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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Rodin sat down to dine; after such exploits he was in need of restoratives. That afternoon there were more lessons and further corrections, I could have observed new scenes had I desired, but I had seen enough to convince myself and to settle upon a reply to make to this villain's offers. The time for giving it approached. Two days after the events I have described, he himself came to my room to ask for it. He surprised me in bed. By employing the excuse of looking to see whether any traces of my wounds remained, he obtained the right, which I was unable to dispute, of performing an examination upon me, naked, and as he had done the same thing twice a day for a month and had never given any offense to my modesty I did not think myself able to resist. But this time Rodin had other plans; when he reaches the object of his worship, he locks his thighs about my waist and squeezes with such force that I find myself, so to speak, quite defenseless. "Therese," says he, the while moving his hands about in such a manner as to erase all doubt of his intents, "you are fully recovered, my dear, and now you can give me evidence of the gratitude with which I have beheld your heart overflowing; nothing simpler than the form your thanks would take; I need nothing beyond this," the traitor continued, binding me with all the strength at his command. "...Yes, this will do, merely this, here is my recompense, I never demand anything else from women... but," he continued, " 'tis one of the most splendid I have seen in all my life... What roundness, fullness!... unusual elasticity!... what exquisite quality in the skin!... Oh my! I absolutely must put this to use...." Chapter 17Whereupon Rodin, apparently already prepared to put his projects into execution, is obliged, in order to proceed to the next stage, to relax his grip for a moment; I seize my opportunity and extricating myself from his clutches, "Monsieur," I say, "I beg you to be well persuaded that there is nothing in the entire world which could engage me to consent to the horrors you seem to wish to commit. My gratitude is due to you, indeed it is, but I will not pay my debt in a criminal coin. Needless to say, I am poor and most unfortunate; but no matter; here is the small sum of money I possess," I continue, producing my meager purse, "take what you esteem just and allow me to leave this house, I beg of you, as soon as I am in a fitting state to go." Rodin, confounded by the opposition he little expected from a girl devoid of means and whom, according to an injustice very ordinary amongst men, he supposed dishonest by the simple fact she was sunk in poverty; Rodin, I say, gazed at me attentively.

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

  "My hand!" I cried, recoiling in fright, "have you been able, Monsieur, to conceive such projects?... no, dispose of my life if you must, but imagine not you will ever obtain from me the horror you propose." "Hear me, Therese," says the Count, reasoning with me calmly, "I indeed foresaw your distaste for the idea but, as you have wit and verve, I flattered myself with the belief I could vanquish your feelings... could prove to you that this crime, which seems to you of such enormity, is, at bottom, a very banal affair. "Two misdeeds present themselves, Therese, to your not very philosophic scrutiny: the destruction of a creature bearing a resemblance to us, and the evil with which this destruction is augmented when the said creature is one of our near kinsmen. With regard to the crime of destroying one's fellow, be persuaded, dear girl, it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms, but lacks that required to annihilate them: well, every form is of equal worth in Nature's view; nothing is lost in the immense melting pot where variations are wrought: all the material masses which fall into it spring incessantly forth in other shapes, and whatsoever be our interventions in this process, not one of them, needless to say, outrages her, not one is capable of offending her. Our depredations revive her power; they stimulate her energy, but not one attenuates her; she is neither impeded nor thwarted by any.... Why! what difference does it make to her creative hand if this mass of flesh today wearing the conformation of a bipedal individual is reproduced tomorrow in the guise of a handful of centipedes? Dare one say that the construction of this two-legged animal costs her any more than that of an earthworm, and that she should take a greater interest in the one than in the other? If then the degree of attachment, or rather of indifference, is the same, what can it be. to her if, by one man's sword, another man is transspeciated into a fly or a blade of grass?

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The whole place looked like an upscale spa under its heavy coat of climbing ivy. Whitewashed facade. Glazed windows. Doe, lean and hungry-looking in her Red Sox windbreaker and grimy jeans, .38 snub nose holstered on her left hip, led the way. “Fisher, new kid—” She glanced at Robbie. “You got a last name?” “Diller.” “What, like Phyllis Diller?” “I guess.” “Huh.” She scratched her chin. “You two take point. Me and Yoshida and Jennings’ll be right behind you. McCutcheon, Doherty, you stay back here. Watch the tree line.” The two older women nodded, turning back toward the forest. Robbie and Sam jogged on ahead to the rusted-open doors and sidled through into deep shadow, flicking on the penlights taped under their crossbows. The narrow blue-white beams swept over mossy tile and a decorative stone fountain where the bones of koi fish lay mired in dried algae. In the angled beams above was a songbird’s nest, abandoned for the fall, and on the front desk a huge gray tomcat, all jowls and scars, was licking himself in a shaft of sunlight that fell through a hole in the roof. “Jesus,” said Sam. “Look at the size of his balls.” They went through the waiting area with its moth-eaten designer chairs and moldering whitewashed walls. Beveled glass doors, one broken off its hinges and leaning at an angle against the frame, and then a long hall lined with soundproofed doors. Some stood open. Some were cross-hatched with splintered claw marks, and the acrid stink of piss told Robbie men had marked here recently, unless the gray tom was particularly ambitious and well hydrated. I could pick an open room, he thought. Stab Sam, duck inside, shoot whoever comes through first and take their cross. He glanced sidelong at the stocky girl beside him, her straight brown hair up in a loose bun, sweat standing out on her wide forehead. She couldn’t be older than twenty-one, twenty-two. I could run. Go out a window. Would they let me go? Through an open door, he saw a skeleton slumped in a rolling chair, a sunroof in its cracked and yellowed skull. The gun might still be nearby. It won’t work. Not after five years. The soft, careful footfalls of the three women behind them echoed down the hallway. Robbie’s back itched between his shoulder blades, as though in anticipation of a bolt. Will it hurt? When it goes into me, will it hurt, or will there not be time for that? They picked their way through a fat wedge of sunlight falling through a rent in the clinic’s exterior. Greenery spilled through the gap, tomatoes black and wrinkled on their drooping vines. Bees droned lazily among dead flowers. I could fit through there, he thought. A few prickers, a couple of scrapes, and I’d be gone.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In the nineteenth century, as today, unreported, even unremarked upon, assault among women too servile or too intimidated to risk further attacks was a customary event among the lower classes. Mill urges that as “there can be little check to brutality consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner,” divorce should be permitted upon conviction of assault, lest convictions become unobtainable “for want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.”79 Further down the rungs of connubial sensibility: “the vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty.”80 Such occasions were a favorite Victorian theme, particularly in the melodrama. The treatment afforded such subject matter, then as now, is often a curiously hypocritical mixture of prurient delight and moral compunction. Since the conditions of any institution are so liable to abuse and Mill’s contentions are grounded in legal reality, Ruskin’s domestic idyll is some. what more difficult to infer from the facts than Mill’s description. Ruskin will trust to chivalry. Mill regards it as an evolutionary stage, only a slight improvement over the barbarities which preceded it and hardly a reliable deterrent, depending as it does upon the gratuitous good will of an elite. Mill had consulted social history and law; Ruskin trusted to poetry, and his history of women is based on the gossamer of literary idealization. Out of the political wisdom afforded by the portraits of Shakespearian heroines, “perfect women,” “steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose,” “strong always to sanctify, infallibly faithful”—together with the tender beauties of Walter Scott’s romances—“patient,” full of “untiring self-sacrifice” and “deeply restrained affection,” Ruskin attempts to re-create the sexual history of the Western peoples.81 As further evidence, he introduces the posture of the courtly lover encountered in Dante and the troubadours, sworn to serve and obey a mistress. Then, with impressive bravura, Ruskin declares that ancient Greek “knights” also practiced courtly love, boasting he could quote antique originals to this effect, were it not that his audience might have difficulty in following him. In any case, he will not be so mean with his hearers as to deny them some descriptions of the “simple mother and wife’s heart of Andromache,” the housewifely calm of Penelope, the “bowing down of Iphegenia, lamb-like and silent,” and Alcestis’ self-immolation to save her husband’s life.82 Ruskin rejoices in this piece of “self-sacrifice” presenting it as evidence that the Greek mind had a premonition of the Christian doctrine of Resurrection. The entire “historical” passage in the lecture, lengthy and presumably central to its argument, is hard to account for. Ruskin was not an ignorant man.

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

  It is peculiar to vice to tremble at the enquiries of justice; and Mrs. Brown, whose conscience was not entirely clear upon my account, as knowing as she was of the town as hackneyed as she was in bluffing through all the dangers of her vocation, could not help being alarmed at the questions, especially when he went on to talk of a Justice of peace, Newgate, the Old Bailey, indictments for keeping a disorderly house, pillory, carting, and the whole process of that nature. She, who, it is likely, imagined I had lodged an information against her house, looked extremely blank, and began to make a thousand protestations and excuses. However, to abridge, they brought away triumphantly my box of things, which, had she not ben under an awe, she might have disputed with them; and not only that, but a clearance and discharge of any demands on the house, at the expense of no more than a bowl of arrack-punch, the treat of which, together with the choice of the house conveniences, was offered and not accepted. Charles all the time acted the chance companion of the lawyer, who had brought him there, as he knew the house, and appeared in no wise interested in the issue; but he had the collateral pleasure of hearing all that I told him verified, as far as the bawd’s fears would give her leave to enter into my history, which, if one may guess by the composition she so readily came into, were not small. Phœbe, my kind tutoress Phœbe, was at the time gone out, perhaps in search of me, or their cooked-up story had not, it is probable, passed smoothly. This negociation had, however, taken up some time, which would have appeared much longer to me, left as I was, in a strange house, if the landlady, a motherly sort of a woman, to whom Charles had liberally recommended me, had not come up and borne me company. We drank tea, and her chat helped to pass away the time very agreeably, since he was our theme; but as the evening deepened, and the hour set for his return was elapsed, I could not dispel the gloom of impatience, and tender fears which gathered upon me, and which our timid sex are apt to feel in proportion to their love. Long, however, I did not suffer: the sight of him over-paid me; and the soft reproach I had prepared for him, expired before it reached my lips. I was still a-bed, yet unable to use my legs otherwise than awkwardly, and Charles flew to me, catches me in his arms, raised and extending mine to meet his dear embrace, and gives me an account, interrupted by many a sweet parenthesis of kisses, of the success of his measures.

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

  Then by means of their cravats, their handkerchiefs, their braces, they make cords wherewith I am tied instantly, in keeping with their plan, that is to say in the cruelest and most painful position imaginable. I cannot express to you what I suffered; it seemed they were rending me limb from limb and that my belly, facing downward and strained to the utmost, was about to split at any moment; sweat drenched my forehead, I no longer existed save through the violence of pain; had it ceased to compress my nerves, a mortal anguish would surely have seized me: the villains were amused by my posture, they considered me and applauded. "Well, that's enough," Bressac said at last, "for the time being she may get off with a fright. "Therese," he continued as he untied my hands and commanded me to dress myself, "show a little judgment and come along with us; if you attach yourself to me you shall never have reason to regret it. My aunt requires a second maid; I am going to present you to her and, upon the basis of your story, undertake to interest her in you; I shall make myself answerable for your conduct; but should you abuse my kindness, were you to betray my confidence, or were you not to submit yourself to my intentions, behold these four trees, Therese, behold the plot of earth they encompass: it might serve you for a sepulcher: bear it in mind that this dreadful place is no more than a league's distance from the chateau to which I am going to lead you and that, upon the least provocation, I will bring you back here at once."

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

  This chimerical propriety, which they have had the absurdity to present to you as a virtue and which, since infancy, far from being useful to Nature and society, is an obvious defiance of the one and the other, this propriety, I say, is no more than a reprehensible stubbornness of which a person as mettlesome and full of intelligence as you should not wish to be guilty. No matter; continue to hear me out, dear girl, I am going to prove my desire to please you and to respect your weakness. I will not by any means touch that phantom, Therese, whose possession causes all your delight; a girl has more than one favor to give, and one can offer to Venus in many a temple; I will be content with the most mediocre; you know, my dear, near the Cyprean altar, there is situate an obscure grot into whose solitude Love retires, the more energetically to seduce us: such will be the altar where I will burn my incense; no disadvantages there, Therese; if pregnancies affright you, 'tis not in this manner they can come about, never will your pretty figure be deformed this way; the maidenhead so cherished by you will be preserved unimpaired, and whatever be the use to which you decide to put it, you can propose it unattainted. Nothing can betray a girl from this quarter, however rude or multiple the attacks may be; as soon as the bee has left off sucking the pollen, the rose's calix closes shut again; one would never imagine it had been opened. There exist girls who have known ten years of pleasure this way, even with several men, women who were just as much married as anyone else after it all, and on their wedding nights they proved quite as virgin as could be wished. How many fathers, what a multitude of brothers have thuswise abused their daughters and sisters without the latter having become on that account any the less worthy of a later hymeneal sacrifice! How many confessors have not employed the same route to satisfaction, without parents experiencing the mildest disquiet; in one word, 'tis the mystery's asylum, 'tis there where it connects itself with love by ties of prudence.... Need I tell you further, Therese, that although this is the most secret temple it is howbeit the most voluptuous; what is necessary to happiness is found nowhere else, and that easy vastness native to the adjacent aperture falls far short of having the piquant charms of a locale into which one does not enter without effort, where one takes up one's abode only at the price of some trouble; women themselves reap an advantage from it, and those whom reason compels to know this variety of pleasure, never pine after the others. Try it, Therese, try, and we shall both be contented."

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

  The men leapt into life... and an instant later a luckless traveler was led into the copse where we had our camp. Questioned upon his motive for traveling alone and for being so early abroad, upon his age, his profession, the rider answered that his name was Saint-Florent, one of the most important merchants of Lyon, that he was thirty-six years old, that he was on his way back from Flanders where he had been concerned with affairs relative to his business, that he had not much hard money upon his person, but many securities. He added that his valet had left him the preceding day and that, to avoid the heat, he was journeying at night with the intention of reaching Paris the next day, where he would secure a new domestic, and would conclude some of his transactions; that, moreover, he was following an unfamiliar road, and, apparently, he must have lost his way while dozing on his horse. And having said that, he asked for his life, in return offering all he possessed. His purse was examined, his money was counted, the prize could not have been better. Saint-Florent had near unto a half a million, payable upon demand at the capital, had also a few gems and about a hundred gold louis.... "Friend," said Coeur-de-fer, clapping his pistol to Saint-Florent's nose, "you understand, don't you, that after having robbed you, we cannot leave you alive." "Oh Monsieur," I cried, casting myself at the villain's feet, "I beseech you not to present me the horrible spectacle, upon my reception into your band, of this poor man's death; allow him to live, do not refuse me this first request I ask of you." And quickly resorting to a most unusual ruse, in order to justify the interest I appeared to take in the captive: "The name Monsieur has just given himself," I added with warmth, "causes me to believe we are nearly related. Be not astonished, Monsieur," I went on, now addressing the voyager, "be not at all surprised to find a kinsman in these circumstances; I will explain it all to you. In the light of this," I continued, once again imploring our chief, "in the light of this, Monsieur, grant me the unlucky creature's life, I will show my gratitude for the favor by the completest devotion to ail that will be able to serve your interests." "You know upon what conditions I can accord you what you ask, Therese," Coeur-de-fer answered; "you know what I demand from you..."

• From Manhunt (2022)

  VII. Bowstring VII BOWSTRING They woke early the next morning and ate smoked fish and hard acorn bread—which tasted like shit—from the stranger’s camp as the fingers of pale sunlight coming through the moth-eaten drapes crept across the carpet. Afterward, Fran repacked the duffel, kneeling in front of it to rearrange its contents. Beth tried not to look at the smooth, tanned skin between the other woman’s shorts and T-shirt. She tried not to think about the freckles on Fran’s back or the fine cornsilk hairs at the nape of her neck. You make me feel so delicate. She ran her thumb absently over the bloodstained gauze taped to her cheek. The cut still hurt, but it no longer throbbed, and the ridge of scabbed-over flesh beneath was only warm to the touch, not burning with infectious fever. She always scarred like that, as though her body had known ahead of time that it was going to be torn open. As though it were prepared for mutilation. The scar at the corner of her mouth, pulling her face into a sardonic leer. The deep cut across the bridge of her nose, still scabby but stiffening fast under its soiled Band-Aid, and of course the checkerboard razor cuts on her upper thighs that once upon a time had bought her so much hell. You think Bay Path’s gonna give that scholarship to a headcase? A dish broken against the wall, a red smear of spaghetti sauce on the yellowing wallpaper. Like blood. You’re throwin’ your fuckin’ life away! They had, in the end, given the headcase that scholarship, and they hadn’t pulled it until sophomore year when everything came out—her, namely, but also her thing with the coach. She could still remember how gently he’d touched her. The glistening trails of his tears down his wind-burned cheeks. She put the thought from her mind and cleared her throat, glancing over to where Fran was still rifling through the duffel. “Oh, bellhop!” she drawled. “How’s it going with those bags?” The crack of a gunshot cut Fran’s answer short. The other girl’s eyes widened. That’s a rifle, Beth thought as she scrambled for her bow, propped against the near arm of the rotting sofa. It’s not far. Half a mile. She hefted it. Saw the frayed fibers bristling from the string near its lower V-hook. She thought of the mice she’d heard in the night, of their sharp little teeth at work on the waxed string while she slept just a few yards away. Her thoughts raced as she buckled on her quiver. The screaming started before the gunshot’s echoes faded. High and cold and somehow unmistakably randy, like a pack of Tex Avery cartoon wolves bugging their eyes out and stamping their feet. “Fran,” said Beth, backing away from the windows, the door, the rotten membrane of the outer wall that seemed all of a sudden so pitifully fragile. Her mouth was dry.

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

  Mother set her in the car seat, and she just drove off to town, then sat behind the steering wheel till Kitty came out to the parking lot and said could she help. We also heard later that she stopped by the hardware store for a three-foot length of industrial rubber tubing. Grandma came home with this stuff in paper bags and locked the door to her room for the better part of the day. When she finally rolled into the living room at dusk, she was waving a tasseled horse quirt over her head like Annie Oakley. She had braided long leather strips in brown and beige and tan around the rubber tubing, which instrument she wanted Mother to use for whipping us. It was the only time I ever saw Mother defy her head-on, and Grandma was batshit about it: “These children are being ruined! You think you have trouble now, you just wait.” Mother started crying but shook her head about using the quirt. She wouldn’t meet Grandma’s eyes, but she stood in one spot with her arms folded and shook her head no. She was studying her own feet the whole time. Then the old woman went on to waggle her quirt tassels at Lecia and call her Belinda, just like she’d done in the hospital. “I hope Belinda does to you what all you’ve done to me,” Grandma said, staring hard at Mother and waggling the horse quirt at Lecia the whole time. Again I got that dim stab of fear that this lady who bossed our mother’s soul didn’t even know our right names. Lecia tried to make peace by saying that she wouldn’t mind so much getting whipped with a horse quirt. It was no worse than Daddy’s belt or the limber chinaberry switches Mae Brown had been known to cut from the backyard. I said that I wasn’t some old barnyard mule and didn’t want to get whipped like one. Grandma pointed out to Mother how I thought I was in charge of my punishments. This seemed to her undeniable evidence that I needed my butt blistered. I aggravated her worse by saying that all the baths and whippings I’d got since Grandma came were “warping my character.” That’s a direct quote, according to Mother, who started to laugh and shake her head. Then she asked would I get her some orange baby aspirin because she felt like she had an ax in her forehead. (She became a terrible baby-aspirin junkie at this time, ate them like peanuts from an economy-sized jar with a depressing label on which two pink-cheeked Swedish-looking children trudged off to a red schoolhouse hand in hand.) She hung the quirt on the doorknob of her new bedroom and continued to conduct our whippings with either the flyswatter or a rolled-up New Yorker. Daddy was never around after Grandma came home. It was some unspoken deal everybody had.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Rowdy is indeed based on my childhood best friend on the Spokane Indian Reservation. But I completely disguised the connection between the fictional character and the real person. How thorough was that disguise? Rowdy’s real name is Randy. Randy J. Peone. So, okay, “Rowdy” and “Randy” are almost synonyms. But Rowdy and Randy differ in significant ways. Unlike Rowdy, Randy is not a single child. He has, like, eighteen thousand brothers and sisters, all of them ridiculously attractive. Unlike Rowdy’s angry father, Randy has a mother and father who are loving and supportive. For many years, Randy has lived in a house only five minutes away from his parents. Unlike Rowdy, Randy liked school. He studied science in college and has worked for our tribal fish hatchery for as long as I can remember. However, our dear Randy has always had a mean temper, like Rowdy. He has always liked to fight, physically and verbally. He has struggled with depression and anger issues. Sometimes he drinks too much. Sometimes he is cruel to his family and friends. So, yeah, Rowdy and Randy also have a lot in common. Don’t worry. Randy read this book before it was published, and he signed a release letter that stated he was cool with his fictional avatar. “Junior,” he said to me during a phone call, “the book is good. But I didn’t punch you in the face when you left Wellpinit.” “Yes, you did,” I said. “Nope,” he said. We argued about that point for a while. We, as they say, agreed to disagree. And then, a few months later, on a publicity visit in Miami, I dreamed of the day when Randy had punched me and sent me to my new school, to Reardan, with a fresh black eye. Except in my dream, a different kid slugged me. I woke from that dream and realized Randy wasn’t the one who’d punched me. It was a different Indian boy, one of my damned bullies. I thought about calling up Randy to apologize. But then I remembered that he had definitely punched me in the nose after a Little League baseball game. Well, I had punched him first, but that was only because he’d been picking on me, just like one of my eternal bullies. Randy was supposed to be my best friend. He was supposed to be my protector. So I punched him in the face for betraying me. And then he punched me back. But he punched me harder. I think he broke my nose. I never went to the doctor. I let it heal on its own. And my nose has been a little flatter ever since. So, okay, Randy did not punch me when I left him for Reardan. But he had slugged me one year earlier. I think the fictional and real punches had very similar emotional content.

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

  "On your knees," the monk said to me, "I am going to whip your titties." "My titties, oh my Father!" "Yes, those two lubricious masses which never excite me but I wish to use them thus," and upon saying this, he squeezed them, he compressed them violently. "Oh Father! They are so delicate! You will kill me!" "No matter, my dear, provided I am satisfied," and he applied five or six blows which, happily, I parried with my hands. Upon observing that, he binds them behind my back; nothing remains with which to implore his mercy but my countenance and my tears, for he has harshly ordered me to be silent. I strive to melt him... but in vain, he strikes out savagely at my now unprotected bosom; terrible bruises are immediately writ out in black and blue; blood appears as his battering continues, my suffering wrings tears from me, they fall upon the vestiges left by the monster's rage, and render them, says he, yet a thousand times more interesting... he kisses those marks, he devours them and now and again returns to my mouth, to my eyes whose tears he licks up with lewd delight. Armande takes her place, her hands are tied, she presents breasts of alabaster and the most beautiful roundness; Clement pretends to kiss them, but to bite them is what he wishes.... And then he lays on and that lovely flesh, so white, so plump, is soon nothing more in its butcher's eyes but lacerations and bleeding. stripes. "Wait one moment," says the berserk monk, "I want to flog simultaneously the most beautiful of behinds and the softest of breasts." He leaves me on my knees and, bringing Armande toward me, makes her stand facing me with her legs spread, in such a way that my mouth touches her womb and my breasts are exposed between her thighs and below her behind; by this means the monk has what he wants before him: Armande's buttocks and my titties in close proximity: furiously he beats them both, but my companion, in order to spare me blows which are becoming far more dangerous for me than for her, has the goodness to lower herself and thus shield me by receiving upon her own person the lashes that would inevitably have wounded me. Clement detects the trick and separates us: "She'll gain nothing by that," he fumes, "and if today I have the graciousness to spare that part of her, 'twill only be so as to molest some other at least as delicate."

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

  Brown and Phœbe did nothing but run riot in praise of this wonderful cousin, and how happy that woman would be that he would favour with his addresses; in short my two gossips exhausted all their rhetoric to persuade me to accept them: “that the gentleman was violently smitten with me at first sight; that he would make my fortune if I would be a good girl and not stand in my own light; that I should trust his honour; that I should be made for ever, and have a chariot to go abroad in,” with all such stuff as was fit to turn the head of such a silly ignorant girl as I then was: but luckily here my aversion had taken already such deep root in me, my heart was so strongly defended from him by my senses, that wanting the art to mask my sentiments, I gave them no hopes of their employer succeeding, at least very easily, with me. The glass too marched pretty quick, with a view, I suppose, to make a friend of the warmth of my constitution, in the minutes of the imminent attack. Thus they kept me pretty long at table, and about six in the evening, after I had retired to my apartment, and the tea board was set, enters my venerable mistress, followed close by that satyr, who came in grinning in a way peculiar to him, and by his odious presence, confirmed me in all the sentiments of detestation which his first appearance had given birth to. He sat down fronting me, and all tea time kept ogling me in a manner that gave me the utmost pain and confusion, all the mark of which he still explained to be my bashfulness, and not being used to see company. Tea over, the commoding old lady pleady urgent business (which indeed was true) to go out, and earnestly desired me to entertain her cousin kindly till she came back, both for my own sake and her; and then, with a “Pray, sir, be very good, be very tender to the sweet child,” she went out of the room, leaving me staring, with my mouth open, and unprepared by the suddenness of her departure, to oppose it. We were now alone; and on that idea a sudden fit of trembling seized me. I was so afraid, without a precise notion of why, and what I had to fear, that I sat on the settee, by the fire side, motionless and petrified, without life or spirit, not knowing how to look or how to stir. But long I was not suffered to remain in this state of stupefaction: the monster squatted down by me on the settee, and without farther ceremony or preamble, flings his arms about my neck, and drawing me pretty forcibly towards him, obliged me to receive, in spite of my struggles to disengage from him, his pestilential kisses, which quite overcame me.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She looked up at him, breathing through her teeth, fighting the urge to shrink into a ball and go away until he’d finished what the thing between his legs wanted to do to her. I can take him. I can take this piece of shit. When he was a person I’d have whipped his ass at pool and gone home with his fucking girl. Warm drool dripped onto her upturned face. His nails broke skin. Her own breath hissed in her ears, thin and strangled, and she thought, for some reason, of Fran’s hesitant mouth on hers, not opening, and of the other woman’s soft, husky voice tickling her neck. You make me feel so delicate. He was going to kill her. She couldn’t hold him off. He was going to kill her, and if she was lucky he’d do it before he raped her. Her forearm trembled under his crushing weight. She could see his chin and his gnashing teeth and his spit ran into her eyes, stinging and vile. Spots formed and burst like blackheads in her vision. Then running footsteps. A dull, solid thwack of impact. The man rolled off of her with a gurgling moan. Beth lay gasping in the mud. Fran stood over her, breathing hard, a bloodstained brick clutched in her hands. “Are you okay?” Fran asked. Beth levered herself up onto her elbows, coughing. “I’m great,” she croaked. “I was about to focus my ki into the first two fingers of my right hand and liquefy his entire spine with a single strike, but you threw off my technique.” The man let out a kind of snarling whine. He was bent double, his wounded head resting against the ground, claws digging furrows in the dirt. In three somehow incredibly faggy steps—Beth had never met anyone else who minced like that—Fran was at his side. Her face screwed up in distaste, she brought the brick down on the back of his head. Skin split. Bone crunched. The brick came up, Fran’s arms trembling with its weight, then down again. Up and down, hammering his face into the mossy ground. Finally Fran stumbled away from his still form, the brick falling with a splash into the muddy water. She was shaking. Beth, still breathing hard, got up and hooked the toe of her boot under the dead man’s shoulder. She flipped him over onto his back. They both stared. With his cleft chin and relatively unmarred face—the worst of the split skin and scarring confined to just behind his ears and the soft flesh under his jaw—he seemed disconcertingly normal, like a stock image of a high school football player, or a Ken doll. Beth burst out laughing. “Oh my God,” Fran squeaked.

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

  He came back about when the rain had started to blow sideways against all the windows with a sound like BB pellets. Grandma’s bath had wound up taking too long. Mother let him force the bathroom door with a screwdriver, and there Grandma sat unmoved from her chair, all her attention honed to that shuttle of hers manufacturing lace while bathwater poured over the edges of the tub and onto the floor. He did have to pick her up, finally. He swooped her up in his arms like she was a bride. Her good leg hung down normally enough, but her stump kept slipping down past his elbow and starting to dangle. Lecia and I had a giggle fit over this on the porch, because Grandma’s legs kept splaying open in a way she would have found unladylike. Outside, the wind had set the phone lines to swaying. It had already started to tear loose some shingles that were blowing up the street. Plus gusts somehow squirmed into the window cracks to make a high-pitched whistling that seemed to get louder by the second. Lecia and I ran for the car, a distance of ten yards, and got drenched to the skin. Getting in the car was like leaving the first big noise of the storm and sitting in a cold bubble. We could barely see the Guardsman through the water streaming off the windshield. He seemed somehow to be trying to move in a more gallant or stately way, what with Grandma’s leg slipping down every other step and all. Anyway, he was slower than we had been, which made us laugh. But we stopped giggling pretty quick when Mother slid behind the wheel. You could see by her eyes in the rearview that she wasn’t crying anymore. That had come to be a bad sign, the not crying. Her mouth turned into a neat little hyphen. I watched the Guardsman climb back in his jeep; then the gray and the rain sort of gobbled up everything but a big olive-drab smear that was moving out of our driveway behind us. I had this crazy urge to roll down my window and poke my head right out into the storm and holler to him to come back. But the wind would have eaten any words I yelled. So I watched the smear of his jeep get littler. Then it was gone, and there was just rain and sirens and Mother’s cold gray eyes set smack in the middle of that silver oblong mirror. The drive from Leechfield to Aunt Iris’s house in Kirbyville would normally have taken an hour. That’s in the best weather conditions. “Sixty minutes, door to door” was what Daddy always said climbing out of his truck cab or stepping up on their porch.

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

  "I have everything to fear," the poor thing added; "my father's conduct toward me since he put me here, his discourses, what preceded Rombeau's examination, everything, Therese, everything suggests that these monsters are going to use me in one of their experiments, and that your poor Rosalie is doomed." After copious tears had flowed from my eyes, I asked the unhappy girl whether she knew where the key to the cellar was kept; she did not; but she did not believe their custom was to take it with them. I sought for it everywhere; in vain; and by the time the hour arrived œor me to return upstairs I had been able to give the dear child no more by way of aid than consoling words, a few hopes, and many tears. She made me swear to come back the next day; I promised, even assuring her that if by that time I had discovered nothing satisfactory regarding her, I would leave the house directly, fetch the police and extricate her, at no matter what price, from the terrible fate threatening her. Chapter 18I went up; Rombeau was dining with Rodin that evening. Determined to stick at nothing to clarify my mistress' fate, I hid myself near the room where the two friends were at table, and their conversation was more than enough to convince me of the horror of the project wherewith both were occupied. It was Rodin who was speaking: "Anatomy will never reach its ultimate state of perfection until an examination has been performed upon the vaginal canal of a fourteen- or fifteen-yearold child who has expired from a cruel death; it is only from the contingent contraction we can obtain a complete analysis of a so highly interesting part." "The same holds true," Rombeau replied, "for the hymeneal membrane; we must, of course, find a young girl for the dissection. What the deuce is there to be seen after the age of puberty? nothing; the menstrual discharges rupture the hymen, and all research is necessarily inexact; your daughter is precisely what we need; although she is fifteen! she is not yet mature; the manner in which we have enjoyed her has done no damage to the membranous tissue, and we will be able to handle her with complete immunity from interference.

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

  Lock the door!” I obey. “Now go downstairs and make sure the door below is also locked.” I descended the winding stairs that lead from her bedroom to the bath; my feet gave way beneath me, and I had to support myself against the iron banister. After having ascertained that the door leading to the Loggia and the garden was locked, I returned. Wanda was now sitting on the bed with loosened hair, wrapped in her green velvet furs. When she made a rapid movement, I noticed that the furs were her only covering. It made me start terribly, I don’t know why? I was like one condemned to death, who knows he is on the way to the scaffold, and yet begins to tremble when he sees it. “Come, Gregor, take me on your arms.” “You mean, mistress?” “You are to carry me, don’t you understand?” I lifted her up, so that she rested in my arms, while she twined hers around my neck. Slowly, step by step, I went down the stairs with her and her hair beat from time to time against my cheek and her foot sought support against my knee. I trembled under the beautiful burden I was carrying, and every moment it seemed as if I had to break down beneath it. The bath consisted of a wide, high rotunda, which received a soft quiet light from a red glass cupola above. Two palms extended their broad leaves like a roof over a couch of velvet cushions. From here steps covered with Turkish rugs led to the white marble basin which occupied the center. “There is a green ribbon on my toilet-table upstairs,” said Wanda, as I let her down on the couch, “go get it, and also bring the whip.” I flew upstairs and back again, and kneeling put both in my mistress’s hands. She then had me twist her heavy electric hair into a large knot which I fastened with the green ribbon. Then I prepared the bath. I did this very awkwardly because my hands and feet refused to obey me. Again and again I had to look at the beautiful woman lying on the red velvet cushions, and from time to time her wonderful body gleamed here and there beneath the furs. Some magnetic power stronger than my will compelled me to look.

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

  He devoured the scene with his beautiful dreamy blue eyes; his lips opened, but he remained dumb. “Well, how do you like the picture?” “Yes, that is how I want to paint you,” said the German, but it was really not a spoken language; it was the eloquent moaning, the weeping of a sick soul, a soul sick unto death. * * * * * The charcoal outline of the painting is done; the heads and flesh parts are painted in. Her diabolical face is already becoming visible under a few bold strokes, life flashes in her green eyes. Wanda stands in front of the canvas with her arms crossed over her breast. “This picture, like many of those of the Venetian school, is simultaneously to represent a portrait and to tell a story,” explained the painter, who again had become pale as death. “And what will you call it?” she asked, “but what is the matter with you, are you ill?” “I am afraid—” he answered with a consuming look fixed on the beautiful woman in furs, “but let us talk of the picture.” “Yes, let us talk about the picture.” “I imagine the goddess of love as having descended from Mount Olympus for the sake of some mortal man. And always cold in this modern world of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves her. And so I shall call the picture: Venus in Furs.” * * * * * The painter paints slowly, but his passion grows more and more rapidly. I am afraid he will end up by committing suicide. She plays with him and propounds riddles to him which he cannot solve, and he feels his blood congealing in the process, but it amuses her. During the sitting she nibbles at candies, and rolls the paper-wrappers into little pellets with which she bombards him. “I am glad you are in such good humor,” said the painter, “but your face has lost the expression which I need for my picture.” “The expression which you need for your picture,” she replied, smiling. “Wait a moment.” She rose, and dealt me a blow with the whip. The painter looked at her with stupefaction, and a child-like surprise showed on his face, mingled with disgust and admiration. While whipping me, Wanda’s face acquired more and more of the cruel, contemptuous character, which so haunts and intoxicates me. “Is this the expression you need for your picture?” she exclaimed.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Beth dared, for a moment, to hope the creature might make it. Then the second pack came boiling quick and quiet from the woods beside the area where trucks had parked so that their drivers could catch a few hours of sleep, before. They got the doe near the on-ramp, it sounded like, and she screamed, just once, a high, hoarse sound Beth wanted to forget as soon as she’d heard it, and then there was only the crunch of breaking bone and the wet ripping noise of the men worrying at her flesh. By dawn the pack had moved on, dragging the deer’s half-eaten carcass back into the woods, and Beth had snatched a few bleak hours of sleep shot through with nightmares of screaming women whose bodies crumbled at the slightest touch. She felt greasy and faintly nauseous, her stomach clenched around a knot of half-digested power bar and jerky. She stood up and stretched, blinking bleary-eyed in the soft, wet heat. She got her shaving kit and vaulted from the roof, leaving Fran to sleep. A backed-up drainage cut near the west edge of the parking lot had flooded some time recently. The water didn’t look bad, Beth thought as she drew closer. Not drinkable, but fine. She knelt in the soft soil of its bank and bent to splash some on her face. Lukewarm. Too cloudy to see the bottom. Her reflection swam in the brown churn. Big brick face, all scarred up and bandaged. Brick, brick, brick. She took her razor from her belt and ran it a few times along its loose stretch, slack grown notch by notch over five years of constant travel and infrequent meals. She didn’t really know if it helped keep the razor sharp, but she liked the shushing sound it made. Stropping. That’s what it was called. He came at her out of the cut, exploding through the placid surface in a cloud of sparkling droplets, and she saw with a thrill of terror that he was erect, his cock standing hard against his concave belly. She dropped her razor and went for her knife, but slowly, so slowly. It felt like she was moving through stirred concrete, like someone had filled her arms with steel ball bearings. Her hand closed on the knife’s worn hilt. He crashed into her and they fell together, rolling through the tall grass. She stabbed at him. He was bigger than she was and strong, hideously strong. The smell of his breath was cum and rotten meat and old, forgotten gym bags where the accoutrements of manhood festered unseen in the sweaty dark. A rat walled up dead behind new drywall. His teeth snapped inches from her face, held back only by her straining forearm. She stabbed again, hot blood gushing over her hand, and lost hold of the knife as he twisted atop her and wrapped his claws around her throat. His filthy nails dug into her neck.

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

  CHAPTER 4 By mid-fall, the cancer had spread to Grandma’s brain. This would have sent most people to bed, according to an oncologist pal of mine. But Grandma just bore down on us harder. If anything, whatever pain she was in or ideas she had about dying seemed to jack up her resolve. She didn’t take morphine or any other pain drugs. Instead, she drank beer nonstop but never seemed to get drunk. She stopped wearing her prosthetic leg, claiming it hurt her, so her stump poked out of her nightie at about eye level to a kid. That gave the impression—when she wheeled toward you—of some finger pointing you down. And it was around this time that her eyes seemed to get more bleached out behind her horn rims. Maybe she had cataracts, or maybe I just imagined the whole thing. But the blue part was lightening up daily, and sharp white spikes stabbed out from the black pupil into the iris. This was the time when you could order X-Ray Specs from the back of Superman comics, and when lasers were just starting to make the Walter Cronkite reports. In some weird conjunction of these two phenomena, I started believing that Grandma watched me through the wall when I slept. Sometimes I’d start up from a dead sleep thinking that two hot beams of white light were coming out of her eyes in the next room, fixed on me, trying to bore right through the wall between us. Nights, I wouldn’t look out the door when she clunked around trying to get to the bathroom. I was scared that I’d see something like little headlights beaming her path down the dark hall. Actually, I wasn’t so scared of seeing this as I was of her seeing me see it, which knowledge might make her angle those beams on me and melt me like wax. Basically, I tried not to notice her at night at all. When I was about five, I had cooked up a technique that kept me from throwing up when I rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair. If I tightened my stomach muscles and squinched my eyes shut and grabbed the chrome front bar as hard as I could, then the ride’s sick bucking around didn’t reach me somehow. Oh, my hair still twisted every which way, and I could feel the lights move across my face, but it was like I could sink back into myself, away from all the diesel engine’s heaving, and not wind up horking my corn dog all over Lecia’s penny loafers. I got famous in our neighborhood for being the littlest kid to ride the scary rides. Anyway, that’s what I tried to do in bed when I heard Grandma thumping around, just hunker down and harden up till everything I was fit into a small stone I held in place behind my stomach muscles. Mother was her own kind of rock.