.” It is the best word we have in English to understand human beings as an integrated mind/body/spirit, and as social, relational beings. In somatic speak, we call this embodiment, “shape,” and the collective “body” or collective psycho-biology. Somatics is a path, a methodology, a change theory, by which we can embody transformation, individually and collectively. Embodied transformation is foundational change that shows in our actions, ways of being, relating, and perceiving. It is transformation that sustains over time. Somatics pragmatically supports our values and actions becoming aligned. It helps us to develop depth and the capacity to feel ourselves, each other and life around us. Somatics builds in us the ability to act from strategy and empathy, and teaches us to be able to assess conditions and “what is” clearly. Somatics is a practice-able theory of change that can move us toward individual, community and collective liberation. Somatics works through the body, engaging us in our thinking, emotions, commitments, vision and action.76 Sounded good to me, even though I was scared of what I might discover in the process. I knew there was trauma in my life that I hadn’t dealt with, and I knew there were big, suspicious gaps in my memory. But I felt ready for something to move in me. I went through the course with equal parts enthusiasm and trepidation. It was a learning year for the organization, but enough of what was offered stuck with me that I said yes to another course a couple years later, Somatics and Trauma.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Rocca Family (RF). Zizi, we heard that you are traveling around the globe, giving workshops on fear. We are now on a road trip trying to face fear, fear from seeing the other and the other seeing us, fear from being stopped from our right to movement from one place to the other, fear from going back to a place that became too small for us, a place that is getting smaller and smaller in accepting us. We are dreaming of expansion, of no limits to where we look, we are searching for freedom, freedom from fear. Zizi, is that possible? You always talk about fear as a tool for survival—is it possible to be fear-free? Zizi. No. No, my darling Rocca Family, you shall never be fear-free. The best you could hope for is to befriend fear. Think of it as such, imagine if you can take the adrenaline or whatever hormones that fear makes the body produce and invest this as a stimulant, a drug, toward deeper and more radical living. How exciting it can be to feel your heart racing and you start to smell your sweat = alive! Indeed, fear is important. How many spankings would you have received if you did not fear Mme. Suzette? That was a bad example, but Zizi has found that it often hits home. Also, other fears help keep us alive and well. However, as you know, my karbujeh,94 most fears that control our lives are mythical. As my bbff recommended, when faced with fear, imagine the worst-case scenario and experience it in your head. Bring the fear into proportion. As a matter of fact, bbff told me it was I who had recommended this remedy for fear. (naturally) I congratulate you for facing fear rather than running away from it. Even if you forgot your raincoat. If you see my auntie the lazy crocodile, do not feed her. Nor the bear. Be bear aware. Now. That is a space that allows for fear. If you allow fear to control you, chances are you will turn around and run away from the black bear, and it will chase you down and eat your toes. Befriend fear, pause, take a deep breath: is this black bear a terrorist busy munching berries? Start walking back really slowly and create more distance between you, because bears like space. That is why you do not find them in the center of human urbanistics, where oxygen hardly has space.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Or perhaps we are the lover, and we are moving forward with consent and connection and suddenly see fear and withdrawal in place of arousal and excitement. I use “we” intentionally here, because so many of us have experienced trauma related to intimacy, and so many of us have experienced moments of getting triggered by that trauma when we are in situations where we want to be present and healed and connected. And we feel super-isolated in these moments of being triggered or triggering. I have been put off for a while at the overuse of the word “trigger”—I think too often people use it when they mean annoyed or offended or something less visceral than triggered. Inside that sense of overuse, I am simultaneously glad that people are finding ways to say, in real time, “something happening right now isn’t right for me.” For this article, I am using the word “trigger” to mean a visceral reaction of sensations and emotions in the body that we can’t control, an experience that brings past trauma to the present. There are so many reasons why these triggers happen. Childhood sexual trauma, abuse, sexual assault—triggers can include times when we are made to feel scared or powerless, even if there was no physical harm. And as I write this, it’s been a week of news about an encounter between a woman called Grace and Master of None creator Aziz Ansari. I have felt within me every possible response to the story, wondering why she didn’t say no, why I didn’t learn to say no, when men aren’t taught to feel and hear no, swinging on a pendulum that keeps landing on “this iceberg of rape culture is the entire planet.” There was so much detail in the story, but I didn’t see anything about either player’s background of trauma and what dynamics and socialization might have been playing out in that room. What I do know is that triggers can look like extreme and overt responses, but they can also make us freeze, keep us very quiet, steal no from our mouths, keep us from being clear about what we want and don’t want, and cause confusion afterward. We are socialized to swallow extreme reactions, to be pleasant instead of present. So here are a few tips for what to do if you find yourself triggered, or suspect your partner is triggered, in a consensual sexual experience.57 Stop Pause what you are doing. If you can speak, say, “Wait, stop, I need a moment.” If you can’t speak, remove your partner’s hands from your body and step away, holding your hands up. If that is too much, just fully withdraw your body from contact.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  In response to the daily physical and emotional violence I was experiencing in the beginning of my gender transition, living in the conservative militarized city of San Diego and being outwardly non-binary in my gender presentation, my desperate need to feel loved and desired was amplified and resulted in my publicly engaging in erotic acts as artwork. I was physically assaulted on the street more than once. I experienced daily harassment about my gender. I was so afraid, constantly afraid. It was like being in fight or flight mode constantly, for almost ten years. I learned to look at the floor, to avoid people’s eyes, so they wouldn’t see me. I no longer see this as liberatory. I am not attempting to describe anyone else’s motivations for creating porn or erotic art but my own, based on my experience of rigorous self-examination. I believe there are infinite possibilities of erotic expression and am not making a value judgment on the content or producers of those works. I see my own early erotic artwork as resulting from the lack of support I was given as a young child expressing transgender desires. I see it as a result of the ways my early caregivers abandoned and harmed me. I see it as a result of a transphobic world that responded to my outward expressions of gender transition with violence, and my own lack of knowledge about how to care for myself in that process. In my twenties and thirties, I often re-created unhealthy relationship dynamics. These were amplified by my gender transition, as I began to experience more violence on a daily basis, and, in turn, I relied more on my partners for physical and emotional safety. My needs were inappropriate and unsatisfiable. I lacked boundaries. I remember one of my partners telling me at the time that I needed constant validation of her love and that she couldn’t provide what I needed. At the time, I was hurt. I felt judged. I was often treated as less than cisgender women—treated as an object, an experiment, or a proof of radicalism by cisgender women. In these experiences, it is hard for me to differentiate between the prevalence of transmisogyny and my own traumatized decisions in choosing partners. I now see how I put myself into many situations, emotional and sexual, which were a result of not valuing, respecting and caring for myself. From a lack of nurturing as a child, I did not know how to love and protect myself. Years of this, combined with the instability and emotional demands of graduate study toward a PhD, led me into a profound depression. At just the moment I finished graduate school and completed the gender-related surgeries I needed, my life felt worthless and my intimate relationships brought me more and more misery and agony.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Description: First edition. | New York : One World, [2020] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019040853 (print) | LCCN 2019040854 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593132586 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593132609 (ebook) Classification: LCC PS3603.H35733 B47 2020 (print) | LCC PS3603.H35733 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040853 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040854 Ebook ISBN 9780593132609 oneworldlit.com randomhousebooks.com Frontispiece illustration: istock.com/shuoshu Book design by Andrea Lau, adapted for ebook Cover design: Michael Morris Cover images: Private Collection © Cristina Rodriguez/Bridgeman Images, soleil420/Getty Images, GB_Art/Getty Images (girl); Private Collection De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images, Julia August/Getty Images (goose); Anna Lukin/Getty Images, tigerstrawberry/Getty Images (bones); Yuliya Derbisheva/Getty Images, Khaneeros/Getty Images (envelopes) ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Mother: Journey to the West (I) Daughter: Hu Gu Po (I) Daughter: Girl in Gourd Daughter: Hu Gu Po (II) Daughter: Hu Gu Po (III) Daughter: Hu Gu Po (IV) Daughter: Bestiary Daughter: Birthdate Daughter: Back to Ben Grandmother: Letter I: In Which the River Is Not Responsible Daughter: Mazu Grandmother: Letter II: In Which the Clouds Are Eaten Daughter: Parable of the Pirate Grandmother: Letter III: In Which a Knot Is Tied Grandmother: Letter [ ]: In Which I Am the Driver Mother: Journey to the West (II) Daughter: Back to Ben Grandmother: Letter V: In Which I Name You Mother: Rabbit Moon (I) Daughter: Rabbit Moon (II) Daughter: Birdbirth Dedication Acknowledgments About the Author “The name of the river is what it says.” —Li-Young Lee “There is a lot of detailed doubt here.” —Maxine Hong Kingston MOTHER Journey to the West (I) Or: A Story of Warning for My Only Daughter Moral: Don’t Bury Anything. Ba doesn’t know where he buried the gold. Ma chases him around and beats him with her soup ladle. You’ve never been to a funeral, but this is what it looks like: four of us in the backyard, digging where our shadows have died. A shovel for Ba, a soup ladle for Ma, a spoon for me and Jie to share. We dig with what we don’t want—piss buckets, a stolen plunger, the hands we pray with. We even use the spatulas gifted to us by the church ladies, after their days-long debate about whether Orientals even used spatulas. It was decided that we didn’t but that we should. Hence our collection of spatulas, different sizes and metals and colors. Ma mistook them for flyswatters. She used them to spank us, selecting a spatula based on the severity of our crime. Be glad I use only my two hands on you. I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you. You’ve never been to this year, so let me live it for you: 1980 lasts as long as it rains.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Her poems have been anthologized in Ink Knows No Borders, Best New Poets 2018, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, the 2019 Pushcart Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. Raised in California, she now lives in New York. Bestiary is her first novel. kmingchang.com Twitter: @k_mingchang 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. MOTHER Journey to the West (I) Or: A Story of Warning for My Only Daughter Moral: Don’t Bury Anything. Ba doesn’t know where he buried the gold. Ma chases him around and beats him with her soup ladle. You’ve never been to a funeral, but this is what it looks like: four of us in the backyard, digging where our shadows have died. A shovel for Ba, a soup ladle for Ma, a spoon for me and Jie to share. We dig with what we don’t want—piss buckets, a stolen plunger, the hands we pray with. We even use the spatulas gifted to us by the church ladies, after their days-long debate about whether Orientals even used spatulas. It was decided that we didn’t but that we should. Hence our collection of spatulas, different sizes and metals and colors. Ma mistook them for flyswatters. She used them to spank us, selecting a spatula based on the severity of our crime. Be glad I use only my two hands on you. I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you. You’ve never been to this year, so let me live it for you: 1980 lasts as long as it rains. It rains the Arkansas way, riddling the ground like gunfire. Years after this story, you’re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss. You ask why your grandfather once buried his gold and forgot about it, and I say his skull is full of snakes instead of brains. He’s all sold out of memories. One time, he pees all over the yard and we follow his piss-streams through the soil. Pray they convene at the gold’s gravesite. The gold in his bladder will guide us toward its buried kin. But his piss-river runs straight into the house and floods it with fermented sunlight. _ When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don’t sweeten tea. Don’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body. Ba says he’ll find the gold soon. Ma beats him again, this time with a pair of high heels (also a gift from the church wives).

• From Bestiary (2020)

  On our maps, we pencil the line from Arkansas to LA: It’s straight all the way across, no excuse to get lost. Still, we get lost. In Arizona, we drive in circles around the same three cities until Ma lets us stop at a motel to ask directions. The heat mirages our morning: the sun a severed head, the sky bleeding out from it. By the time we park at another motel, we’ve hallucinated a vulture plucking at a baby’s rib cage (Ma), a Tayal spear wearing a pink wig (Jie), a military of small men dressed in furry purple vests (Ba), and a shark with toddler legs (me). At the motel, we fall asleep side by side by side by side on the queen bed with camouflage sheets. _ Thirst thorns my throat. When I cough myself awake, I leave the bed and walk alone to the ice machine in the hall, shoveling jewels of it into my mouth with my bare hands, choking on the cold. I feel an urge to find the car and pet its muzzle, to confirm we’ve got a way to leave. The parking lot looks like an iced-over lake and I’m afraid to step onto it. Our eggplant car is still there, still hot to the touch like a fever. The car parked beside it—too close—is also bruise-purple, but unlike ours there’s no dent in the side, no piss-jars on the dashboard, no pigeon pancaked on the windshield. The bumper’s been brushed like teeth and the moon reads me the license plate. TEXAS. I should say: My sister doesn’t star in this part of the story, but I need you to know I can see her always, see her face in the reflection of the window like it’s the moon she’s become. But I don’t listen when the moon shakes its head, tells me to turn back. I go closer to the car. At first I think I hear the engine revving, but there’s no one in the front seat. Then I look to the backseat and there’s a boy on his back, mouth open, brandishing his tongue and snoring so loud, I think it’s the sky making that sound. I step back from the car when I see him wake up. He’s Chinese. The car and his beardlessness and his eyes halving open like seeds. He swings out of the backseat. Asks my name. Asks in guoyu: _______________? I tell it. I speak with Ma’s accent, wince at how millet-whipped and field-born it sounds next to his, how full of oxshit my mouth is. He asks if I’m alone. He slides his hand into his pocket and I duck, but he takes out a cigarette. I say my name. I say no. He asks if I am Chinese. I say we’re speaking Chinese.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He asked if it was snowing outside and we explained it was ash from the wildfires up north. He wanted to go outside and catch ash in his mouth, but we said the ash was made of corpses, the air carrying bones on its tongue. Inside the house, he watched TV with the sound off, substituting the dialogue with his own memories: Once, I fished with my father. He taught me which ones to throw back: He said if it’s bigger than your dick, butcher it. If it’s not, give it back to the river. But when the week ended and looped back, Agong repeated the stories with words in a dialect I’d never heard before. I tried to rearrange his words back into a narrative, but Agong spoke in a rhythm like swimming, dipping down and out of his own stories until I understood nothing. Once in a river I fished my father raw. He taught me butcher me. He tried to bite off his tongue until my mother held his jaw open and told him to stop, reciting a list of everything inside his body that was still his. Tongue. Bones. Blood. Throat. Mouth. Eyes. Ears. Anus. Neck. Intestines. When we ran out of things inside him, we repeated them all again in different dialects: This is your tongue. These are your teeth. They are not enemies. Agong untied all the leaves from our white birch tree and ate them, copying the squirrels. He didn’t know his own species. I’d read online that memories can be startled back into a person, then pulled out of the mouth like a magician’s scarf. My brother and I tried to scare Agong into remembering us by mimicking the sounds of war. We filled pots with pebbles, popped balloons to impersonate gunfire. Sometimes it worked, and he leapt from the bed as if boiled, fondling the imaginary gun in his waistband, calling us guizi, guizi, guizi. My mother told us to stop—she thought we could trigger another heart attack, which in Agong’s dialect sounded like heart war. Back then I thought a heart attack was when your heart grew legs like a soldier, walked out of your chest, and invaded the nearest body. I thought bowels were a breed of bird, and bowel movements were how they migrated. Agong claimed he once ate sparrows for an entire year, back when fullness was foreign to his body, and some of the sparrows were all bone. We took him to a monk in the neighborhood to be blessed, a former soldier who told us that the only cure for forgetting was to approach your own future like a fort. Say: Surrender. That night, I walked to the kitchen and touched the cleaver hanging above the sink, my face foreign in its reflection.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  She draws forth a short dagger. I start with fright when its blade gleams in front of my eyes. I actually believe that she is about to kill me. She laughs, and cuts the ropes that bind me. * * * * * Every evening after dinner she now has me called. I have to read to her, and she discusses with me all sorts of interesting problems and subjects. She seems entirely transformed; it is as if she were ashamed of the savagery which she betrayed to me and of the cruelty with which she treated me. A touching gentleness transfigures her entire being, and when at the good-night she gives me her hand, a superhuman power of goodness and love lies in her eyes, of the kind which calls forth tears in us and causes us to forget all the miseries of existence and all the terrors of death. * * * * * I am reading Manon l’Escault to her. She feels the association, she doesn’t say a word, but she smiles from time to time, and finally she shuts up the little book. “Don’t you want to go on reading?” “Not to-day. We will ourselves act Manon l’Escault to-day. I have a rendezvous in the Cascine, and you, my dear Chevalier, will accompany me; I know, you will do it, won’t you?” “You command it.” “I do not command it, I beg it of you,” she says with irresistible charm. She then rises, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks at me. “Your eyes!” she exclaims. “I love you, Severin, you have no idea how I love you!” “Yes, I have!” I replied bitterly, “so much so that you have arranged for a rendezvous with some one else.” “I do this only to allure you the more,” she replied vivaciously. “I must have admirers, so as not to lose you. I don’t ever want to lose you, never, do you hear, for I love only you, you alone.” She clung passionately to my lips. “Oh, if I only could, as I would, give you all of my soul in a kiss—thus—but now come.” She slipped into a simple black velvet coat, and put a dark bashlyk5 on her head. Then she rapidly went through the gallery, and entered the carriage. [Footnote 5: A kind of Russian cap.] “Gregor will drive,” she called out to the coachman who withdrew in surprise. I ascended the driver’s seat, and angrily whipped up the horses. In the Cascine where the main roadway turns into a leafy path, Wanda got out. It was night, only occasional stars shone through the gray clouds that fled across the sky. By the bank of the Arno stood a man in a dark cloak, with a brigand’s hat, and looked at the yellow waves. Wanda rapidly walked through the shrubbery, and tapped him on the shoulder. I saw him turn and seize her hand, and then they disappeared behind the green wall.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  It took a long time for me to figure that out for certain, even longer to drive my memory from that single place in time out toward the rest of my life. The next thing I knew, I was being led away by Sheriff Watson. He still held Lecia, who had decided to pretend that she was asleep. My eyes were belt-level with his service revolver and a small leather sap that even then must have been illegal in the state of Texas. It was shaped like an enormous black tear. I resisted the urge to touch it. Lecia kept her face in his neck the whole time, but I knew she was scudging sleep. She slept like a cat, and this was plenty of hoopla to keep her awake. The sheriff held my left hand. With my free one, I reached up and pinched her dirty ankle. Hard. She kicked out at me, then angled her foot up out of reach and snuggled back to her fake sleep on his chest. The highway patrolmen and firemen stood around with the blank heaviness of uninvited visitors who plan a long stay. Somebody had made a pot of coffee that laid a nutty smell over the faint chemical stink from the gasoline fire in the backyard. The men in the living room gave our party a wide berth and moved toward the kitchen. I knew that neither of my parents was coming. Daddy was working the graveyard shift, and the sheriff said that his deputy had driven out to the plant to try and track him down. Mother had been taken Away—he further told us—for being Nervous. I should explain here that in East Texas parlance the term Nervous applied with equal accuracy to anything from chronic nail-biting to full-blown psychosis. Mr. Thibideaux down the street had blown off the heads of his wife and three sons, then set his house on fire before fixing the shotgun barrel under his own jaw and using his big toe on the trigger. I used to spend Saturday nights in that house with his daughter, a junior high twirler of some popularity, and I remember nothing more of Mr. Thibideaux than that he had a crew cut and a stern manner. He was a refinery worker like Daddy, and also a deacon at First Baptist. I was in my twenties when Mr. Thibideaux killed his family. I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course—I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He laughed so hard his last baby tooth flew out and shot down the ceiling fan. Telling me to stand up, my brother looked at the back of my pants, saying no one would really notice my tail unless they were looking for it, and no one would look at my flat ass even if it was on fire. I told him the tail wasn’t the problem so much as the symptom: I was tigering. Hu Gu Po was the new governor of my bones. In the bathroom, I tugged the tail to remove it at the root, but the fur was too oily to grip. The tail must be breeding with my bones, seeding what would breach my skin next, claws or canines. Tomorrow my mother would ride me through the house, a daughter she smuggled into a hunter’s body. I told you not to dig those holes, she’d say while petting my neck, spaying me with a pair of garden shears. The only hole that’s natural is the one you shit from. She told me to fear holes because of what might enter them, but I was more afraid of what would exit. Once, she lectured me for days on the importance of not letting men enter my room. But there’s one living in my room! I said. My mother said that brothers weren’t men until they were married, and my own brother would never get married because he wasn’t allowed to love a woman more than his mother. I heard that, my brother said. And I’ve already decided not to love anyone. That way it’s fair for everyone. The rest of her speech was this: Tampons are American propaganda. The string hangs out of you like a grenade pin. When you pull it out, a period of martial law begins in your body. _ The next morning I was the same. Gowned inside a girl. My skin still my skin. Maybe I needed to wait to be shaped: My mother always said the moon wasn’t whitened in a day. I meant to sew all the yard-holes closed, but they bred behind my back: I couldn’t guess what was fucking them. That night, I heard a humming in my sleep. A voice dislocating the dark. My tail humped the mattress and I made a fist around it, strangled it into silence. The humming sounded like my own, but when I rose, it led me away from myself. It was early in the night and the sky was bad-breathed, freckled with stars like white bacteria on a tongue. Since growing my tail, my night-seeing had improved: My eyes homed to heat. I could always see the shapes of faces but never mouths. I could see the shapes of bodies but not their distance from me. I kneeled in the soil, skating my ear above one of the holes. It had my teeth. It was breathing bullets of heat. The hole whistled at me like a man.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  CAN HUNGER BE INHERITED? I HOPE YOU’RE NOT PLANNING ON EATING ANYONE SOMEDAY. THOUGH IS THERE A CHOICE IN WHAT YOU HUNT—WHAT HUNTS YOU? —BEN GRANDMOTHER Letter III: In which a knot is tied Dear third daughter, Your birth came easy to me involuntary as breath. From birth knots were your only form of speech: to say your name you knotted a string in three places you knew all the ways to tangle a thing I predicted your life knotting around your neck I kept so many things away from you jump ropes sewing thread purse straps Still you came home every day with cinched wrists young branches recruited into bracelets garter snakes scars you could braid your own hair before you could speak tied knots into it one for yes two for no three for don’t bother me when you were hungry you unraveled a knot two if you were thirsty you spoke to me in undoings I hear your wife is a Hakka woman a tour guide in the south that you two are running a hotel now her fingers reading your knots in the dark I hear you buried a pair of scissors together on the beach for the wedding I want to know what you fight about if you ever mention me the mother the summer I took you and your sisters to the far shore the one facing the mainland the ghost- bridge you asked why so many people once crossed the Strait there was a war a war a war our island was captured for I told you the sea here is sold to the biggest bidder the country where my own mother taught me before crossing any body of water you pay it a coin a bracelet your life How much do you know about forgetting?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The army was banked on all sides by a fog thick as milk. To trick the enemy, the city strapped children to paper kites, gave them gourd-flutes to blow as they flew. The army, walled by fog, heard the children making music in the sky and assumed they were surrounded. The men surrendered within an hour. The city was saved by its smallest members. My kite’s eyes blinked at me from above: It could watch itself being flown, my father perching me on his shoulder-bones. You’re flying me, I said. He gripped both my ankles—one in each fist—as if the wind would lick me away. Kites were once made of skin, he said. Flown to frighten the enemy. I misheard him and imagined my skin made of kites, how anything could wound me, tear me: wind, getting wet, getting dressed. I wore my shirt backward once and my father called me careless, tugging me back into the house by the collar. He asked me what people would think if I went outside with my head facing the wrong way. In the kitchen, I practiced putting my shirt on, taking it off and putting it back on until I couldn’t lift my arms above my head, the shirt trembling when I tried to hoist it, a failed flag of surrender. _ I wanted to teach my father how to make something too, so I showed him how to make sock puppets we’d learned in first grade. You put a sock over your fist and made it speak by opening your hand, blinking its button eyes. My father said I should cut it a mouth, a real one that could eat. To make anything real required butchery. So I used scissors on one of his white socks, long enough to roll over my forearm, and cut a mouth into it. My mother said he would kill me for doing that, but instead he sat with me in the kitchen and fed my fist everything that would fit in it: a found fishbone, a peach pit that had rolled under the cabinets, his own thumb. I bit down with my fingers and twisted his thumb until he yanked it back. I wasn’t sorry, but I blew on his thumb with my sock-mouth. It blued anyway. When I saw that my sock-mouth was stronger than my born one, I spent weeks speaking through my fist, holding it up to my mother’s ear and asking her to call me through it. She held my fist like a seashell to her ear, whispered back to it.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "The Spahi's face expressed a mixture of acute pain and intense lechery; all the nerves of his body seemed stretched and quivering, as if under,the action of a strong battery; his eyes were half closed, and the pupils had almost disappeared, his clenched teeth were gnashed, as the bottle was, every now and then, thrust a little further in. His phallus, which had been limp and lifeless when he had felt nothing but pain, was again acquiring its full proportions; then all the veins in it began to swell, the nerves to stiffen themselves to their utmost. "'Do you want to be kissed?' asked someone, seeing how the rod was shaking. "'Thanks,' said he, 'I feel enough as it is.' "'What is it like?' "'A sharp and yet an agreeable irritation from my bum up to my brain.' "In fact his whole body was convulsed, as the bottle went slowly in and out, ripping and almost quartering him. All at once the penis was mightily shaken, then it became turgidly rigid, the tiny lips opened themselves, a sparkling drop of colourless liquid appeared on their edges. "'Quicker—further in—let me feel—let me feel!' Thereupon he began to cry, to laugh hysterically; then to neigh like a stallion at the sight of a mare. The phallus squirted out a few drops of thick, white, viscid sperm. "'Thrust it in—thrust it in!' he groaned, with a dying voice. "The hand of the manipulator was convulsed. He gave the bottle a strong shake. "We were all breathless with excitement, seeing the intense pleasure the Spahi was feeling, when all at once, amidst the perfect silence that followed each of the soldier's groans, a slight shivering sound was heard, which was at once succeeded by a loud scream of pain and terror from the prostrate man, of horror from the other. The bottle had broken; the handle and part of it came out, cutting all the edges that pressed against it, the other part remained engulfed within the anus. CHAPTER VIII"TIME passed——" "Of course, time never stops, so it is useless to say that it passed. Tell me, rather, what became of the poor Spahi?" "He died, poor fellow! At first there was a general sauve qui peut from Briancourt's. Dr. Charles sent for his instruments and extracted the pieces of glass, and I was told that the poor young man suffered the most excruciating pains like a Stoic without uttering a cry or a groan; his courage was indeed worthy of a better cause. The operation finished, Dr. Charles told the sufferer that he ought to be transported to the hospital, for he was afraid that an inflammation might take place in the pierced parts of the intestines. "'What!' said he; 'go to the hospital, and expose myself to the sneers of all the nurses and doctors—never!' "'But,' said his friend, 'should inflammation set in——' "'It would be all up with me?' "'I am afraid so.'

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 3 I had this succinct way of explaining the progression of my grandmother’s cancer to neighbor ladies who asked: “First, they took off her toenail, then her toe, then her foot. Then they shot mustard gas through her leg till it was burnt black, and she screamed for six weeks nonstop. Then they took off her leg, and it was like a black stump laid up on a pillow. When we came to see her, she called Lecia by the wrong name. Then she came home, and it went to her brain, so she went crazy, and ants were crawling all over her arm. Then she died.” At the end of this report, Lecia and I would start scanning around whoever’s kitchen it was for cookies or Kool-Aid. We knew with certain instinct that reporting on a dead grandma deserved some payoff. After a while, Lecia even learned to muster some tears, which could jack-up the ante as high as a Popsicle. (If I gave my big sister a paragraph here, she would correct my memory. To this day, she claims that she genuinely mourned for the old lady, who was a kindly soul, and that I was too little and mean-spirited then to remember things right. I contend that her happy memories are shaped more by convenience than reality: she also recalls tatting as fun, and Ronald Reagan, for whom she voted twice, as a good guy.) I couldn’t have cried for Grandma under torture. But I knew my spiel and could nod earnestly to back up Lecia’s snot-nosed snubbing. As in most public dealings with grown-ups, I blindly counted on people’s pity to get me what I wanted. For a long time Grandma’s entire slow death from cancer stayed fenced inside that pat report. It’s a clear case of language standing in for reality. Perhaps the neighbor ladies who heard me tell it back then were justly horrified by my lack of grief instead of being wowed—as I intended them to be—by how well I was bearing up. To them, I nod mea culpa for this lie. Believe me, I fooled no one worse than I fooled myself by blotting out the whole eighteen-month horror show. Lecia kowtowed to the old lady because it kept the peace and bought her points with Mother. I just tried to slip around her, the reasons for which avoidance are vague. Whether she liked to wash me or to pull at my hair snarls with a fine-toothed comb, I could not for many decades figure. The central feeling that arises from memory of that time is a fear that starts low in my spine and creeps upward till it borders on low-level panic. Even now, part of me flinches at any mention of her. I would just as soon keep that wheelchair she occupied in my head empty of its ghost. Maybe this aversion comes partly from a kid’s normal intolerance for the infirm.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The afternoon heat closed around us like a jaw and my father ignored him. When the safari tour ended, dropping us back off at the wrought-iron gate with the faux-wood welcome sign, my father asked if we wanted to go kite-flying. Walking us toward the parking lot, a hand welded to each of our necks, he said he knew the perfect place, the casino by the freeway with a rooftop bar where you could tie your kites to the railing and let them scoop up the air, ladle you a sky. No, my brother said again, stopping. We were almost to the car: I could see its one-eyed headlights, the left tire with half a dead squirrel still mashed to it, the license plate that began with the first letter of my name. My father stopped too, looked down at me as if I were the one who refused to keep walking, but I said nothing. We were passing between two parked SUVs, heading toward the far side of the lot where our car was, where our mother once stapled the seatbelt to our shirts because she didn’t trust us to be safe otherwise. A sunburnt station wagon passed behind us, windows bruised by the heat, the underwater voices of a family arguing inside. My father made a fist around my brother’s T-shirt collar, navy with neck-sweat, and lifted him off the ground. It was the same way he’d held my brother when we were on the mainland, before their bones had borrowed the air and flown. But here, there was no sky that could basket my brother, no string I could use to steer my father. I had no breath left in my body to blow them into kites. My father swung him back and forth, swung him dumb. Walk, he said, but my brother shook his head, choking inside his own shirt collar, biting his tongue until beetles of blood crawled out of his mouth. My father put him down, said, Walk. I stood behind them both, as if by staying still I could assume the shape of my shadow, flat on the asphalt, flitting beneath the cars and finding the street on my own, go home. My brother looked up, kept his face still as those ancient statues I’d seen only in textbooks, the kind missing their torsos, chipped at every angle, gutted by age into something graceful. Unsettled by the stillness of my brother’s face, my father looked down. At the crotch of my brother’s cargo shorts: a stain too dark to be sweat, a sweet rancid scent rising from his legs. He’d pissed himself, and on the asphalt I saw the lit trail of it, beginning somewhere at my own feet.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Hems of our nightgowns baptized in mud. He raises the gun at me. He has no daughters. He’s a boy counting Japanese bombs from the roof of his house, so many they outnumber rain. He’s the boy who hid in a well for three days, the sky as big as the hole he came down. No, Ma says, and grabs the gun-barrel. Tugs it down toward the ground. Ba fires once and sees a soldier in front of him burst into birds. Jie shouts. I eat my spit. The light scatters to salt. Don’t move in this part of the story. Watch. I’m waiting for the bullet to birth its hole in me. I want to know what it feels like, to be a soldier like Ba, to die like one. Did you see that? He smiled when he fired, all his teeth. Have you ever seen him smile like that? Don’t answer me. You aren’t even born yet and you already know he never has. I wait for the bullet to reach into me and flip me inside-out. But the bullet’s gone slant into the soil, the shotgun knocked diagonal by Ma’s hands. Look down now at this choreography of shadows: The bullets nose-diving into my toes. Ma pulling me back into the house by my armpits. Ba crouching in the dirt with his hands leafed over his head. See my left foot before Ma wraps it in newspaper, the same way a butcher wraps her best cut. There are days between the wound and the fever in my spine, but I don’t know how many. I rip the sheets to sleep. I smell rot in my foot, sour and sizzling. My brain spit-roasting in my skull, a hand reaching in to spin it. One night I wake believing my hands are torches, lit to the wrist. I limp into the backyard to run them under the hose. Ba’s been put to sleep on the kitchen floor. In a week my skin’s still a stove, so Ma says, We have to amputate before it spreads. Jie boils the knives. You choose the night. The night before the amputation, I dream that Ma fills a bucket with hose-water and carries me outside like a bride. Ma washes my infected foot in the water, praying over it. Kissing the bark of my heel. You say it’s not a dream, but it has to be: When I wake, it’s back to blades. Ma’s knife is guiding the light into me. Ma’s hand hot on my ankle, pinning my foot to the cutting board. The infection in two of my neighboring toes, three rotten in total. My blood on the board looks fake, a staged slaughter.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  It is full moon. It is already peering over the tops of the low hemlocks that fringe the park. A silvery exhalation fills the terrace, the groups of trees, all the landscape, as far as the eye can reach; in the distance it gradually fades away, like trembling waters. I cannot resist. I feel a strange urge and call within me. I put on my clothes again and go out into the garden. Some power draws me toward the meadow, toward her, who is my divinity and my beloved. The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The atmosphere is heavy with the odor of flowers and of the forest. It intoxicates. What solemnity! What music round about! A nightingale sobs. The stars quiver very faintly in the pale-blue glamour. The meadow seems smooth, like a mirror, like a covering of ice on a pond. The statue of Venus stands out august and luminous. But—what has happened? From the marble shoulders of the goddess a large dark fur flows down to her heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare at her in amazement; again an indescribable fear seizes hold of me and I take flight. I hasten my steps, and notice that I have missed the main path. As I am about to turn aside into one of the green walks I see Venus sitting before me on a stone bench, not the beautiful woman of marble, but the goddess of love herself with warm blood and throbbing pulses. She has actually come to life for me, like the statue that began to breathe for her creator. Indeed, the miracle is only half completed. Her white hair seems still to be of stone, and her white gown shimmers like moonlight, or is it satin? From her shoulders the dark fur flows. But her lips are already reddening and her cheeks begin to take color. Two diabolical green rays out of her eyes fall upon me, and now she laughs. Her laughter is very mysterious, very—I don’t know. It cannot be described, it takes my breath away. I flee further, and after every few steps I have to pause to take breath. The mocking laughter pursues me through the dark leafy paths, across light open spaces, through the thicket where only single moonbeams can pierce. I can no longer find my way, I wander about utterly confused, with cold drops of perspiration on the forehead. Finally I stand still, and engage in a short monologue. It runs—well—one is either very polite to one’s self or very rude. I say to myself: “Donkey!” This word exercises a remarkable effect, like a magic formula, which sets me free and makes me master of myself. I am perfectly quiet in a moment. With considerable pleasure I repeat: “Donkey!” Now everything is perfectly clear and distinct before my eyes again. There is the fountain, there the alley of box-wood, there the house which I am slowly approaching.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She looked at me without blinking, her mouth-O symmetrical to the holes. Waiting for her teeth to cleave me, I imagined my finger severed inside her mouth, twirling like a stem. Ben shut her eyes, her breath burning circles on the back of my hand. Her teeth clasped around my knuckle and then released, skimming the skin so lightly it reminded me of the time a wasp landed on my finger and sipped at my sweat. I’d been so afraid of moving, of baiting its sting, that I didn’t breathe. Coaxing my finger into a hook, I twisted it slow as a key until she opened for me. _ The next day, Ben thanked me for showing her the holes in my yard and said there was something she still hadn’t shown me yet. It was taco day at school, and we’d both poured the ground beef out of their neon shells and down our pants, laughing as the minced meat sagged our underwear. We ran up to the lunch chaperones and said we’d pooped ourselves, flashing our meat stains. They panicked and escorted us to the bathroom, excused us from our next class, and left us together while they scoured the lost and found for clean pants. When they left, Ben pushed me into the bathroom stall and told me to sit down and wait. I squatted on the toilet seat until she returned carrying the cage. She tugged me out of the stall by my wrist. In front of the finger-smeared mirror, she lifted the birdcage with both hands. The mirror above the sink reflected the birdcage between us, fluorescent light flattening our faces. I was too busy watching Ben’s face in the mirror to see it: a shape in the center of the birdcage, a shadow without a body. The shadow was standing on the perch in the center, moving in a familiar rhythm, slight and fast and songlike. A bird. When it opened its wings, I turned my head from the mirror to look up at the ceiling, to see what bird was casting its shadow down on the cage. But there was no body, just the bird-shadow, and I could see only its reflection. I looked at the cage directly, then at its image, trying to align them in my mind. But the cage in the mirror carried more. Ben guessed the shadow-bird was some kind of ghost, left behind by a bird that had died in it. I told her I was always suspicious of shadows: Mine left me at night to grow its own body. I looked at the shadow-bird again in the mirror, trying to imagine a pigeon or a sparrow, but I decided its species was its own.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He pulls my hair back like reins, calls me by another animal’s name. When he falls asleep, the moon peels off its skin, squeezed to pulp in my hands. I walk back to our room and sit in the bathroom till morning, watch a creek of red ants cross my legs five times. In the morning, Ma asks if I’d dreamed of getting pregnant with a flock of flies that tries to leave through my throat. She told me it happens sometimes, that dream, and you always wake up with your own hands around your neck. Jie traces my neck with her thumb and doesn’t ask. We drive the rest of the way in less than a day. Ma complains that Ba’s bowels are like a waterslide. So we stop at a reservoir and Ba squats on the shore, the knobs of his hips brassy with sweat. His shit floats on the surface, still as a body. We drive far from the crime. By the time we reach LA, it’s night and we thirst. Our lips crumble off like cake. The car has three more dents, but none of us remember what we hit. Outside the passenger window, I see metal birds the size of trees pecking at the hills, and Jie says they’re derricks, blackening their beaks in oil that comes from the soil. We share a one-bedroom with a shower curtain down the center of it, our cousin and his cousin and his wife and his mistress and his mistress’s son in one room, us in the other. Our cousin has a tattoo of a snake that begins on the back of his head and ends somewhere below the waist. Want to guess where the snake ends? he says to Jie, and she says, Don’t forget I used to kill snakes for a living. But he doesn’t know what we did at the chicken farms, doesn’t believe us. He takes our cash and promises us jobs in a few days. He makes us bowls of rice porridge thinner than piss, and we sleep on a mattress with an exposed spring, a hole in the center that we curve our bodies around. We take turns drinking from the faucet, swallowing mouthfuls until our bellies billow out, bigger than anything we could ever birth. Back in Arkansas we had no faucet, just a hose dangling from the side of the house. Not the kind of hose you know: bigger, bitten by field mice, holes too small for us to see. At night, Jie and I hosed each other down in the dark. Chased each other around the yard even though Ma said someone would see us naked and turn us to salt. But we ran anyway, circling each other until the sky turned over like a bowl and cupped us to the ground. The stars were dandruff and we brushed them off our shoulders.