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 The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  We roll on our sides and face each other. The quilt squares stretch beneath us. We hopscotch from square to square in finger tag—black gabardine to charcoal flannel to gray pinstripe, like farmlands seen from up high. Mother earlier smashed all the lightbulbs in our room with a broom handle, so it’s dark. You can’t quite decipher the individual pieces of furniture tipped over and flung around, just the right angles that poke up making a jagged mountain landscape around our floor pallet. I can hear Mother in the kitchen now. She must be dumping cutlery from the drawers because the noise of metal crashing explodes then stops, explodes then stops. If I close my eyes it’s like a great battle right out of King Arthur is taking place in there. I can picture knights in armor bringing their swords down against shields, arrows flying into battlements, lances striking the breastplates of horsemen. When I open my eyes, though, there is only the dark plain of the quilt we lie on divided up in squares by the neat grid of suit samples. Next to me Lecia’s face is long and white under her spiky bangs. She looks baleful as a basset hound. She has stopped hopscotching and now presses her index finger against her lips to show me not to say anything, but what might I say? A long rectangle of light spills over us from the open door. Then a dark shape comes to occupy that light, a figure in the shape of my mom with a wild corona of hair and no face but a shadow. She has lifted her arms and broadened the stance of her feet, so her shadow turns from a long thin line into a giant X. And swooping down from one hand is the twelve-inch shine of a butcher knife, not unlike the knife that crazy guy had in Psycho for the shower scene, a stretched-out triangle of knife that Daddy sharpens by hand on his whetstone before he dismantles a squirrel or a chicken, though it is also big enough to have hacked through the hip joint of a buck. It holds a glint of light on its point like a star, so that old rhyme pops into my head: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. Then I don’t know what to wish for. Lecia’s finger stays pressed to her lips. Her eyes are big but steady on that figure in the doorway and on the knife. I wish not to scream. Screaming would piss Lecia off. I can tell. A scream is definitely not what I want to happen to me right now. It’s part wish and part prayer that zips through my head and keeps me from howling. No sooner do I choke down that scream than a miracle happens. A very large pool of quiet in my head starts to spread.

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

  Even when she said that they were my half brother and half sister, I couldn’t figure it out. Hell, other than Mother divorcing Paolo, which was a kind of family secret, I’d never known anybody who’d divorced, never even heard about anybody divorcing other than Elizabeth Taylor. The idea of having half a sister fascinated me. Which half was mine? I must have asked Grandma about this, because at some point she explained that they were Mother’s Other Kids from her Other Husband. I asked was that Paolo, whom Daddy had whomped so good so long ago, and she said no. She always got weary thinking of how Mother had thrown Paolo over, so she took a second to look weary before saying that their daddy was another husband, Mother’s first husband, Tex, who was news to me. The whole idea of a new husband and two kids added up to my not knowing squat about Mother’s life before she came to Leechfield. Her history was almost a cipher as it stood. Oh, I knew she’d gone to art school in New York City during the war. But none of that story involved any other babies. She always made a big deal about how Lecia and I were her first babies, how she was thirty and that was old. I kept staring at the pictures in Grandma’s lap till she snapped them closed and slid them back in her dress pocket. While the fact of these two kids was trying to take shape in my head, Grandma did something that to this day my sister claims was so out of character for her it could not have happened. She grabbed my shoulder and breathed that death smell all over my face and said that should I fail to mind my mother—here Grandma brought her mouth right up to my face—if I continued to sass back and crud everything up—her eyes were almost pure white by now behind her smeary horn-rims—I would be Sent Away, just like they had been. They had never seen their mother again, not since they were babies. It was then that I found out that the snake smell wasn’t just from her bedpan or some old food getting nasty somewhere in the room. It came from her. In fact, it came from her open mouth, from deep inside her where the cancer was doubtless eating out whatever was human. If you had told me at that minute that writhing in her belly were dozens of newly hatched baby moccasins just busted loose from their eggs, I doubt I would have expressed surprise. She had also put Vicks VapoRub around her nostrils, maybe to shield her very self from her mouth’s own death stink. That eucalyptus in the Vicks rode right on top of her cottonmouth breath in a way that made it worse. (The closest I had ever come to that smell before Grandma’s room was the closest I’d come to a snakebite.

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

  Hearing the national anthem got all balled up in his mind with that brother’s funeral—the flag folded neat in a navy-blue triangle some officer handed over to his mother, the fistful of dirt Hector himself had tossed down the oblong hole onto the polished box they lowered by hand on straps. Anyway, Lecia stood, and Hector’s face worked itself into a twist we’d never seen. He wound up calling Lecia a spoiled little bitch. Now, nobody would dispute we were spoiled. But the “bitch” part hit some string in Mother, and the next thing we knew she held that pistol. Night had blacked out the bay windows behind her. She had on a silk slip the color of mayonnaise. Underneath that slip was her long-line conical bra, which turned breasts into something not unlike artillery. Hector slumped in the rose chintz armchair. His head bobbed down, so folds of neck skin gathered around his chin like a basset hound’s. He said go on and shoot, his life wasn’t worth a nickel anyway. I got the idea to fling myself across his body. I was betting Mother wouldn’t plug me to get at him. And the move did draw her up short. She squinted at me as if I were a long ways off. When she waved the gun sideways to motion me out of the way, her arm looked boneless and wiggly as an eel. Scoot over , she said. Lecia begged her not to pull the trigger, while I draped the length of my body down his front like a lobster bib. He smelled of Burma-Shave and scotch. His belly was wishy under all the knobs and angles of me. I sank into that softness a notch, then craned my head back to see what effect I was having on Mother. A mist from somewhere inside her skull seemed to skitter behind her green eyes. She was considering. Her hand even dropped a few degrees from its straight-on angle. My poor, poor babies , she said. Then the lines of her face drew up and hardened into something like resolve. Get offa him, Mary Marlene , she said. Hector’s breath was wicked sour when he pleaded back to her, Honey …to which she said shut up. Lecia took her place at Mother’s elbow. She stared up with an expression that struck me as lawyerly, like Perry Mason’s at the jury box. At any second she might’ve drawn out a pointer and clicked on an overhead projector, the better to list her arguments, which, by the way, struck me as real obvious. If you shoot him, you’ll go to jail, maybe forever—that sort of thing. This didn’t trouble Mother one whit. She tossed her head and squared her shoulders. At least I’d have done something worthwhile , she said. Killing that low-life sonofabitch. She studied Hector like he was some worn-out farm mule she was fixing to plug. She waxed lyrical about what a worthless sack of shit he was.

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

  I don’t remember our family driving across the Orange Bridge to get to the Bridge City café that evening. Nor do I remember eating the barbecued crabs, which is a shame, since I love those crabs for their sweet grease and liquid-smoke taste. I don’t remember how much Mother drank in that bayou café, where you could walk to the end of the dock after dinner and toss your leftover hush puppies to hungry alligators. My memory comes back into focus when we’re drawing close to the Orange Bridge on the way home. From my spot in the backseat, I can see a sliver of Daddy’s hatchet-shaped profile—his hawk-beak nose and square jaw. Some headlights glide over him and then spill onto me. I want to see Mother’s face, to see which way her mood is drifting after all the wine. But I’m staring at the back of her head in its short, wild tangle of auburn curls. All at once, the car rears back the way a horse does underneath you if it shies away from a small, skittery animal on the road, and we’re climbing up the bridge. The steel webbing of the road sets the tires humming. That matches up just right with that humming in my head left over from the hurricane day. The night streams over the car and fans away like black water. I can almost feel a long wake of dark dragged out behind us. Sometime during this ride, the car has filled up with that musky snake smell from Grandma’s old room, a smell I hadn’t even noticed had been gone from our lives till it flooded back. Lecia rolls down the window, maybe to get the stink out. Her hair is spronging loose from its French twist. The wind’s about to suck me out that window and over the bridge rail. The rushing sound marries with the tires humming till a big rocket fills the small car space and makes me feel little. I muster all my courage to look out my window at the long drop down. It makes my stomach lurch. The steel girders jerk by my window in a fast staccato. In the distance, I can see two flaming refinery towers. They make a weird Oz-like glow that bleeds up the whole bottom part of the sky. It’s a chemical-green light the color of bread mold, rising up the night sky like a bad water stain climbing wallpaper. Out beyond the river there are marshes and bayous. A black barge moves slow under the bridge. Mother is shouting, shouting she wished herself dead before she’d ever married Daddy. She wished she’d been struck by lightning on this very bridge before she crossed over into that goddamn bog. Leechfield is the asshole of the universe, the great Nowhere. And Daddy is a great Nothing. I feel over for Lecia’s hand, and it’s a cold fist knotted shut.

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

  “Just more squirrel for me and you.” One Sunday, when Daddy was working days, I woke up late and found the old lady sitting in her wheelchair by herself in the kitchen. Breakfast dishes were scattered around, and she had a beer stuck between her thighs. I’d never been alone with her before and didn’t fancy it. She lifted her head like she’d been dozed off; then she jumped a little when she saw me. “Don’t shout!” I remember her saying. She gave me a walleyed stare. I told her I hadn’t made a peep. She said that Lecia had asked Mother to drive her to church, which idea made me want to dip snuff. Lecia’s religious ardors were at least as vague as mine. But her going to church had the desired effect on Grandma: she got a rapturous look telling me about it, as if that one piddling trip to the house of the Lord might hold Lecia a place in heaven. Then Grandma said she had something to show me in her room. I was grateful, at least, that she had her leg on that morning. She’d even covered it up with these thick support hose, Supp-Hose, they were called. They were orange and heavier than sausage casings. Anyway, she wore those and had wedged the black shoe back on the plastic foot. (There’s something overdressed about a shoe on a plastic foot, like it’s beside the point.) Once we were in her room, she closed the door and posted herself, wheelchair and all, right in front of it. Let me take a minute to tell you about the smell in that room. It stank of snake, specifically water moccasin. If you are walking in waders through a marsh, say, on a warm winter morning, scanning the sky for mallards riding their jagged V overhead, you can smell a moccasin slithering alongside you long before you see it. It has an odor like something dead just before the rot sets in and the worms in its belly skin get it to jiggling around unnaturally. Often the smell of some rotting carcass—armadillo or nutria rat or bird—has stopped me in my tracks and gotten me to turn my eyes expecting to find on the ground the triangular, near-black head of a cottonmouth, which is related to both cobra and pit viper and the most vicious snake on this continent. I could never smell one swimming in a bayou, but on land it gives off a musk easily as strong as skunk. (I knew a drug dealer once who collected them in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  She would see to it personally, she told me. I cannot remember, said Austerlitz, with what words I said goodbye to Mrs. Ambrosova, how I got out of the archives building or where I went after that; all I know is that I took a room in a small hotel on Kampa Island not far from the Karmelitska and sat there by the window until darkness fell, looking out at the heavy, leaden-gray waters of the Vitava, and over the river to the city, which I now feared was entirely alien to me, a place with which I had no connection at all. These thoughts went through my head with grinding slowness, each more confused and harder to grasp than the one that went before. I spent the whole night either lying awake or tormented by fearful dreams in which I had to climb up and down flights of steps ringing hundreds of doorbells in vain, until, in the outermost suburbs, I came upon a darkly looming building, from the dungeon-like basement of which there emerged a caretaker called Bartoloméj Smecka, a veteran, it seemed, of long-lost campaigns, clad in a crumpled redingote and a flowered fancy waistcoat with a gold watch chain draped over it, who having studied the note I handed him shrugged his shoulders, saying that unfortunately the tribe of the Aztecs had died out years ago, and that at best an ancient perroquet which still remembered a few words of their language might survive here and there.

• From My People (2022)

  Dozens of journalists have fled into exile and six have been charged with terrorism in absentia, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). When I visited Ethiopia earlier this month with a colleague from the CPJ and the continent-wide project called the African Media Initiative, journalists we met with told us they all live in fear, calling the terrorism law a “game changer.” One foreigner working in Ethiopia told me: “There is a red line. The problem is, we don’t know where it is.” When we met Bereket Simon, Ethiopia’s minister of information, he defended the incarceration of Eskinder and the seven other journalists locked up with him on the grounds that they were involved in terrorism. In a polite but firm dissent, he said neither Eskinder nor any of the other journalists were in prison for what they wrote. When we asked to see Eskinder and the others in prison, we were told that it was not likely and that turned out to be the case. But his wife, Serkalem, who was recently in New York receiving on Eskinder’s behalf a prestigious freedom of the press award from PEN America, told us when we met her in Addis that Eskinder had asked her to tell us that he was in no way connected with any terrorist group—there or in the United States. She also told us that he said that if the price of telling the truth was imprisonment, he could live with that. Of course, when the verdict is handed down—which is scheduled to happen Thursday—Eskinder could be sentenced to life in prison or death. Part of the reason for my involvement with journalists and their issues in Ethiopia and other parts of the continent is to try to present a much-maligned continent in a light different to that in which it is often portrayed elsewhere in the world: in a light that makes it clear that Africans want as much as anyone else to make choices about themselves and their children in an informed way, and that they have the same hopes and aspirations for themselves, their families, and their communities as do people in democracies the world over. Imperfect as many democracies are, their governments do not put people in jail for words that come out of their mouths and the freedom-loving desires that live in their hearts. That’s why, as an American, I hope that my countrymen and women who have that right should get on Ethiopia’s case. They should insist that a U.S. government which is pledged to ensure those rights in America should also help ensure them in Ethiopia. And I hope they will be joined by freedom-loving people all over the world, including on the African continent. But Ethiopia stands as a partner with the United States, in particular, in fighting real terrorists, including Al Qaeda, in a strategic part of the world.

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

  It was a dull white color. It looked like a free-floating brain knocked out of somebody’s skull. I found a pole to pick it up, stabbing up under the hard white tentacles till it was pretty deep on the stick with its inner goop squooshing out. This was the perfect weapon to chase Lecia with, jellyfish being somehow like roaches in their ability to make her squeal. I stood in the shorebreak and brandished it like a head on a pole, holding it angled away from myself so none of the poison would get on me. She’d backed up into a big piece of chop. The white top of the wave slapped over her head and got her hair in her face. She must have had hair spray in it, because it stayed glued together in a kind of slab, and she started rubbing at her eyes with a fury. She was still rubbing with one hand when she started squealing. At first I thought she was screaming to mock me. It was such a high-pitched squeal, like a little shoat hog might make. Then she danced up and down in the water, pumping her knees too high. I kept wielding the jellyfish on the pole at her. If anything, I was happy because I was really scaring her with it. I waded out a little closer to her. I wanted her to stop making fun of me so I could find out what kind of liquor license they had at the Breeze Inn. But of course she kept squealing. The slab of hair over her eyes shielded her face. But when she began swatting and slapping at her leg below the water, I backed up pretty quick. Maybe a braver child would have rushed to help her. I was not a braver child, though. I backed up slow, afraid if I took my eyes off her she might vanish below the surface in the jaws of some sea creature. After a while, I dropped the pole and ran as fast as I could to the bar. It was a hard run in deep sand from the waterline to the steps of the Breeze Inn. My feet sank and couldn’t get traction, like the run in a bad dream. Mother and Daddy ran back with me all the way down to the beach, but once they got there, they seemed way too calm. I mean, neither of them lit a cigarette or anything, but it took a long time before either of them really did much. The guy in the camouflage pants had dragged Lecia out of the water while I was fetching my parents. He was kneeling beside her with his pink grandma gloves on when we came up. Lecia sat on the sand with her legs straight out in front of her like some drugstore doll. She had stopped squealing.

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

  Lecia’s face shrinks back like somebody in the wrong end of your telescope. Then even Mother’s figure starts to alter and fade. In fact, the thin, spidery female form in black stretch pants and turtleneck wielding a knife in one upraised arm is only a stick figure of my mother, like the picture I drew in Magic Marker on the Mother’s Day card I gave her last Sunday. I wrote underneath it in pink block letters that I decorated with crayon drawings of lace, “You are a nice Mom. I love you. It has been nice with you. Love from Mary Marlene.” That Sunday morning when she’d opened that card up and read it, she cried racking sobs and hugged me hard so her tears streamed down into my ears till Lecia showed up at Mother’s bedside with a vodka martini she’d mixed saying, Here, sip at this. Then there was another martini and another. Della Reese was singing “Mack the Knife” on the record player. She kept saying My poor, poor babies and This isn’t your fault. By the time I got my nerve up to sneak in the kitchen and upend the vodka bottle down the sink, there was only an inch left anyway. That was Mother’s Day a week ago. On my card, I had drawn a stick-figure mom wearing a string of Ping-Pong-sized pearls around its stick neck. Now in my mind, that stick figure is what Mother becomes. She’s just a head like a ball and curly scribbles for hair. But there the likeness to the figure on my card ends. This stick figure holds a triangle knife with a star glinting off its end. My stick-figure sister is breathing deep in the chest of her white PJs, and I match my breath to hers. We lie there in that cartoon of a room for what seems like forever, and then out of nowhere Mother roars No! like a lioness, her mouth shapes itself into a giant black O with real definite pointy teeth for what seems like a long time. The black NO sails out of that mouth in a long balloon with the tail of a comet streaking past us and out the wax-papered windows into the flaming night. That’s how God answered my prayers: I learned to make us all into cartoons. That stick woman in the center of the big black page with her eyebrows squinched down in a mad V over pin-dot eyes is no more my mother than some monster on the Saturday cartoons. She just isn’t. I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice. I can feel Lecia cock her head at me, like she wants to know what the hell I have to grin about. Now the stick-figure mom sets down the knife on the floor to dial the phone.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Then, in December, the Apollo lifted anchor and headed to the warmer climate of the Canary Islands. One day in Tenerife, Hubbard decided to take his Harley-Davidson motorcycle out for a spin on the twisty mountain roads. Miles away, in the lush volcanic landscape, the Harley hit a patch of oil or mud and crashed. Hubbard broke his arm and several ribs. Somehow he managed to right his bike and make his way back to the ship. Some members of the Sea Org cite the motorcycle accident as the moment when Scientology changed course and sailed toward a darker horizon. Hubbard was in terrible pain, but he was fearful of doctors and refused to go to the hospital. Dincalci and the ship’s other medical officer, Kima Douglas, neither of whom had a medical degree, attempted to treat him. They strapped Hubbard’s injured arm to his side and wrapped his broken ribs, then sat him in a velvet reading chair, which he rarely left for the next six weeks, day or night. The whole ship could hear him cursing and screaming and throwing plates and things against the wall with his one good arm. He was in too much discomfort to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time, so the ranting and moaning went on almost nonstop. The medical officers had persuaded him to let a local doctor come aboard with a kind of primitive X-ray machine, which confirmed the broken bones. The doctor left Dincalci a prescription for pain pills. The first time Dincalci gave Hubbard the pain pills, however, Hubbard panicked and said that they had slowed down his heart. “ You’re trying to kill me!” he shouted. Dincalci, who looked upon Hubbard as a father, both spiritually and emotionally, was devastated. Hubbard ordered him “beached”—dropped off in Madeira, the distant Portuguese island, where he remained for a year. Other members of the Sea Org were having a hard time coping with the blatant contradiction between Hubbard’s legend and the crabby, disconsolate figure howling in his stateroom. “ If he is who he says he is, why does he have so little staying power?” Hana Eltringham wondered. “He has a motorcycle accident, he doesn’t recover quickly, and he doesn’t use Scientology techniques on himself.” By now, Eltringham had been promoted to Deputy Commodore, the highest post in the Sea Org after Hubbard himself. She had been off the ship for a couple of years, in Los Angeles, running the Advanced Orgs—the divisions responsible for producing Operating Thetans—and setting up a liaison office to supply the Scientology fleet. During that period, she began experiencing crippling headaches. Some days she was unable to work at all. She couldn’t even lie down because the pressure from the pillow was unbearable. The vibration of footsteps in the hall outside her room made the pain excruciating. She thought if she could only discover the body thetans that she must be harboring she could ease her misery.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  I will have a cunt, I will, I will, and I’ll never be hungry again or sleep outside or have to pretend with Beth. It’s going to be better. It’s going to be— “Perfect,” said Viv, tugging off her right glove with her teeth and offering Nam-joo her hand. “Let’s fucking celebrate.” Robbie staggered out the clinic’s front door, stepping over Reena’s body where it lay curled on the threshold in the arms of another corpse—a man, his teeth buried in the back of her neck, a crossbow bolt through his left eye socket. A dozen yards off, two more men were fighting over what was left of Sam in the shade of a stand of beeches. Flesh stretched and tore between their rotting teeth. He watched them, breathing hard. The van stood unattended across the expanse of the parking lot. Thirty yards of waving grass and wildflowers shedding dry, dead petals in the wind. I can make it. From somewhere back inside the clinic came the booming report of Doe’s revolver. A man screamed again. Another answered from the tree line to the north. No more time to think. He shoved his knife into its sheath and launched himself toward the van. No cover. Witchgrass hissing against his jeans. His own breath rasping in his ears as he saw Sam yanked again and again back through the hole in the wall. Blood on broken brick and concrete. An eagle swooped low over the field, passing by not far from him, and he wished, with the same terrible, helpless fury with which he had once wished to sleep and wake up as a boy, to shuck his skin and leap after it into the sky, to be wild and alone and friendless. Free. The van’s rear doors were open. He leaped inside, nearly braining himself on the car’s roof. The gray tomcat hissed at him from underneath the passenger seat, eyes gleaming like jewels in the dark. He covered his mouth to stifle a yelp of hysterical fear and crouched down to catch his breath, not daring to believe he’d made it. The keys were still in the ignition. The lockbox where Doe kept her handguns lay forgotten under the bench that ran the length of the van’s left-hand wall. “You coming with me?” he asked the cat, who only hunkered down and made a low, warning kind of yraowl sound. He chuckled and turned back to pull the doors shut behind him. Doe stood there, snub-nosed revolver pointed squarely at his chest. “Too bad,” she rasped. Her ginger hair was matted and spiky with blood. Ugly gashes glistened on her throat and shoulder. She held her right arm tucked under her left and the sleeve of her windbreaker was soaked through and dripping.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  There would be no rebellion for him, no linking up with Zia and her crew within and without the Screw to liberate the women it was sending north to be worked to death by TERFs on some industrial project. They’re going to put me through something, something to make sure I stay loyal. “Sure,” he said. “Give me a second—I’ll get dressed.” He kicked the door shut and dove under his bed, scrambling over the concrete floor without regard for his bare knees. Or, he thought as he used his teeth to rip a strip of electrical tape from the roll he’d stashed and wrapped it tight around his stolen knife to strap it to his forearm, they know I talked to Zia and they’ll just kill me, and leave my body out there for the dogs, and the turkey vultures. He’d tried to find Indi last night, to tell her what was happening, but she hadn’t answered her door and the public clinic wasn’t open. He struggled into an old, paint-stained sweatshirt and a pair of shapeless jeans. His reflection, pale and harried, looked back at him from the mirror by the door. He made himself take a breath. Another. And another. His composure was all that stood between him and the forest’s scavengers. He exhaled and gripped the doorknob. And the other men. Vivian led them down the beach, waves flattening out over wet sand before retreating, leaving only a silvery sheen and a few flecks of foam in their wake. Fran watched a crab scuttle sidelong through the rushing surf. The ocean was calm today, sparkling and trackless, and seagulls whirled over the breakers where they tumbled clear and ponderous into the shallows, the mass of the water beneath them no longer enough to support their weight. Dissolution. The hiss of water over earth. Ahead, the TERFs’ work crews were scrapping the USS Hyannis , taking her apart screw by screw and loading the resultant detritus onto the barges they’d pulled ashore in the predawn light. Hydraulic cutters whined. Rusted steel crunched and sparks flew in short-lived jets where women severed struts and whatever you called the little walls around the deck with acetylene torches. Most of the pilot house and radar tower were already disassembled and loaded away, and a crane jacked up on bricks and shale strewn over the sand had one of the deck guns swinging from its arm. “We’ll have shipping running up and down the coast,” Viv shouted back at Fran and Nam-joo. “Rye, Portsmouth, Bath—we’ll start in Boston, come up through here!” They have people that far north? “Fuel?” Nam-joo shouted back.

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

  One evening when Daddy had rowed our rented boat into a patch of morning glories, he all of a sudden lifted the dripping oar from the bayou and took a swipe about three inches above my head, so the water from the oar fanned down over my face and bare arms. There was a quick plop in the water next to the boat. The cottonmouth had been draped off a branch right over me, he said. We watched it drag its S-shaped body through the brown water. I started shaking, not from cold.) That day in Grandma’s room, with no one in the house to rescue me, I started to tremble at that smell. I shoved past her chair and ran for the kitchen. When Mother came home, Grandma made her spank me. She said she’d caught me going through her drawers trying to steal her ear bobs, which lie I didn’t even bother arguing with. I just followed Lecia’s advice for once and stood still, and sure enough, the whipping was over in a Yankee minute. But I could see a rigid set to Mother’s jaw and feel something mechanical about the whapping of her hand on my rear end. Sometime during that whipping, I began to get rid of Tex and Belinda’s existence—an erasure that held for nineteen years. Some chasm in my skull opened up that morning and swallowed those children so totally that I never even mentioned them to Lecia, who served at that time as a live-in checkpoint for theories relating to Mother. (I later learned that she’d been shown the same pictures by Grandma. She had also promptly forgotten them. In this way, we entered amnesia together.) I knew, of course, that three husbands was a lot. Three husbands crossed the line between a small mistake and a nasty habit. (An often-divorced friend of mine once declared that when you’re saying “I do” for the third or fourth time, you have to admit to yourself that they can’t be entirely at fault.) So two extra kids who’d appeared from a pocket in Grandma’s apron were unfathomable. This doesn’t completely explain my blanking out Tex and Belinda, though, because usually you could convince me of anything. That very year, Lecia had persuaded me—with zero evidence—that I was a robot assembled to serve her and to help with chores. She said I was in constant danger of being turned off if I didn’t work out. I was not, therefore, exactly broke out in brains, particularly when it came to being convinced that I was inadequate, inhuman, or otherwise Not Right. I now know that I couldn’t twig to the fact of those two spare kids because they were lost kids. And if they could be lost—two whole children, born of Mother’s body just like us—so might we be.

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

  Lecia and I had been playing Jewelry Store in the backseat, which involved my giving her real money for fake jewels. She kept a red fruitcake tin stuffed with buttons of every conceivable shape and material, including rhinestone and brass love knots. I had started the trip with a stack of dimes I’d collected in a glass cigar tube from Daddy, and a click-open plastic Barbie purse full of pennies. By Fort Worth, Lecia had taken nearly all the dimes by arguing that since they were littler, they were worth less. That was the kind of transaction that marked all our games. (Lecia went on to make an adult fortune selling whole-life insurance in Houston.) Anyway, I was down to pennies, and she was down to trying to pawn off plain white plastic buttons as pearl when the afternoon sky first went dark. Out in West Texas, the sky is bigger than other places. There are no hills or trees. The only building is an occasional filling station, and those are scarce. How the westward settlers decided to keep moving in the face of all that nothing, I can’t imagine. The scenery is blank, and the sky total. Even today you can drive for hours with nothing but the hypnotic rise and slope of telephone lines to remind you that you’re moving. So the sky getting dark was a major event, as if somebody had dropped a giant tarp over all that impossibly bright wideness. You could still see the water mirage lying in the middle of the blacktop road a ways ahead, but the sky it reflected had somehow gone all dirty brown. We looked up. Lecia pointed out a dark cloud racing toward us. It was strange. We’d seen tornadoes, but this was different. Instead of blue-black, this cloud was the color of an old penny, and it was wider, slower, not at all cone-shaped. It still seemed far off when handfuls of locusts began to spatter against the windshield like hail. You could hear the hum of wings as the cloud got closer. Then the world outside the car went black so fast it seemed the sun had been blown out. It didn’t start slowly and build the way normal storms do. By the time Mother got us pulled over, I was crying, and the cloud had more or less enveloped the whole car in a deep crust, a sheet of locusts. They made an eerie roachlike clacking noise that multiplied about a million times in my head. Mother scrambled to close off the side vents, but some of them got inside anyway. That set her saying Oh my God oh my God and me screaming as I hunkered down in the black well of the backseat in the duck-and-cover posture we’d learned for the atom bomb. Lecia was quicker to the take than we were. She started smacking locusts with her flip-flop, calling each one a name: “Take that, you sonofabitch ,” she’d say.

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

  Once I wandered outside, and Daddy had to come chasing after me. That fall my school career didn’t go much better. I got suspended from my second-grade class twice, first for biting a kid named Phyllis who wasn’t, to my mind, getting her scissors out fast enough to comply with the teacher, then again for breaking my plastic ruler over the head of a boy named Sammy Joe Tyler, whom I adored. A pale blue knot rose through the blond stubble of his crew cut. Both times I got sent to the principal, a handsome ex-football coach named Frank Doleman who let Lecia and me call him Uncle Frank. (Lecia and I had impressed Uncle Frank by both learning to read pretty much without instruction before we were three. Mother took us each down to his office in turn, and we each dutifully read the front page of the day’s paper out loud to him, so he could be sure it wasn’t just some story we’d memorized.) He let me stay in his office playing chess all afternoon with whoever wandered in. He loved pitting me against particularly lunkheaded fifth- and sixth-grade boys who’d been sent down for paddlings they never got. He’d try to use my whipping them at chess to make them nervous about how dumb they were. “Now this little bitty old second-grader here took you clean in six plays. Don’t you reckon you need to be listening to Miss Vilimez instead of cutting up?” When Mrs. Hess led me solemnly down the hall to Frank Doleman’s office, I would pretend to cry, but thought instead about Brer Rabbit as he was being thrown into the briar patch where he’d been born and raised, and screaming Please don’t throw me in that briar patch! At the end of both days, Uncle Frank drove me home himself in his white convertible, the waves of kids parting as we passed and me flapping my hand at all of them like I was Jackie Kennedy. It was also at this time that I came to be cut out of the herd of neighborhood kids by an older boy. Before that happened there was almost something sacred about that pack of kids we got folded into. No matter how strange our family was thought to be, we blended into the tribe when we all played together. For some reasons, I always remember us running barefoot down the football field together, banking and turning in a single unit like those public-TV airplane shots of zebras in Africa. But obviously I had some kind of fear or hurt on me that an evil boy could smell. He knew I could be drawn aside and scared or hurt a little extra. When he came for me, I went with him, and my going afterwards felt as if it had been long before plotted out by something large and invisible—God, I guess.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Fundamentalisms are also often preoccupied by the horror of modern warfare and violence. The shocking slaughter in Europe during the First World War could only be the beginning of the end, the evangelicals concluded; these times of unprecedented carnage must be the battles foretold in the book of Revelation. There was a deep anxiety about the centralization of modern society and anything approaching world rule. In the new League of Nations, they saw the revival of the Roman Empire predicted in Revelation, the abode of Antichrist.4 Fundamentalists now saw themselves grappling with satanic forces that would shortly destroy the world. Their spirituality was defensive and filled with a paranoid terror of the sinister influence of the Catholic minority; they even described American democracy as the “most devilish rule this world has ever seen.”5 The American fundamentalists’ chilling scenario of the end time, with its wars, bloodshed, and slaughter, is symptomatic of a deep-rooted distress that cannot be assuaged by cool rational analysis. In less stable countries, it would be all too easy for a similar malaise, despair, and fear to erupt in physical violence. Their horrified recoil from the violence of the First World War also led American fundamentalists to veto modern science. They became obsessed with evolutionary theory. There was a widespread belief that German wartime atrocities were the result of the nation’s devotion to Darwinian social theory, according to which existence was a brutal, godless struggle in which only the strongest should survive. This was, of course, a vulgar distortion of Darwin’s hypothesis, but at a time when people were trying to make sense of the bloodiest war in human history, evolution seemed to symbolize everything that was most ruthless in modern life. These ideas were particularly disturbing to small-town Americans who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist elite—almost as though they were being colonized by a foreign power. This distress came to a head in the famous Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, when the fundamentalists, represented by the Democratic politician William Jennings Bryan, tried to defend the state legislature’s prohibition of the teaching of evolution in the public schools. They were opposed by the rationalist campaigner Clarence Darrow, supported by the newly founded American Civil Liberties Union.6 Even though the state law was upheld, Bryan’s bumbling performance under Darrow’s sharp interrogation thoroughly discredited the fundamentalists’ cause.

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

  “I bethought myself that I had totally forgotten my baggage. I took out my check, and then decided it was not worth while to return. I continued on my way. In spite of all my efforts to remember, I cannot at this moment make out why I was in such a hurry. I know only that I was conscious that a serious and menacing event was approaching in my life. It was a case of real auto-suggestion. Was it so serious because I thought it so? Or had I a presentiment? I do not know. Perhaps, too, after what has happened, all previous events have taken on a lugubrious tint in my memory. “I arrived at the steps. It was an hour past midnight. A few isvotchiks were before the door, awaiting customers, attracted by the lighted windows (the lighted windows were those of our parlor and reception room). Without trying to account for this late illumination, I went up the steps, always with the same expectation of something terrible, and I rang. The servant, a good, industrious, and very stupid being, named Gregor, opened the door. The first thing that leaped to my eyes in the hall, on the hat-stand, among other garments, was an overcoat. I ought to have been astonished, but I was not astonished. I expected it. ‘That’s it!’ I said to myself. “When I had asked Gregor who was there, and he had named Troukhatchevsky, I inquired whether there were other visitors. He answered: ‘Nobody.’ I remember the air with which he said that, with a tone that was intended to give me pleasure, and dissipate my doubts. ‘That’s it! that’s it!’ I had the air of saying to myself. ‘And the children?’ “‘Thank God, they are very well. They went to sleep long ago.’ “I scarcely breathed, and I could not keep my jaw from trembling. “Then it was not as I thought. I had often before returned home with the thought that a misfortune had awaited me, but had been mistaken, and everything was going on as usual. But now things were not going on as usual. All that I had imagined, all that I believed to be chimeras, all really existed. Here was the truth. “I was on the point of sobbing, but straightway the demon whispered in my ear: ‘Weep and be sentimental, and they will separate quietly, and there will be no proofs, and all your life you will doubt and suffer.’ And pity for myself vanished, and there remained only the bestial need of some adroit, cunning, and energetic action. I became a beast, an intelligent beast. “‘No, no,’ said I to Gregor, who was about to announce my arrival. ‘Do this, take a carriage, and go at once for my baggage. Here is the check. Start.’

• From My People (2022)

  Although he stressed that arrest records were not his goal, he was critical of “people who try to take prisoners away from the police officer. “I can’t understand why people say, ‘don’t take the brother,’ when he has just committed a crime against another brother,” he said. Responding to a suggestion made by many community residents that there be more black policemen who live in the area and who presumably would then understand their problems better, Inspector Cawley, who is white and lives in Floral Park, Queens, said he could “appreciate their concern.” Of the three commanders within his division—it consists of the 25th, the 28th, and the 32d Precincts—one, Captain William Bracey of the 32d, is black. A black policeman, the inspector said, “has one or two advantages going for him immediately.” But a police officer, “well trained, regardless of color or where he lives, can deliver the services needed,” he said. Having an officer with enough time so that he has the opportunity to meet with residents about their concerns is what the inspector considers the critical ingredient. The inspector’s plans include the assessment of the manpower needs of the division to insure that we are getting our fair share of the total resources, as well as to try and make more time for policemen to get out of their cars and speak to residents. “A police service,” Inspector Cawley said, “—that’s how the police department has to be looked upon—not as a force, but as a service.” Talking to Young People About TrumpThe New Yorker NOVEMBER 18, 2016 Last week, the day after the election of Donald Trump, I found myself recalling the words of Rodney King, spoken during the 1992 Los Angeles riots: “Can we all get along?” A black former congressman had told me about waking up his nine-year-old daughter that morning. When she heard the news, she began crying, fearful in ways she couldn’t exactly articulate, but fearful nevertheless. The following day, I traveled to Pennsylvania and met with two groups of young people, some her age and some a bit older, and, curious as to whether the nine-year-old’s reaction was unique, I began by relaying the story and asking how many of them had felt the same way. Most of the young people, in both groups, raised their hands, eager to share their anxieties and their fears. The meetings were very different in some respects. One took place at a charter school with an emphasis on art, with students dressed in uniforms in a setting designed to highlight their often amazing artistic talents. The other was at a Boys and Girls Club, populated by students who needed a place to hang out after school until their working parents could come and fetch them. But there was a common denominator: except, I believe, for one child at the charter school, all the students were African American.

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

  Whereupon I receive fifty strokes, all of them directed between the region bordered by the shoulders and the small of the back. He dashes to my comrade and treats her likewise: we pronounce not a word; nothing may be heard but a few stifled groans, we have enough strength to hold back our tears. There was no indication as to what degree the monk's passions were inflamed; he periodically excited himself briskly, but nothing rose. Returning now to me, he spent a moment eyeing those two fatty globes then still intact but about to undergo torture in their turn; he handled them, he could not prevent himself from prying them apart, tickling them, kissing them another thousand times. "Well," said he, "be courageous..." and a hail of blows descended upon these masses, lacerating them to the thighs. Extremely animated by the starts, the leaps, the grinding of teeth, the contortions the pain drew from me, examining them, battening upon them rapturously, he comes and expresses, upon my mouth which he kisses with fervor, the sensations agitating him.... "This girl entertains me," he cries, "I have never flogged another with as much pleasure," and he goes back to his niece whom he treats with the same barbarity; there remained the space between the upper thigh and the calves and this he struck with identical vehemence: first the one of us, then the other. "Ha !" he said, now approaching me, "let's change hands and visit this place here"; now wielding a cat-o'-ninetails he gives me twenty cuts from the middle of my belly to the bottom of my thighs; then wrenching them apart, he slashed at the interior of the lair my position bares to his whip. "There it is," says he, "the bird I am going to pluck": several thongs having, through the precautions he had taken, penetrated very deep, I could not suppress my screams. "Well, well!" said the villain, "I must have found the sensitive area at last; steady there, calm yourself, we'll visit it a little more thoroughly"; however, his niece is put in the same posture and treated in the same manner; once again he reaches the most delicate region of a woman's body; but whether through habit, or courage, or dread of incurring treatment yet worse, she has enough strength to master herself, and about her nothing is visible beyond a few shivers and spasmodic twitchings. However, there was by now a slight change in the libertine's physical aspect, and although things were still lacking in substance, thanks to strokings and shakings a gradual improvement was being registered.

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

  But the deep fear that draws all air from your lungs and sends the world into slow motion hadn’t pulled on me for weeks. I’d submerged it till that very instant when Lecia took her place beside me looking wholly empty of herself. She was telling me to run. But in her pass-the-butter voice. Run across the street to the Janisches’ house. Mother was fixing to shoot Hector right that second unless I could fetch some grown-up to stop it. Sure enough, Mother had shifted into her ghost self, holding that very real gun with a hand so pale you could practically see through it. She didn’t hear Lecia tell me to go fetch somebody, for she was past hearing. Her lips moved in a whispery way, as if she was praying. But her gun arm stayed straight. Her hair was spiky wild, and her jaw set. She didn’t move to stop me dashing by. I might have been a cockroach that scuttled past for all the notice she paid. And I didn’t look back. I couldn’t have seen my sister laying so deep in her ten-year-old body, stared at by that silver pistol’s round and careless black eye, and still been able to run off. Or so I tell myself outside, where time starts to shift. The night itself seems heavy. It drags against my shoulders and keeps me from running as fast as I’m able. The fresh snow on the street I step into is blue as pool water. I don’t even feel my bare feet go cold in that snow. Nor do I note under my white gown the constellation of gooseflesh that must break out down my stick legs. Even the fact that my legs are pumping doesn’t fully register. I can only see the still street bob, which phenomenon reassures me that I’m running. The Janisches’ mahogany front door with its wreath of holly jerks closer to me one stride at a time, in stop-action. Their porch light is gold, their doorbell lit like a bright period at the end of some long dark sentence I’ve crossed. The finger pressing that doorbell must be mine, for there are my nails, square, with slivers of dirt underneath. A shape moves across the window lace. Then, where the door was, there’s a rectangle of light holding Mrs. Janisch in her blue duster. What I tell her is a mystery, though I can feel my jaw working. It’s sharp cold, I think, for my very words to get eaten soon as they leave my mouth, before I can even hear them myself. Then Mr. Janisch appears wiping a clear path through the shaving cream on his jaw with a gym towel. He’s wearing a T-shirt and dress slacks. And dangling around his neck is a tin medal of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.