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 Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  It is the same with touch. Everyone must have felt the sensible quality change under his hand, as sudden con tact with something moist or hairy, in the dark, awoke a shock of disgust or fear which faded into calm recognition of some familiar object? Even so small a thing as a crumb of potato on the table-cloth, which we pick up, thinking it a crumb of bread, feels horrible for a few moments to our fancy, and different from what it is. Weight or muscular feeling is a sensation; yet who heard the anecdote of some one to whom Sir Humphry Davy showed the metal sodium which he had just discovered? "Bless me, how heavy it is!" said the man; showing that his idea of what metals as a, class ought to be had falsified the sensation he derived from a very light substance. In the sense of hearing, similar mistakes abound. I have already mentioned the hallucinatory effect of mental images of very faint sounds, such as distant clock-strokes (above, p. 71). But even when stronger sensations of sound have been present, everyone must recall some experience in which they have altered their acoustic character as soon as the intellect referred them to a different source. The other day a friend was sitting in my room, when the clock, which has a rich low chime, began to strike. "Hollo!" said he, "hear that hand-organ in the garden," and was surprised at finding the real source of the sound. I had myself some years ago a very striking illusion of the sort. Sitting reading late one night, I suddenly heard a most formidable noise proceeding from the upper part of the house, which it seemed to fill. It ceased, and in a moment renewed itself. I went into the hall to listen, but it came no more. Resuming my seat in the room, however, there it was again, low, mighty, alarming, like a rising flood or the avant-courier of an awful gale. It came from all space. Quite startled, I again went into the hall, but it had already ceased once more. On returning a second time to the room, I discovered that it was nothing but the breathing of a little Scotch terrier which lay asleep on the door. The note-worthy thing is that as soon as I recognized what it was, I was compelled to think it a different sound, and could not then hear it as I had heard it a moment before. In the anecdotes given by Delbœuf and Reid, this was probably also the case, though it is not so stated. Reid says: "I remember that once lying abed, and having been put into a fright, I heard my own heart beat; but I took it to be one knocking at the door, and arose and opened the door oftener than once, before I discovered that the sound was in my own breast." (Inquiry, chap. IV). Delbœuf's story is as follows:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "I was reading a newspaper, and the indication of the approaching delirium was an inability to keep my mind fixed on the narrative. Directly I lay down upon a sofa there appeared before my eyes several rows of human hands, which oscillated for a moment, revolved and then changed to spoons. The same motions were repeated, the objects changing to wheels, tin soldiers, lamp-posts, brooms, and countless other absurdities. This stage lasted about ten minutes, and during that time it is safe to say that I saw at least a thousand different objects. These whirling images did not appear like the realities of life, but had the character of the secondary images seen in the eye after looking at some brightly-illuminated object. A mere suggestion from the person who was with me in the room was sufficient to call up an image of the thing suggested, while without suggestion there appeared all the common objects of life and many unreal monstrosities, which it is absolutely impossible to describe, and which seemed to be creations of the brain. "The character of the symptoms changed rapidly. A sort of wave seemed to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse was beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising considerable will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 135 to the minute. "I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop. "There were moments of apparent lucidity, when it seemed as if I could see within myself, and watch the pumping of my heart. A strange fear came over me, a certainty that I should never recover from the effects of the opiate, which was as quickly followed by a feeling of great interest in the experiment, a certainty that the experience was the most novel and exciting that I had ever been through. "My mind was in an exceedingly impressionable state. Any place thought of or suggested appeared with all the distinctness of the reality. I thought of the Giant's Causeway in Staffa, and instantly I stood within the portals of Fingal's Cave. Great basaltic columns rose on all aides, while huge wares rolled through the chasm and broke in silence upon the rocky shore. Suddenly there was a roar and blast of sound, and the word 'Ishmaral' was echoing up the cave. At the enunciation of this remarkable word the great columns of basalt changed into Whirling clothes pins and I laughed aloud at the absurdity.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o'clock in the evening I went into the dining room to fix a cup of tea, and on turning from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the table before the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the gas, I saw standing with his hand clasped to his side in true military fashion a soldier of about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing eyes looking directly into mine. He wore a small cap with standing feather; his costume was also of a soldierly style. He did not strike me as being a spirit, ghost, or anything uncanny, only a living man; but after gazing for fully a minute I realized that it was nothing of earth, for he neither moved his eyes nor his body, and in looking closely I could see the fire beyond. I was of course startled, and yet did not run out of the room. I felt stunned. I walked out rapidly, however, and turning to the servant in the hall asked her if she saw anything. She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw nothing." Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case: "In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1888, I will inflict on you a letter. "On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1888, I was in———-, where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulæ. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her. She was, by the way, in B——, some fifty miles from me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  There are so many birds in the sky that by morning, it is still night. Ben shouts, points at a bird with a meloning belly, so big it butts out the sun. Behind us, in front of the house, the road is rearing and bucking into a river, asphalt dissolving to ink, a flood reaching our feet. We wear the river around our ankles. It rises between our legs, splitting open in birth. A tail breaches the surface, legs wading after it. Out of the riverroad the tiger runs to us brightwet mouth wider than night calling Mother mothermothermother For MaMa ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my family (my Sega World team!). To my mother: You’re the best and most inventive storyteller I know, and thank you for all the laughter and the gossip. Thank you to my agent Julia Kardon for being my first supporter. You told me during our first phone call that we’d be team Year of the Tiger, and I’m so grateful to have you rooting for me. Thank you to my editors, Victory Matsui and Nicole Counts. Victory: Thank you for leading me to the tail and the holes, and for being the best reader I could possibly imagine. You asked me what my characters desired, and in writing those desires, I learned what I wanted, too. Nicole: Thank you for midwifing this story into the world, and for being the most incredible advocate. Your enthusiasm, generosity, and support mean everything to me. Whenever I doubt myself, I think about your comments in the margins of my manuscript. Thank you to everyone on the One World team for their support and brilliance: Chris Jackson, Cecil Flores, and so many others. Thank you to Dennis Ambrose for his copyediting expertise. And my deepest gratitude to Andrea Lau for designing the inside of the book, and to Michael Morris for giving me the cover of my dreams. Thank you to Rachel Rokicki, Claire Strickland, Jess Bonet, and the entire publicity and marketing team—your enthusiasm and creativity are an inspiration to me. Thank you to Mikaela Pedlow for your passion and support—I’m so grateful to the Harvill Secker team for their warm reception. Thank you to Deborah Sun De La Cruz and the Hamish Hamilton team—your enthusiasm for this book has buoyed me. My deep gratitude to Mei Lum and the entire W.O.W. family for welcoming me and for showing me the power of storytelling and intergenerational community. Thank you to Rattawut Lapcharoensap for your advice, support, and for all of our conversations, literary and otherwise—you saw things in my work that I didn’t even know were there. Thank you to Jennifer Tseng for reading a very messy early draft and seeing so much in it. Many, many thanks to Rachel Eliza Griffiths for reading my very first essay and telling me to write a whole book. I did, and it’s all because you believed I could. Thank you to Marilyn Chin, whose book made this one possible.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  They cursed gravity as thievery. I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay. _ On Sundays, our mother woke us up with the end of her broom to clean every room, saran-wrapping the sofa and spitting on the windows to lubricate the light that entered them. To keep my language clean: gargle saltwater twice a week. To keep your teeth from leaving you on wings: tally them every night with your tongue. She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife in the sink as if auditioning to be its blade. We can never be clean enough for this country, she said. Weekly, my father accused her of loving the apartment better than her husband, of kneeling to clean but never kneeling for him. My mother said that keeping a clean home was a sign of wealth and keeping a husband was a sign of stupidity . When my father raised his hand, my mother always raised something else—a vase, a chopstick, a sofa cushion—not to deflect the blow, but to meet it midair, to return it. When my father took off his belt, we held on to the other end to anchor it, give back its gravity. Sometimes he beat us with it just to hear us beg him to stop. This is the only thing I can give you, he said. Not money or a house. Just this, his hands overflowing with us, just this: his mercy. Some Sundays, after my mother finished scrubbing every seat in the apartment that had fraternized with our asses, my father taught us to make kites with rice paper and disposable chopsticks and twine, our arms acting as spools. He told us to draw eyes onto our kites, or else they’d be blind to the path of their own flight. In the backyard, the kites tugged me onto my toes, the paper wings so thin the stars teethed through them. My father told me stories of flying over a salt lake, his kite slitting the sky’s belly, the winds so strong they could hike a child up onto a cloud. My father tethered me by stepping on my feet. While my brother punctured his kites on trees and powerlines, the string lurching out of his hands, I could fly for hours, even at night, my paper kite a second moon, a man-made light. My father stayed up with me and watched. He told me that kites were once used for war. Once, an approaching army set up camp just outside the city.

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

  While this confusion of ideas was passing in my head, and I sat pensively by the fire, with my eyes brimming with tears, my neck still bare, and my cap fallen off in the struggle, so that my hair was in the disorder you may guess, the villain’s lust began, I suppose, to be again in flow, at the sight of all that bloom of youth which presented itself to his view, a bloom yet unenjoyed, and of course not yet indifferent to him. After some pause, he asked me with a tone of voice mightily softer, whether I would make it up with him before the old lady returned, and all should be well; he would restore me to his affections, at the same time offering to kiss me and feel my breasts. But now my extreme aversion, my fears, my indignation, all acting upon me, gave me a spirit not natural to me, so that breaking loose from him, I ran to the bell and rang it, with such violence and effect as to bring up the maid to know what was the matter, or whether the gentleman wanted anything; and before he could proceed to greater extremities, she bounced into the room, and seeing me stretched on the floor, my hair all dishevelled, my nose gushing out blood, which did not a little tragedize the scene, and my odious persecutor still intent of pushing his brutal point, unmoved by all my cries and distress, she was herself confounded and did not know what to do. As much, however, as Martha might be prepared and hardened to transactions of this sort, all womanhood must have been out of her heart could she have seen this unmoved. Besides that, on the face of things, she imagined that matters had gone greater lengths than they really had, and that the courtesy of the house had been actually consummated on me, and flung: me into the condition I was in: in this notion she instantly took my part, and advised the gentleman to go down and leave me to recover myself, and “that all would be soon over with me; that when Mrs. Brown and Phœbe, who were gone out, were returned, they would take order for everything to his satisfaction; that nothing would be lost by a little patience with the poor tender thing; that for her part she was frightened; she could not tell what to say to such doings; but that she would stay by me till my mistress came home.” As the wench said all this in a resolute tone, and the monster himself began to perceive that things would not mend by his staying, he took his hat and went out of the room murmuring and pitting his brows like an old ape, so that I was delivered from the horrors of his detestable presence.

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

  "I had better bring her round to the sex you have just soiled," cries Antonin, seizing Octavie where she is, and not wishing to let her stand up; "there's more than one breach to a rampart," says he, and proudly, boldly marching up, he carries the day and is within the sanctuary in no time at all. Further screams are heard. "Praise be to God," quoth the indecent man, "I thought I was alone; and would have doubted of my success without a groan or two from the victim; but my triumph is sealed. Do you observe? Blood and tears." "In truth," says Clement, who steps up with whip in hand, "I'll not disturb her sweet posture either, it is too favorable to my desires." Jerome's Girl of the Watch and the twenty-year-old girl hold Octavie: Clement considers, fingers; terrified, the little girl beseeches him, and is not listened to. "Ah, my friends!" says the exalted monk, "how are we to avoid flogging a schoolgirl who exhibits an ass of such splendor !" The air immediately resounds to the whistle of lashes and the thud of stripes sinking into lovely flesh; Octavie's screams mingle with the sounds of leather, the monk's curses reply: what a scene for these libertines surrendering themselves to a thousand obscenities in the midst of us all I They applaud him, they cheer him on; however, Octavie's skin changes color, the brightest tints incarnadine join the lily sparkle; but what might perhaps divert Love for an instant, were moderation to have direction of the sacrifice, becomes, thanks to severity, a frightful crime against Love's laws; nothing stops or slows the perfidious monk, the more the young student complains, the more the professor's harshness explodes; from the back to the knee, everything is treated in the same way, and it is at last upon his barbaric pleasures' blooddrenched vestiges the savage quenches his flames. "I shall be less impolite, I think," says Jerome, laying hands upon the lovely thing and adjusting himself between her coral lips; "where is the temple where I would sacrifice? Why, in this enchanting mouth...." I fall silent.... 'Tis the impure reptile withering the rose Ä my figure of speech relates it all.

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

  CHAPTER 1 My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark. I was seven, and our family doctor knelt before me where I sat on a mattress on the bare floor. He wore a yellow golf shirt unbuttoned so that sprouts of hair showed in a V shape on his chest. I had never seen him in anything but a white starched shirt and a gray tie. The change unnerved me. He was pulling at the hem of my favorite nightgown—a pattern of Texas bluebonnets bunched into nosegays tied with ribbon against a field of nappy white cotton. I had tucked my knees under it to make a tent. He could easily have yanked the thing over my head with one motion, but something made him gentle. “Show me the marks,” he said. “Come on, now. I won’t hurt you.” He had watery blue eyes behind thick glasses, and a mustache that looked like a caterpillar. “Please? Just pull this up and show me where it hurts,” he said. He held a piece of hem between thumb and forefinger. I wasn’t crying and don’t remember any pain, but he talked to me in that begging voice he used when he had a long needle hidden behind his back. I liked him but didn’t much trust him. The room I shared with my sister was dark, but I didn’t fancy hiking my gown up with strangers milling around in the living room. It took three decades for that instant to unfreeze. Neighbors and family helped me turn that one bright slide into a panorama. The bed frame tilted against the wall behind the doctor had a scary, spidery look in the dark. In one corner, the tallboy was tipped over on its back like a stranded turtle, its drawers flung around. There were heaps of spilled clothes, puzzles, comics, and the Golden Books I could count on my mom to buy in the supermarket line if I’d stayed in the carriage. The doorway framed the enormous backlit form of Sheriff Watson, who held my sister, then nine, with one stout arm. She had her pink pajamas on and her legs wrapped around his waist. She fiddled with his badge with a concentration too intense for the actual interest such a thing might hold for her. Even at that age she was cynical about authority in any form. She was known for mocking nuns in public and sassing teachers. But I could see that she had painted a deferential look on her face. The sheriff’s cowboy hat kept the details of his expression in deep shadow, but I made out a sort of soft half-smile I’d never seen on him. I had a knee-jerk fear of the sheriff based on my father’s tendency to get in fights. He’d pull open the back screen with knuckles scraped and bleeding, then squat down to give instructions to me and Lecia (pronounced, she would have me tell you, “Lisa”).

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My father and I laughed ourselves raw when we saw it, our mouths making symmetrical sounds, and all I could hear was our resemblance. He sat me on his lap so we wouldn’t have to pay for three seats, but I tried to slide off, fearing he’d feel the fist of my tail. The spineless popsicle dissolved in my palms, scrawling sugar down my arms. Wasps came to halo my elbows, stinging the sweetest parts of me. I want to go home, my brother said. He was counting his breaths again. The afternoon heat closed around us like a jaw and my father ignored him. When the safari tour ended, dropping us back off at the wrought- iron gate with the faux-wood welcome sign, my father asked if we wanted to go kite-flying. Walking us toward the parking lot, a hand welded to each of our necks, he said he knew the perfect place, the casino by the freeway with a rooftop bar where you could tie your kites to the railing and let them scoop up the air, ladle you a sky. No, my brother said again, stopping. We were almost to the car: I could see its one-eyed headlights, the left tire with half a dead squirrel still mashed to it, the license plate that began with the first letter of my name. My father stopped too, looked down at me as if I were the one who refused to keep walking, but I said nothing. We were passing between two parked SUVs, heading toward the far side of the lot where our car was, where our mother once stapled the seatbelt to our shirts because she didn’t trust us to be safe otherwise. A sunburnt station wagon passed behind us, windows bruised by the heat, the underwater voices of a family arguing inside. My father made a fist around my brother’s T-shirt collar, navy with neck-sweat, and lifted him off the ground. It was the same way he’d held my brother when we were on the mainland, before their bones had borrowed the air and flown. But here, there was no sky that could basket my brother, no string I could use to steer my father. I had no breath left in my body to blow them into kites. My father swung him back and forth, swung him dumb. Walk, he said, but my brother shook his head, choking inside his own shirt collar, biting his tongue until beetles of blood crawled out of his mouth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Its pelt of paint was perpetually wet, and all kinds of creatures got stuck to the sides of the house: squirrels, pigeons, a collage of flies. Our mother drove with her elbows while she smoked out the window, spitting into the cup holder. When she spoke of her father now, he was no longer our agong, just her ba, which meant he belonged to her and not to us. Our blood was borrowed. When we reached Ama’s driveway, the moon was not yet nailed in the sky. Ama always said the moon was the corpse of the sun, meaning every night is a funeral. During our week as nocturnal animals, my brother and I had trained our eyes to adjust to any density of dark, and now neither of us tripped on Ama’s root-risen driveway. Our mother didn’t ring the doorbell, which had been taped over. She pounded on the door. When no one answered, she told my brother to get the flashlight from the glove box. She went up to the front window, the flashlight flaccid-looking in her hands. Her arm coiled back. My brother grabbed her wrist, but the flashlight was already through the glass. We waited for the alarm, waited to run like she wasn’t our mother and the night didn’t know us, but there was no sound except for a neighbor’s dog, barking like we’d come just to kill it. I could see my mother squinting back and forth between me and the window, calculating if she could toss me in too, but then all the lights in the house opened their eyes. The hole in the window filled with Ama’s face. She stood looking out at us, our faces reflected next to hers in the glass. Barefoot and bathrobed, hair in pink curlers, her face was narrower than my mother’s, cheekbones hanging their shadows. She looked at us through the hole in the window as if we were the weather forecast, expected. The air had tattled on us, and now she darted her tongue in and out of her mouth, licking at our evaporated sweat, tasting the hard kernels of rain inside our veins. The knife in her left fist was upright, like some flower she had just picked for us. My brother walked back to the car and started it, a sound we thought was far away in someone else’s night. Let’s go home, he said, and my mother didn’t turn her head. Ama opened the door, beckoned us in with her blade. The night beat us inside, stars sprinkling themselves like salt all over her carpet. I’d slit a hole in my skirt for the tail to slide out, a knife to draw on her throat before she could use her own. Tapping at the root of my tail, I told it to get ready. My mother shouldered past Ama.

• From The Art of Memoir

  once, and I said, “Who’s noticing that?” You want to get next to that quiet, noticer self as a starting place. Just apply your ass to the chair (as someone wise once said, a writer’s only requirement) and for fifteen or twenty minutes, practice getting your attention out of your head, down to some wider expanse in your chest or solar plexus—a place less self-conscious or skittery or scared. The idea is to unclench your mind’s claws. So don’t judge how your thoughts might jet around at first. Eventually you’ll start identifying a little bit with that detached, watcher self and less with your prattling head. You’re seeking enough quiet to let the Real You into your mind. Inspiration—the drawing into the body of some truth-giving spirit ready to walk observantly through the doors of the past. Then, with eyes still closed, approach the memory you’re scared to set down. Start by composing the scene in carnal terms—by which I mean using sensory impressions, not sexual ones. Smell is the oldest sense —even one-celled animals without spinal cords can smell—and it cues emotional memory like nothing else. If you can conjure the aroma of where you are—fresh-cut grass or lemon furniture oil, say —you’re halfway there. What can you see, hear, touch, taste? What do you have on? Is the cloth rough or smooth? If you’re on the beach, there’s a salt spray, and you need a sweater. In the trench, sweat snails down your spine. What taste is in your mouth? I always liken the state I’m in before I write to waking too early to rise and looking for a wormhole to corkscrew down into that more honest place. You want a clear sense memory, a treasured (or despised) object. And most of all, you want your old body. Your cold hand wrapped around a jelly glass of grape juice. That toy monkey with the switch on its back that banged cymbals and—when smacked on its head—hissed at you. You need a point of physical and psychic connection, a memory you’d swear by to start with. Then allow the memory to play itself. It won’t be video footage, of course, only jump cuts, snippets, an idea here and there, an image. Now open your eyes. If you’re doing this right, the whole thing should’ve been arrestingly vivid, maybe even a little awful. Many

• From Bestiary (2020)

  They flee the 口 ’s throat, threading in and out of clouds, sewing the dark whole. There are so many birds in the sky that by morning, it is still night. Ben shouts, points at a bird with a meloning belly, so big it butts out the sun. Behind us, in front of the house, the road is rearing and bucking into a river, asphalt dissolving to ink, a flood reaching our feet. We wear the river around our ankles. It rises between our legs, splitting open in birth. A tail breaches the surface, legs wading after it. Out of the riverroad the tiger runs to us brightwet mouth wider than night calling Mother mothermothermother DAUGHTER Bestiary My brother and the other older boys swung their bats at the crows that clotted the sky and clung to the backstop fence. I watched the game every day and walked in circles around the baseball field, measuring the radius of my appetite, daring the sunlight to lash my skin into stripes. My tail would learn like a lightning rod, absorbing the heat of those boys’ hands, and then it would detach into a baseball bat. Belong in my hands as a weapon. Today, one of the crows gripped the side of the batting cage with one foot, its left wing pimpled and pink. Neck plucked clean as my pinky. One of the boys pivoted to swing. The crow shivered and groomed itself, the sun mirrored on its one good wing. Standing on the sidelines, I shouted to warn it away from the fence. But the bat struck too fast and the crow crumpled like a fist, dented the dirt. The boy twirled his bat like a baton and ran a lap around the bases, wiping the blood off on home plate. My tail ticked back and forth across the border of my spine, synced with my pulse, eager to intervene. To bound into the diamond and eat the boys, their severed feet flopping alive in the field, flaccid as fish. The teachers would have to burn the corpses and call my mother, who’d strap me to a pole by my limbs and harvest me for my marrow, distill me to tigerwine. I turned away, willed myself still. When the sky bruised into night, I turned back and saw the crow splayed on its back in the dirt, flat as its shadow. Someone had erected a fence of feathers around the crow, enforcing a perimeter around the body.

• From Bestiary (2020)

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

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother, locked in the bedroom, begged to be let out. Said, We thought you were dead. We thought you were dead. You were dead. My mother always said that speaking a prayer out loud would keep it from coming true, that a voice cancels out its listener. By speaking his death, she was keeping him alive. When my father finished, he cried into my neck. His apple, half-eaten, was a bright pulp on the floor. He always said that it hurt him to hurt us, that each of our bruises cast a body-sized shadow behind him. My brother threw up over the rail of the balcony, a comet in his belly. The blood in the vomit was bright as confetti. _ On the rooftop of my father’s building, you could see an amusement park with an imitation Great Wall. It was spine-shaped. My brother paced one side while my father sat me on his lap, saying this was the perfect place to fly a kite. He showed me the railing that had retired to rust, a place where I could tie several kite-strings at once. He asked me to stay with him. I could live with him while my mother and brother went home, back to the country where I was without a name. He told me he was learning to cook, showed me the scars on his forearms where he’d tossed oil out of the pan and onto himself. When I didn’t speak, he showed me the edge of the roof and tested me, pointing at faraway things and asking for their names in Mandarin: Sky. Cloud. Bird. Car. Crosswalk. Airplane. Night. Child. Then he pointed at himself. Man, I said. He cinched his fist around my wrist, and I felt the bones rub like flint, starting a fire under my skin. No, he said. Father. He made me repeat it until night. When we returned to his apartment, my father unlocked my mother from the bedroom and tucked us in with her, arranging us on the bed that smelled of him, tugging the sheet over our heads as if shrouding us. I pretended the sheets were made of water and we were treading the bed together, that we were somewhere where sound was a stone, swallowed and sunk. Back when he was a boy in Texas, my father taught himself to swim in a public pool where white kids thickened the deep end and played Marco Polo, their swim trunks in primary colors, their striped and patterned towels laid out like the flags of foreign countries. My father began in the shallowest end, where even babies could float without their parents. Even on his back, the water folded over him like a sheet, dragged him deep.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A hand is a whole country. Before bed, I touched my armpit, my ass-crack, my peanut-toes, my tail. The belly button that was pecked into my skin by a bird. I touched them all twice. Named each part of me a citizen of the night. _ The first week my father was home, my tail grew a bone of its own. A bruise trellised up my spine. At night, my mother followed him into the man-made dark of his room—he taped butcher paper on all the windows because perverts could be watching. At night: the sound of her jaw locking up her teeth. That wasn’t the sound I turned my head from: It was the symmetry of my father’s silence, the way sex didn’t sound like two bodies added together but the subtraction of one from the other. At night, I consulted the cookie tin in the closet, my ears magnetized to the toes rattling inside. The toes were butting over territory, acting like they belonged to enemy bodies. I knocked on the lid with my fist and they fired out, bulleting through the lid. One of them flew in and out of my mouth, threading my spit, teasing my teeth to bite it. Before my father came home, my mother spent her nights with me. We watched episodes of Desperate Housewives on the sofa that rose like a loaf of bread when it met our body heat. I dubbed the dialogue in Chinese and my mother spat five-spice peanuts at all the blondes onscreen. I asked her which of the wives she’d want to marry and she said Gaby: She wore cheetah-print, meaning she must be related to Hu Gu Po. A shared history of hunger. At night, my dreams collaged the plots of Desperate Housewives and Hu Gu Po: In this one, Gaby and her landscaper make love in the master bedroom while Gaby’s husband is away at work. But the landscaper’s penis grows a crown of canine teeth when he’s inside her, his palms serrating into paws. Gaby hemorrhages and dies. The landscaper tries to swallow his paws, but it’s too late. Her husband comes home and discovers a tiger pacing his master bedroom, trying to nudge the window open with its muzzle. On the floor is his wife, a lawn mower circling her body, scalping away the carpet. When I recounted this dream to my mother, she deleted every recorded episode. We’d liked Gaby because she was the only wife with our hair. She had the biggest closet, bigger than our bedroom. There was a crack in the TV screen letting the light out of every scene, striping the image onscreen, queering her face into mine.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women. When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial. And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse. In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity—the abuse of feeling.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We followed her to the left, my brother running back to join us, the car still running. We went down the hall so narrow we walked sideways, comical as crabs. There was a smell like singed hair, Ama’s curlers filling with smoke. All the walls were exposed brick, rough and dark as scabs. My mother told me that one summer, Ama had asked Agong to paint the interior a color closer to the sky, any color but white. Agong went to the store for paint and came back with a hammer instead. Ama threw the hammer at him, its silver head gouging the brick wall behind him. Now, as we walked toward Agong, my mother petted each wall as we passed it, trying to find that old injury, that hole in the brick where she used to hide cigarettes, coins, a highway map. She’d planted pieces of her past inside the wall, waiting for the house to grow a future worth staying for. We stopped before the bedroom door, Ama behind my left shoulder, walking so close to my tail that I wanted to turn and bind her wrists together with it. We could smell Agong behind the bedroom door, a mulch of shit and sweat. Our mother opened the door and the smell coiled back, hit like a fist. The window was barricaded with a dresser, and a chair in the corner kept only three of its limbs. There were no mirrors— fengshuibuhao—but something had shattered, and there were crumbs of glass in the carpet, burrowing into our feet as we neared the bed. What I thought was slicked-back hair was a bruise spanning his scalp. The liverspots on his hands were the size of quarters and I wanted to pluck them off one by one, spend them on new skin for him. Agong’s mouth was all movement. His tongue worming through the skin of his cheek. My mother got on her knees beside the bed, pressing her forehead to the mattress, and when she lifted her forehead it was bright with blood. The mattress was ripe with it. I squinted at his chest to see if something still lived in it. My brother’s hand was damp inside mine, though I couldn’t remember when I’d reached out for it. Hold your breath, my brother said. He once told me it was important to hold your breath around dying people. That way, the sick person had more air for themselves. But I didn’t think Agong had lungs anymore: His chest was bowled, carrying a soup of sweat. My tail clenched around my thigh when I saw his neck, mottled with moles, so thin I wanted to pluck it with my fingers, make music of this silence. When my mother stood up, her eyes arrowed through everything again: the dresser in front of the window, Ama in the doorway with her hands sprouting a knife, the chair’s bruised knees, my brother and I holding hands.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  How much would you pay for one? The fisherman’s wife named a price. Slipping the skin off another nut, Hu Gu Po said, That’s not enough for me to make a living. She laughed, her black braid unraveling to ash, charring the air. The next morning, every child in the village woke with a toe subtracted from each foot. On each of their pillows was a five-cent coin, rusted dark as a blood spot. The fisherman’s wife had no children, but when she heard what had happened, she remembered the woman in the market cleaving peanut shells with her teeth. When she opened her door, there was a skin pouch lying in her doorway. She slit open the pouch and it spilled dozens of toes, deboned and dusted with salt. _ My mother lifted the bedsheet over us both when she told me this story, crouching down over my feet, grasping them in her fists, and ferrying them to her mouth. My toes squirmed like minnows in her maw, swimming against the current of her spit. In the dark, I watched the geography of her face rearranging: the mountain range of moles on her forehead, the hook of her lip lowering when she fished up a story. She let go of my feet when I begged her not to eat them, but one night she concluded the story by biting down on my big toe. Her teeth encircled it like a tiara, resting on the skin rather than breaking it, but I could feel her trembling, her jaw reined back by something I couldn’t see. In the morning, my toe wore a ringlet of white where the blood didn’t return again for months. Some nights, I woke to my mother’s finger foraging around in my ear, nicking out the earwax with her hooked pinky nail. She liked to joke she was digging for gold. She lifted the canoe of her pinky nail, loaded with my grit, and brought it to her mouth. I yanked at her wrist and said, No, no, no no no. But she ate it anyway, laughing when I said it was gross. I used to eat my earwax when I was hungry, she said. My ears were always so clean. That’s why I can hear everything. My mother said if I let the earwax live inside me, it would eventually grow beetle legs and scuttle into my brain, nesting there like shrapnel. She said she was saving me by eating my ear canals clean, allowing the sun to tunnel into my skull and keep all my memories lit. _ In the bedroom I shared with my brother, our mother told us stories about Arkansas/the rain, her sister/my aunt, her ma/my ama, her ba/my agong.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Zizi. Are you there yet? When you arrive at too much curiosity, call me. Curiosity is about listening to the answer when you ask a question. Curiosity involves sitting back, being quiet, and listening and watching. And then curiosity is about falling asleep to a world of wonder; go for the rides in dreamland and tell your dreams (only the interesting ones) to a fellow curious. Curiosity is also about sitting back with your emotion and living it. If you get too excited with your curiosity, grab a drink, go out for a smoke, take a break, be lazy, be slow. Some Zizi teachings: Life brings us pains, lick them. Life brings us unknowns, chew them. Life brings us germs, take them. Sip them. When it is most challenging, consider offering your body. Seek the monster under the bed. Let there be pee. Embarrass yourself. Surrender to Zizi tonight, and you shall be free. 94 My sweet.95 Shamiest of shame, embarassingliest of embarrassment. Nothing is shame, O Rocca Family, but shame.96 I have a big belly and I love my belly. [repeat]97 Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.98 Life is but a moment.The Power to Make LightA Conversation with Dallas Goldtooth Dallas Goldtooth is the Keep It in the Ground organizer at the Indigenous Environmental Network, and a founder of the political comedy troupe the 1491s and was a trustworthy spokesperson on the ground at Standing Rock, which was a radical mass action to stop a pipeline from being built on Indigenous-held lands. amb. One of my theories is that, right now, movements are spaces that people rarely want to enter or stay around because our tone is so serious, so dire, that people are just like “I’m already fucking hopeless, and you look burnt out and tired, and why would I come spend time there?” Dallas, you use humor to draw people in. Was there a time in your life when it was like, “Oh, I’m fucking hilarious. I’m gonna do something with this.” You know, was it sort of like, “I’m gonna go be a comedian—oh wait, I’ve gotta still be an activist.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ma explains that there is only one day and it lives like a body, getting up before us and falling asleep when we do, putting on the sky like a skirt. There aren’t many, or if there are, it’s the same day dressed as different countries. The paper people say no, no. Ask how we got here. There’s a man in the corner wearing a uniform, handcuffs hanging from his hip. The cuffs bared like teeth. Silver mouths that circle into smiles. Ma herds us out of the office and we take the bus out of the city, back to the chicken farm, and I still don’t know what day I’m born. Later, the missionaries assigned a birthday to me and Jie, the day we were baptized, the only time we wore white when nobody had died. In the summer we sleep in different corners of the house to keep cool. Ma in the bedroom alone. The shotgun’s shadow stalking the walls. I sleep on the porch outside, bury myself in tarps to keep mosquitos out. Jie is a dog curled behind the front door. Near morning when I hear the gun go off. Light limping down from the sky. My spit purifies to glass in my throat. I wake and think the gunshot flew out from my dreams, but I can’t remember what I’ve been aiming at, if I have hands. I check for a gun and find my fist. Jie runs barefoot onto the porch, takes me by the armpits. Ba’s got the gun, she says. We thread out of the house. A second gunshot guts the clouds. We run to the backyard and he’s there, panting and pantsless, bleeding sweat everywhere, bullets bucking the air. Backfire makes him stumble, knees grieving to the ground. Ama’s there too, her hands reining in his shoulders. Give it back, she says. Agong lowers it to the trees. I haven’t seen him stand straight in months. He lifts his left hand to the sky, pointing or saluting. We try to see what he’s pointing at, but the sky speaks nothing, not a bird. Clouds cockroaching across the sky. I anticipate holes in the blue, but there’s no wound. Ba shakes the sweat off his upper lip and says, They’re coming, they’re coming. In his hands, the shotgun is boneless. Ma bites the ball of his shoulder, tells him the war, both, are behind him. Ba looks behind him, at her. His eyes are seedless, white. He says, Where are the planes? I spot a wounded bird in the corner of the sky, shedding blood, flying in circles with one wing wrenched out. Ma says, You got them all, you got them. But Ba’s eyes are years behind, stalled on the same sky: back when warplanes had anuses that dilated open and shat dung-bombs, spraying a diarrhea that scarred your skin. Ba ba ba ba ba, I say. He turns and sees Jie and me, shoulder-to-shoulder like soldiers.