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 Crazy Brave (2012)

  Though my stepfather was a house painter, our house was peeling and appeared ragged and in need of repair. The yard was barren and wild. Our house was noticeably the shabbiest house on the block. I could have taken initiative with the yard, but I always lost energy when I stepped into the aura of the house. I struggled with lethargy and often had to force myself through chores and obligations. I felt a warning in my gut. My stepfather’s car was in the drive. I tried to disarm the knowing. The knowing was a powerful warning system that stepped forth when I was in danger. Still, I often disregarded it. I’d been asked by a boy a few years older than me to go for a walk behind the grounds of the teen recreation center. My knowing said to me in a loud, distinct voice, Do not walk alone with this boy. To do so would put you in danger. I must be imagining things, I said to myself. I walked with him. He knocked me down and attempted to rape me. Someone came on us and I leaped up and got away. The knowing was always right. It could never be disarmed. It stood watch over me. Still, I tried. I told the knowing to remember that my stepfather could be nice sometimes. He sang show tunes to my mother. The knowing didn’t respond. Truth does not lower itself to small-time arguments or skirmishes. But, I argued with myself, you never knew what would happen. He could uncover or invent a transgression of weeks or months before and off would come his belt if he needed an excuse to hit you. Or, once when I thought I would get in trouble for climbing into the space between the ceiling and the roof and falling through into the living room, he just laughed. I hugged my bag under my arm, to protect the play pages. When I opened the door, he stood, smiling, with his belt in his hand. He yanked me into the house, out of view of the neighbors. “This isn’t fair. My mother told me I could go!” I cried as he swung the belt. Because I protested, he hit me for a long time. He grounded me for a month and forbade me to try out for the school play. I had work to do at home. I had to take the bus with everyone else. I didn’t care anymore what happened to me. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] It wasn’t long after that I was invited by a classmate to go to a party. I barely knew her, and I didn’t have a good feeling about her or the situation. But I wanted to go. I wanted to have some semblance of a normal teenage life. I lied to my mother and said I was going to my friend’s house to study for the evening. I didn’t want to lie.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Christian doctrine of the future life differs from the heathen, and to a less extent also from the Jewish, in the following important points: (a) It gives to the belief in a future state the absolute certainty of divine revelation, sealed by the fact of Christ’s resurrection, and thereby imparts to the present life an immeasurable importance, involving endless issues. (b) It connects the resurrection of the body with the immortality of the soul, and thus gives concrete completion to the latter, and saves the whole individuality of man from destruction. (c) It views death as the punishment of sin, and therefore as something terrible, from which nature shrinks. But its terror has been broken, and its sting extracted by Christ. (d) It qualifies the idea of a future state by the doctrine of sin and redemption, and thus makes it to the believer a state of absolute holiness and happiness, to the impenitent sinner a state of absolute misery. Death and immortality are a blessing to the one, but a terror to the other; the former can hail them with joy; the latter has reason to tremble. (e) It gives great prominence to the general judgment, after the resurrection, which determines the ultimate fate of all men according to their works done in this earthly life. But we must distinguish, in this mysterious article, what is of faith, and what is private opinion and speculation. The return of Christ to judgment with its eternal rewards and punishment is the centre of the eschatological faith of the church. The judgment is preceded by the general resurrection, and followed by life everlasting. This faith is expressed in the oecumenical creeds. The Apostles’ Creed: "He shall come to judge the quick and the dead," and "I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." The Nicene Creed: "He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end." "And we look for the resurrection of the dead, and

• From Trash (1988)

  “The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, and the sense of belief we create from nothing. I used to watch my mama hold off terror with only the edges of her own eyes for a shield, and I still don’t know how she did it. But I am her daughter and have as much muscle in me as she ever did. It’s just that some days I am not strong enough. I stretch myself out a little, and then my own fear pulls me back in. The shaking starts inside. Then I have to stretch myself again. Waxing and waning through my life, maybe I’m building up layers of strength inside. Maybe.” Last night, late, Liz called, asked me to please go out with her for a beer—meet her at the Overpass and talk to her for a few hours. She needed someone to listen to her. Jackie never did anymore, she said. But when we sat down she acted like a stranger, like someone who had come in from out of town and really couldn’t stay long. She was smoking again, Pall Malls out of a hard pack, and lighting them with wooden kitchen matches from a small box. Her red hair looked faded, its dark shine had gone dull and even the blue of her eyes had faded to gray. “It’s wearing me down,” she kept saying. “It’s just fucking wearing me down.” I ordered her a beer and me a glass of wine. When she kept licking her lips and lighting cigarettes one after the other, I started telling her stories. I found myself describing Judy’s hip-grinding routine and the way my new girlfriend Cass would spit in her hand and slide her pool cue up and down while other women took their shots—making both acts equally hilarious and revealing. “Bitches,” Liz pronounced them both. “Like you and me, honey. We’re all pretty bitchy when it comes down to it.” I rubbed my hands in the wine that had trailed down the lip of my glass. “Naw.” She’d downed her beer and signaled for another one. “You and me, we’re the ones they fuck with. We’re something else, taking their shit all the time, their goddamn shit all the time.” I’d sipped my wine and rubbed my neck. “You and Jackie fighting then?” “How’d you guess?” In the dim bar’s lighting, her pale eyes looked charcoal, and she had no smile at all. She was wearing the collar of her dark plaid shirt turned up high against the fringe of her short-cropped hair and she kept pushing up at the back of her head until the hair was standing up stiff and spiky. She looked like one of those desperate women sketched out on the cover of an old Ann Bannon novel, lips and eyes swollen and dark, features all raw and flushed.

• From Trash (1988)

  We are just like her, my sister and I. That March when my sister called, I thought for a moment it was my mama’s voice. The accent was right, and the language—the slow drag of matter-of-fact words and thoughts, but the beaten-down quality wasn’t Mama, couldn’t have been. For a moment I felt as if my hands were gripping old and tender flesh, the skin gone thin from age and wear, my granny’s hands, perhaps, on the day she had stared out at her grandsons and laughed lightly, insisting I take a good look at them. “See, see how the blood thins out.” She spit to the side and clamped a hand down on my shoulder. I turned and looked at her hand, that hand as strong as heavy cord rolled back on itself, my bare shoulder under her hand and the muscles there rising like bubbles in cold milk. I had felt thick and strong beside her, thick and strong and sure of myself in a way I have not felt since. That March when my sister called I felt old; my hands felt wiry and worn, and my blood seemed hot and thin as it rushed through my veins. My sister’s voice sounded hollow; her words vibrated over the phone as if they had iron edges. My tongue locked to my teeth, and I tasted the fear I thought I had put far behind me. “They’re doing everything they can—surgery again this morning and chemotherapy and radiation. He’s a doctor, so he knows, but Jesus ...” “Jesus shit.” “Yeah.” Mama woke up alone with her rage, her grief. “Just what I’d always expected,” she told me later. “You think you know what’s going on, what to expect. You relax a minute and that’s when it happens. Life turns around and kicks you in the butt.” Lying there, she knew they had finally gotten her, the they that had been dogging her all her life, waiting for the chance to rob her of all her tomorrows. Now they had her, her body pinned down under bandages and tubes and sheets that felt like molten lead. She had not really believed it possible. She tried to pull her hands up to her neck, but she couldn’t move her arms. “I was so mad I wanted to kick holes in the sheets, but there wasn’t no use in that.” When my stepfather came in to sit and whistle his sobs beside the bed, she took long breaths and held her face tight and still. She became all eyes, watching everything from a place far off inside herself.

• From Trash (1988)

  My Uncle Matthew used to beat my Aunt Raylene. The twins, Mark and Luke, swore to stop him, pulled him out in the yard one time, throwing him between them like a loose bag of grain. Uncle Matthew screamed like a pig coming up for slaughter. I got both my sisters in the toolshed for safety, but I hung back to watch. Little Bo came running out of the house, off the porch, feetfirst into his daddy’s arms. Uncle Matthew started swinging him like a scythe, going after the bigger boys, Bo’s head thudding their shoulders, their hips. Afterward, Bo crawled around in the dirt, the blood running out of his ears and his tongue hanging out of his mouth, while Mark and Luke finally got their daddy down. It was a long time before I realized that they never told anybody else what had happened to Bo. Randall tried to teach Lucille and me to wrestle. “Put your hands up.” His legs were wide apart, his torso bobbing up and down, his head moving constantly. Then his hand flashed at my face. I threw myself back into the dirt, lay still. He turned to Lucille, not noticing that I didn’t get up. He punched at her, laughing. She wrapped her hands around her head, curled over so her knees were up against her throat. “No, no!” he yelled. “Move like her.” He turned to me. “Move.” He kicked at me. I rocked into a ball, froze. “No, no!” He kicked me. I grunted, didn’t move. He turned to Lucille. “You.” Her teeth were chattering but she held herself still, wrapped up tighter than bacon slices. “You move!” he shouted. Lucille just hugged her head tighter and started to sob. “Son of a bitch,” Randall grumbled, “you two will never be any good.” He walked away. Very slowly we stood up, embarrassed, looked at each other. We knew. If you fight back, they kill you. My sister was seven. She was screaming. My stepfather picked her up by her left arm, swung her forward and back. It gave. The arm went around loosely. She just kept screaming. I didn’t know you could break it like that. I was running up the hall. He was right behind me. “Mama! Mama!” His left hand—he was left-handed—closed around my throat, pushed me against the wall, and then he lifted me that way. I kicked, but I couldn’t reach him. He was yelling, but there was so much noise in my ears I couldn’t hear him. “Please, Daddy. Please, Daddy. I’ll do anything, I promise. Daddy, anything you want. Please, Daddy.” I couldn’t have said that. I couldn’t talk around that fist at my throat, couldn’t breathe. I woke up when I hit the floor. I looked up at him. “If I live long enough, I’ll fucking kill you.” He picked me up by my throat again. “What’s wrong with her?” “Why’s she always following you around?” Nobody really wanted answers.

• From Trash (1988)

  When my mama was twenty-five she already had an old woman’s hands, and I feared them. I did not know then what it was that scared me so. I’ve come to understand since that it was the thought of her growing old, of her dying and leaving me alone. I feared those brown spots, those wrinkles and cracks that lined her wrists, ankles, and the soft shadowed sides of her eyes. I was too young to imagine my own death with anything but an adolescent’s high romantic enjoyment; I pretended often enough that I was dying of a wasting disease that would give lots of time for my aunts, uncles, and stepfather to mourn me. But the idea that anything could touch my mother, that anything would dare to hurt her, was impossible to bear, and I woke up screaming the one night I dreamed of her death—a dream in which I tried bodily to climb to the throne of a Baptist god and demand her return to me. I thought of my mama like a mountain or a cave, a force of nature, a woman who had saved her own life and mine, and would surely save us both over and over again. The wrinkles in her hands made me think of earthquakes and the lines under her eyes hummed of tidal waves in the night. If she was fragile, if she was human, then so was I, and anything might happen. If she were not the backbone of creation itself, then fear would overtake me. I could not allow that, would not. My child’s solution was to try to cure my mother of wrinkles in the hope of saving her from death itself. [image file=image_408.jpg] Once, when I was about eight and there was no Jergens lotion to be had, I spooned some mayonnaise out to use instead. Mama leaned forward, sniffed, lay back, and laughed into her hand. “If that worked,” she told me, still grinning, “I wouldn’t have dried up to begin with—all the mayonnaise I’ve eaten in my life.” “All the mayonnaise you’ve spread—like the butter of your smile, out there for everybody,” my stepfather grumbled. He wanted his evening glass of tea, wanted his feet put up, and maybe his neck rubbed. At a look from Mama, I’d run one errand after another until he was settled with nothing left to complain about. Then I’d go back to Mama. But by that time we’d have to start on dinner, and I wouldn’t have any more quiet time with her till a day or two later when I’d rub her feet again.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The first part exhorts unbelievers to repent in view of the impending end of the world, and gives prominence to chiliastic ideas about Antichrist, the return of the Twelve Tribes, the first resurrection, the millennium, and the last judgment. The second part exhorts catechumens and various classes of Christians. The last acrostic which again reminds the reader of the end of the world, is entitled "Nomen Gazaei,"1570 and, if read backwards, gives the name of the author: Commodianus mendicus Christi.1571 2. The second work which was only brought to light in 1852, is an "Apologetic Poem against Jews and Gentiles," and was written about 249. It exhorts them (like the first part of the "Instructions" to repent without delay in view of the approaching end of the world. It is likewise written in uncouth hexameters and discusses in 47 sections the doctrine of God, of man, and of the Redeemer (vers. 89–275); the meaning of the names of Son and Father in the economy of salvation (276–573); the obstacles to the progress of Christianity(574–611); it warns Jews and Gentiles to forsake their religion (612–783), and gives a description of the last things (784–1053). The most interesting part of this second poem is the conclusion. It contains a fuller description of Antichrist than the first poem. The author expects that the end of the world will soon come with the seventh persecution; the Goths will conquer Rome and redeem the Christians; but then Nero will appear as the heathen Antichrist, reconquer Rome, and rage against the Christians three years and a-half; he will be conquered in turn by the Jewish and real Antichrist from the east, who after the defeat of Nero and the burning of Rome will return to Judaea, perform false miracles, and be worshipped by the Jews. At last Christ appears, that is God himself (from the Monarchian standpoint of the author), with the lost Twelve Tribes as his army, which had lived beyond Persia in happy simplicity and virtue; under astounding phenomena of nature he will conquer Antichrist and his host, convert all nations and take possession of the holy city of Jerusalem. The concluding description of the judgment is preserved only in broken fragments. The idea of a double Antichrist is derived from the two beasts of the Apocalypse, and combines the Jewish conception of the Antimessiah, and the heathen Nero-legend. But the remarkable feature is that the second Antichrist is represented as a Jew and as defeating the heathen Nero, as he will be defeated by Christ. The same idea of a double antichrist appears in Lactantius.1572 § 202. Arnobius. (I.) Arnobii (oratoris) adversus Nationes (or Gentes) libri septem. Best ed. by Reifferscheid, Vindob. 1875. (vol. IV. of the "Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum," issued by the Academy of Vienna.) Other editions: by Faustus Sabaeus, Florence 1543 (ed. princeps); Bas. (Frobenius) 1546; Paris 1580, 1666, 1715; Antw. 1582; Rom. 1583; Genev. 1597; Lugd. Bat. 1598, 165l; by Orelli, Lips. 1816; Hildebrand, Halle, 1844; Migne, "Patrol.

• From Trash (1988)

  Jo was wrong about that, though as it turned out we were both grateful she got me to come. Arlene came close to putting out the eye of the orderly who tried to help the nurses strap her down. She did break his nose, and chipped two teeth that belonged to the rent-a-cop who came over to play hero. The nurses fared better, getting away with only a few scratches and one moderately unpleasant bite mark. “I’ll kill you,” Arlene kept screaming. “I’ll fucking kill you all!” Then after a while, “You’re killing me. You’re killing me!” It was Jo who had found Arlene. Baby sister had barely been breathing, her face and hair sour with vomit. Jo called the ambulance, and then poured cold water all over Arlene’s head and shoulders until she became conscious enough to scream. For a day and a half, Jo told me, Arlene was finally who she should have been from the beginning. She cursed with outrage and flailed with wild conviction. “You should have seen it,” Jo told me. By the time I got there, Arlene was going in and out—one minute sobbing and weak and the next minute rearing up to shout. The conviction was just about gone. When she was quiet for a little while, I looked in at her, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. Every breath Arlene drew seemed to suck oxygen out of the room. Then Jack came in the door and it was as if she caught fire at the sight of him. For the first and only time in her life she called him a son of a bitch to his face. “You, you,” she screamed. “You are killing me! Get out. Get out. I’ll rip your dick off if you don’t get the hell out of here.” “She’s gone completely crazy,” Jack told everyone, but it sounded like sanity to me. The psychiatric nurse kept pushing for sedation, but Jo and I fought them on that. Let her scream it out, we insisted. By some miracle they listened to us, and left her alone. We stayed in the hall outside the room, listening to Arlene as she slowly wound herself down. “I did the best I could,” Jack kept saying to the doctor. “You can see what it was like. I just never knew what to do.” Jo and I kept our distance. Neither of us said a word. By the third morning, Arlene was gray-faced and repentant. When we went in to check on her, her eyes would not rise to meet ours. “I’m all right,” she said in a thick hoarse whisper. “And I won’t ever let that happen again.” “Damn pity,” Jo told me later. “That was just about the only time I’ve ever really liked her. Crazy out of her mind, she made sense. Sane, I don’t understand her at all.” “What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked me.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But as luck would have it, the sea was struck by a sudden squall, which sent the chest hurtling into Landolfo’s spar, upending it and inevitably causing Landolfo to lose his grip and go under. When he re-surfaced, he found that he was some distance away from the spar, and was afraid that he would never reach it, for he was exhausted and only his panic was keeping him afloat. He therefore made for the chest, which was quite close at hand, and dragging himself up on its lid, he sprawled across it and held it steady with his arms. And in this fashion, buffeted this way and that by the sea, with nothing to eat and far more to drink than he would have wished, not knowing where he was and seeing nothing but water, he survived for the whole of that day and the following night. By the next day, Landolfo had almost turned into a sponge when, either through the will of God or the power of the wind, he arrived off the coast of the island of Corfu. Clinging grimly to the edges of the chest with both hands, just as we see a man in danger of drowning attaching himself firmly to anything within reach, he was sighted by a peasant woman, who happened to be scouring and polishing her pots and pans in the sand and salt-water.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I cried in pain, in fear of the thoughts stabbing my parents’ minds: She could be crippled the rest of her life. She could die. My father didn’t know what to do. He knew how to fix the car or his truck. He didn’t know how to fix me, his baby girl. After hanging up with the doctor, my mother announced: “We have to take her to the hospital, now.” My father left my side to get the car keys. A neighbor who agreed to stay with my baby brother took instructions from my mother as she tightly rolled up my shivering body in a blanket. I had the chills, and for a moment the chatter of my teeth distracted me. They made a rhythm. The rhythm pleased me. My father carried me to the car to take me to the hospital. Polio was epidemic in the country. It caused paralysis and killed. My parents, the doctor, and the neighbor were frightened. I had entered a world in which everyone spoke softly, with trepidation, as if the sound of the word polio would call it into the house. In my parents’ tribal traditions, the word, if spoken with intent, could call it here. The hospital was a house of strangers. I was undressed and put in a gown, a diaper, and a crib. Not only was I sick, my status had dropped from girl to baby. My parents watched helplessly from a distance. The transfer of power confused me. In this realm my parents were no longer the presiding gods. A nurse in white carried me to a bare room for a spinal tap. I knew it was going to be bad when three people in uniforms came into the room to hold me down. I screamed as a needle went in. The spinal column carries personal essence back and forth between earth and sky. The spine is powerful and vulnerable. The procedure was excruciating. I flailed as much with the fear as with the pain. Worse, I saw my mother’s face across the room as it broke apart with my suffering. I didn’t see my father there. He was standing out in the hallway, smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette. I can still hear the kind voice of a nurse attempting to reassure me by lying to me. “It won’t hurt too much. It will be over soon.” My parents gave me a white stuffed cat, then reluctantly left at the end of visiting hours. I was bereft. The toy didn’t replace my parents, but I needed that token of their love. And I liked cats. My father was of the Tiger clan through his mother. This gave us a special connection with cats. Some of our family understand and speak cat language. Aunt Lois said her father had a black cat he fed special treats from the table. She said she told her father that he loved the cat more than her.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  My mother awakened me from the floor of the closet where I had fallen asleep. I was dreaming I was with my father in his boat at the lake. We couldn’t move through the water because the lake was frozen. I was getting cold. “It’s snowing, baby,” my mother whispered to me as she carried me to the window. My little brother was asleep, curled up on his cot. He looked like one of the delicate angel ornaments. Baby was sucking her hand as she dreamed and appeared to float in her bassinet. There was still no tree, no father. I felt bad about everything. “I’m sorry, Mama.” “Shush,” she cooed as she wiped the window free of frost. “Look at all the snow.” We looked out together into the shining world. There was magic in the whirling pictures the snow made. In the distance I imagined my father dragging home a tree taller than the house. He called out to my mother and me to open the door as he hefted the trunk to his shoulder to bring it back home in time for Christmas. I was four years old when I woke up with muscle stiffness, headache, and nausea—all the symptoms of polio. The o’s of the word polio rolled through my mouth like a game of catch. The word sent hushed fear through the voices of my parents as they moved about me, attempting to alleviate my symptoms. My body was a hurting thing. Though I tried, I could not leave my body by will. I heard my mother on the phone with the doctor, her fear tensing the mother- cord between us. I cried in pain, in fear of the thoughts stabbing my parents’ minds: She could be crippled the rest of her life. She could die. My father didn’t know what to do. He knew how to fix the car or his truck. He didn’t know how to fix me, his baby girl. After hanging up with the doctor, my mother announced: “We have to take her to the hospital, now.” My father left my side to get the car keys. A neighbor who agreed to stay with my baby brother took instructions from my mother as she tightly rolled up my shivering body in a blanket.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  My grandmother used to dream stories as long as novels, said my mother. She used them to get the children into bed at night. They were thrilling and dramatic. She was skillful at timing, ending each episode at a critical juncture so the children were kept in suspense until the next night. My mother says she would think of the story all day long, eager for bedtime. It was a major undertaking to get seven children—six boys and one girl—tucked in at night. If they cooperated, they were rewarded with the next segment in the serial. I can see them lined up together on the floor, wrapped in their pallets of handed-down blankets and quilts in the abandoned two-story house they lived in one winter when the family was destitute. No one else would go near the house, much less live in it, because the house was haunted. The family had no place else to go, and my mother’s father was away working on the railroad. My mother remembers wandering far to gather firewood. It was record- breaking cold that winter and most of the wood nearby had been picked off. To keep warm, the family blocked off most of the rest of the house and stayed in the room with the fireplace. Every night the ghosts of the house would assemble for the party upstairs. My mother said she’d hear the tinkling keys of an old-time piano. Then she would hear the shuffle and slap of the deal of the cards, and the sighs and exclamations of the card players. The same party went on every night. The voices would start at a low, conversational rumble and then build as the night went on and they had more to drink, until a fight would break out. Then someone would fire a gunshot, and then the family would hear the strange bump of a dead body being dragged down the stairs. My mother said it terrified her, no matter how many times it happened. In one story that hides out in the corner of family memory, a man comes home from working on the railroad all winter. It was a rough winter made by swinging a hammer through wind, ice, and rain. He carefully saves money for his family, though he does succumb to a few trips into town to gamble and drink with his friends, to see a woman. He’s not a drinker or gambler by nature. He can take it or leave it. He has seven children at home. When he returns with enough cash to rent a place, buy new shoes for everyone and food, he discovers his wife is pregnant with a baby that is not his child. He beats her in a rage. She miscarries the child. Then he drags her into the path of an oncoming train and holds her

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Meanwhile, the ship itself, though torn open and almost waterlogged, was driven swiftly along by powerful winds until eventually it ran aground on a beach on the island of Majorca. By this time, the only people still aboard were the lady and her female attendants, and they were all lying there like dead creatures, paralysed with terror by the raging tempest. The ship’s impetus was so great that it thrust its way firmly into the sand before coming to rest a there stone’s throw from the shore, and since the wind was no longer able to move it, there it remained for the rest of the night, to be pounded by the sea. By the time it was broad daylight, the storm had abated considerably, and the lady, who was feeling practically half-dead, raised her head and began, weak as she was, to call out to her servants one after another. But it was all to no purpose, because they were too far away to hear. On receiving no response and seeing nobody about, she wondered what on earth had happened, and began to be filled with considerable alarm. She staggered to her feet to discover that her maids of honour and the other women were lying about all over the ship, and she attempted to rouse each of them in turn by calling to them at the top of her voice. But few of them showed any signs of life because they had all been laid low by their terror and the heavings of their stomachs, and her own fears were accordingly increased. Nevertheless, since she was all alone and possessed no idea of her whereabouts, she felt in need of someone to talk to, and so she went round prodding the ones who were still alive and forced them to their feet, only to discover that none of them had any idea what had happened to all the men aboard. And when they saw that the ship was aground and full of water, they all started crying as though they would burst.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  [image "6742.jpg" file=Image00012.jpg] fter we lost my father when my parents divorced, my mother and our family of four children kept going, though we floated in the chaos of unknowing. Our mother worked several jobs. When word got out that our beautiful mother was single, men began showing up to court her. Most she dismissed. We children liked the Indian bull rider missing two fingers best. He showed us how to loop a rope, throw a lasso. We loved the twangy beat of his country guitar, his kind shine. There was an angular preacher who wore black. He smelled sour and lonely. He carried a switch for beating behind his back. My mother did not invite him to return. In fact, she hadn’t invited him at all. The last man who courted our mother was seventeen years older. He charmed her and us. He gave me a pair of skates. He took us for rides that ended in hamburgers and shakes. He sang songs and smiled with his eyes. He’d been watching our mother for some time. He married our mother in a ceremony without us. We moved from our childhood home with its familiar trees, plants, and creatures. We left our friends, our school, and the memories that were rooted there. As we drove away from the house we had known as our own, I disappeared into a cloud of sullen mourning. We moved to a house with four bedrooms that my mother and stepfather found together on “Independence” Street. What irony. In that house I had nightmares and premonitions of evil. The first night there, with unpacked boxes surrounding me in the room I was to share with my sister, I woke up in the midst of a struggle with a dark being. I cried out for my mother. No one came. I remember being reprimanded by my stepfather the next morning. I was never to disturb their sleep in the night again. Any pretense of nice ended there. The next Saturday morning I followed my five-year-old sister’s cries to the kitchen and found her being held aloft by one leg by my stepfather. I froze in terror. My brother closest in age stood with me. “This is what will happen to you if you misbehave.” He swung our sister around. He unbuckled and pulled off his belt in one slick motion. I still see the sweat crescents under the arms of his work shirt. I hear him grunt with the effort as he whips her. When he was done he put her down, then slid the belt back carefully around his girth. His buckle made a satisfied click. Then he went into the living room, back to watching golf on the television. I ran to tell my mother about the belt-buckle marks on the baby’s leg. I imagine our mother hadn’t come out at the sound of the ruckus because she assumed she was finally getting help with disciplining us.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  The divorce and then the move had stirred up her gang of children. We were confused and acting out. She naturally believed that if he was spanking one of us, it was because we needed it. He’d signed on to be her partner in marriage. My mother scooped up her bruised baby, who was hiccuping with tears. When she saw the marks, she was furious. She walked into the living room to confront her husband. I followed close behind her, trying to stay in her shadow so he couldn’t see me. He denied hitting my sister with the belt buckle, though the mark was clearly delineated on her leg. He called me a liar. Then he and my mother went back to their room for the rest of the afternoon. It was the last time he hit my sister, but after that he had it in for me. I begged my mother to leave him. I was still upset about the succession of events that had led us to this house of bad spirits and pain. There were literally hundreds of snakes in the yard. We were in the middle of one of those fairy tales that was rolling toward a nasty end. The pressure kept me up at night. From the time our stepfather married and moved us until the day I left home as a teenager, I kept sentry at night. I would doze lightly or not at all until I heard and saw the sun coming up over the horizon. Then I would sleep. My mother confided that there was no way we could leave. He said he would kill her and her children if she divorced him. He’d leave our bodies in a burning house. He said it would look like an accident. No one would ever know. We both knew he would do it. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] One night I woke up to a scuffle in the living room. My mother had just come in from her weekly date of playing shuffleboard at the bar with her girlfriends. I heard my stepfather grilling her. I heard my mother protesting and weeping. My sister slept peacefully beside me. My brothers were in their room. I wondered if they heard anything. “Who were you with?” my stepfather demanded. “I was partying with my girlfriends. You know I don’t have anyone else.” “If you want to party, we’ll have a party right here.” I wound tighter, ready to leap to save her. I heard him methodically popping open beers with a church key, one after another, and pouring beer down her throat and over her clothes. I heard ripping. My mother kept saying it wouldn’t happen again. It won’t happen again. It won’t happen again. Then it was quiet. It was quiet until dawn, and then I got up for school. After that, my mother’s few girlfriends called or came by only when my stepfather wasn’t around.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  When I returned to my body at dawn, my father showed up at home with smeared lipstick on his white shirt and the terrible anger of a trapped cat inside him. I watched the moon from a distance. It was a slender knife in the winter sky. I hoped the old man couldn’t see me sitting drunk here, beneath his home in the moon. I had to keep from staring at the new student, Lupita. Her perfect skin was café au lait, and her black eyes were elegant like a cat’s. She announced that the first thing she had done when she arrived at school was check out the male population and she was going to give a report. We laughed and leaned forward to listen. “What’s the name of that Sioux guy who paints large canvases with the geometric designs? With the nice smile and perfect back, always running touchdowns between classes?” “John Her Many Horses,” we chimed. Every girl on campus had noticed him. “Now that morsel over there . . .” She motioned to Herbie Nez. He was Navajo and as slim as a girl. “He’s much too pretty. I could eat him up in one bite,” she teased. Herbie’s hearing was like a finely cut crystal and tuned into everything, even the songs and cries of spirits who hung around the school. He could hear the cries of children dragged in the early years to the school against their will. Herbie looked over at us and batted his eyelashes. We all laughed together and downed the next round. Then suddenly our party was over. The dorm patrol surprised us in the nearly moonless night. We scattered across the grounds into the dark to save ourselves from detention, restriction, and being sent back home. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. By the time I made it back to our room, my roommate had already been caught, tried, and judged and was packing her bags to go home. She was the first that semester to be kicked out of school for drinking. She was to be the object lesson for all of us. Her family came after breakfast the next morning, just as a light rain blew in over the mountains. We all watched apprehensively from the dorm living room as her father stiffly lifted her suitcases into their truck to take her back to the reservation. When she climbed in next to her mother and brothers and sisters, she turned and waved a heavy goodbye. That night Georgette Romero woke up the whole dorm. First I heard screams and then footsteps running down the hall toward my room, which was in the farthest wing. Lupita saw everything, she told me later, because she was up writing a letter to her mother at four in the morning. When Georgette ran by, Lupita saw her being chased by a ghost. Her Apache roommates refused to let her back into their room and burned cedar to dispel the evil.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  could not find my voice. In all the years of the chase, I had never come to this place. I heard a congested, snuffling breathing. The monster rose up before me. I saw him for the first time. The horror transfixed me. I had no room in my mind for such a being. I realized how tired I was of the chase, of all the years of the chase. Just when I was about to give up, the knowing reminded me that I knew how to fly. I thought fly, and I leapt to the ceiling of the white room. I felt safe. Then the monster flew up. There was nothing else I could do. With a sudden, unexpected grace, all the fear within me escaped. There was no panic. I was a lightness I had never experienced before in my life. The monster put his hand to me. It did not touch me. He disappeared. I was free. Free. Free. I carried that dream back through several layers of consciousness, to where I stood in the future, with a stack of poems and a saxophone in my hands. That night I wrote this poem. It is one of my first poems. I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you as myself. I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my children. You are not my blood anymore. I give you back to the soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children, raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters. I give you back to those who stole the food from our plates when we were starving. I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close. I release you I release you I release you

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She said coldly: ‘If you’re going because of me, because you imagine that I’m frightened — then stay. I assure you I’m not in the least afraid; here and now I defy you to take her from me!’ And even as she said this she marvelled at herself, for she was afraid, terribly afraid of Martin. He flushed at the quiet contempt in her voice, which roused all the combative manhood in him: ‘ You think that Mary doesn’t love me, but you’re wrong.’ ‘Very well then, prove that I’m wrong!’ she told him. They stared at each other in bitter hostility for a moment, then Stephen said more gently: “ You don’t mean to insult me by what you propose, but I won’t consent to your going, Martin. You think that I can’t hold the woman I love against you, because you’ve got an advantage over me and over the whole of my kind. I accept that challenge — I must accept it if I’m to remain at all worthy of Mary.’ He bowed his head: ‘ It must be as you wish.’ Then he sud- denly began to talk rather quickly: ‘ Stephen, listen, I hate what I’m going to say, but by God, it’s got to be said to you somehow! You’re courageous and fine and you mean to make good, but life 492 THE WELL OF LONELINESS with you is spiritually murdering Mary. Can’t you see it? Can’t you realize that she needs all the things that it’s not in your power to give her? Children, protection, friends whom she can respect and who’ll respect her — don’t you realize this, Stephen? A few may survive such relationships as yours, but Mary Llewellyn won’t be among them. She’s not strong enough to fight the whole world, to stand up against persecution and insult; it will drive her down, it’s begun to already — already she’s been forced to turn to people like Wanda. I know what I’m saying, I’ve seen the thing — the bars, the drinking, the pitiful defiance, the horrible, useless wast- age of lives — well, I tell you it’s spiritual murder for Mary. Pd have gone away because you’re my friend, but before I went I’'d have said all this to you; I’d have begged and implored you to set Mary free if you love her. Pd have gone on my knees to you, Stepheni ai He paused, and she heard herself saying quite calmly: ‘ You don’t understand, I have faith in my writing, great faith; some day I shall climb to the top and that will compel the world to accept me for what I am. It’s a matter of time, but I mean to succeed for Mary’s sake.’ ‘God pity you!’ he suddenly blurted out. ‘ Your triumph, if it comes, will come too late for Mary.’

• From Trash (1988)

  The lights were dimmed way down and the television set provided most of the illumination. The stair-stepper was set up close to the TV, and my mouth went dry when I saw my little sister. She was braced between the side rails, arms extended rigidly and head hanging down between her arms. I watched her legs as they trembled and lifted steadily, up and up and up. A shiver went through me. I tried to think of something to say, some way to get her off those steps. Arlene’s head lifted, and I saw her face. Cheeks flushed red; eyes squeezed shut. Her open mouth gasped at the cold filtered air. She was crying, but inaudibly, her features rigid with strain and tightened to a grotesque mask. She looked like some animal in a trap, tearing herself and going on—up and up and up. I watched her mouth working, curses visible on the dry cracked lips. With a low grunt, she picked up her speed and dropped her head again. I stepped back into the darkened doorway. I did not want to have to speak, did not want to have to excuse seeing her like that. It was bad enough to have seen. But I have never understood my little sister more than I did in that moment—never before realized how much alike we really were. Jack has been sober for more than a decade, something Jo and I found increasingly hard to believe. Mama boasted of how proud she was of him. Her Jack didn’t go to AA or do any of those programs people talk about. Her Jack did it on his own. “Those AA people—they ask forgiveness,” Jo said once. “They make amends.” She cackled at the idea, and I smiled. Jack asking forgiveness was about as hard to imagine as him staying sober. For years we teased each other, “You think it will last?” Then in unison, we would go, “Naaa!” Neither of us can figure out how it has lasted, but Jack has stayed sober, never drinking. Of course, he also never made amends. “For what?” he said. For what? “I did the best I could with all those girls,” Jack told the doctor, the night Arlene was carried into the emergency room raving and kicking. It was the third and last time she mixed vodka and sleeping pills, and only a year or so after Jack first got sober, the same year I was working up in Atlanta and could fly down on short notice. Jo called me from the emergency room and said, “Get here fast, looks like she an’t gonna make it this time.” Jo was wrong about that, though as it turned out we were both grateful she got me to come. Arlene came close to putting out the eye of the orderly who tried to help the nurses strap her down.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  In those earliest years, before language, I brought back images of sarcophagi in Egypt. I carried long story sequences of those times, which I do not remember now. One of the oldest stories took place in lower Nubia and involved a very cruel imprisonment. People were literally buried alive, standing up. I can still see the rows of eyes looking out. They haunted me for many nights. I can still see them in a stark, unrelenting sunlight, suffering without water. They were there because they did not agree with the prevailing government. And I visited the moon. My teacher or guardian sometimes accompanied me, or met me there. This kind of story travel was normal for me. I often felt more awake in my dreaming life than I did in this corporeal reality. I still do. My travel through story realms stopped when I started public school. It was also at this time that I began attending an evangelical church. Church members caught us as we left the doors of the public school, giving out candy suckers attached to fliers advertising vacation Bible school. I wanted more candy. I was always up for stories. In church I was taught that anything visionary on a personal level, especially in girls or women, was evil and most likely of the devil. I became fearful of those abilities. I closed the door. In the last long summer dusk before I started elementary school, I was playing in the yard with my brother and the neighbor children. There was no end to that day; it is still dusk in memory. I was five years old. I was swinging in the trees, jumping over the gas meter. There were somersaults, tag, bees, clover, the red porch, and the possibility of watermelon and homemade ice cream. There was scramble of ball, running and tackling. There were horned toads, toads to give you warts, June bugs and lightning bugs. There were snakes to find in the grass. I liked their writhing aliveness, their black no-question eyes, and their tongues that flashed like lightning. They smelled like cool melon, stronger toward dusk and dew. And then my mother interrupted the party with a command: “Joy! Come in here right now and put on a shirt.” I bristled with injustice. “Why doesn’t my brother have to come in and put on a shirt?”