Grief

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 In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She said her father would pay for my ticket but I would never go for that. She was so generous and thoughtful…” Miss Krasner looked away. “I don’t think I can go back to that dorm room we shared. I may take the semester off. Maybe I’ll transfer to another school. Kathy was my closest friend. Sometimes it’s like that. You meet someone and you know you’re going to be best friends. You know it right away. Now she’s gone. I’ll never see her again. She was so beautiful, inside and out.” PhoniesWhen Steve read about Kathy in the paper, when he read she was coming home to see a boy she’d met over the holidays, a boy she really liked, he got into bed and stayed there for four days. He thought about dying but he was afraid to do it himself. His only solace was reading The Catcher in the Rye. Holden was his friend, the one person who could understand what Steve was thinking, and the unbearable sadness he was feeling. Finally, his mother came to his room and said, “Get up, Steve.” “Why?” “Because we need you to.” “That’s not a good enough reason.” “We know you’re sad…” “Who’s we?” “Your family.” Steve snorted. “Stop this, Steve!” His mother pulled the covers off him and just as fast, he pulled them back. “Can’t you see what I’m going through?” she cried, burying her face in her hands. She turned away from him, her shoulders shaking. What was this? When she faced him again she was angry. “Don’t do this, Steve. And give me that book!” She reached for it, but again, he was quicker, and shoved the book under his ass where she wouldn’t dare try to get it. “I need you to get up, shower, put on your clothes, have breakfast and go to school. I need you to do that for me.” Who gives a fuck about what she needs? “Do you understand, Steve?” “I understand.” Part of him felt bad for her, his pretty little mother. But the other part knew she was a phony like all the other so-called adults in his life. Not one of them gave a shit about Kathy. She was just another dead person. Just one of the tragic twenty-three on just another crashed plane. And hardy-har, Mother dear, it wasn’t even a non-sked this time. He should tell her that—tell her how he’d traveled back from Boston in a snowstorm in a non-sked, thanks to his father. What would she say then? Maybe he would get up. Maybe he’d get up and go to school and pretend everything was okay, just like the rest of them. He grabbed his copy of Catcher. “I’m not finished with you, Holden,” he whispered to the book, “or you, either, Phoebe.” Fern was his Phoebe, or could be if she played it right. At school Phil acted all glad to see him, like nothing much had happened. “Were you sick?

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  She knew Tim was due in at about that time. The noise of the alarm woke the toddler, Evie, who started screaming. Laura ran to the girls’ room, lifted Evie out of her crib and patted her back. “There, there, sweetie, everything’s okay.” That started the baby, Heather, crying. When word came over the radio that it was a plane, an American Airlines Convair, Laura knew for sure. She lay down on her bed with the toddler and the baby cradled on either side of her and began to sing, “Hush, little babies, don’t say a word, Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…” SteveAt first he and Phil didn’t get what the commotion at the American Airlines counter was about. It wasn’t until Phil’s aunt screamed—a chilling scream you could hear throughout the terminal, a scream that would haunt him the rest of his life—that they understood something had happened to the plane. Phil rushed to his aunt’s side with Steve right behind him, but she had already collapsed and two airline employees were trying to get her to her feet. Phil tossed the keys to the blue Ford convertible to Steve. “Drive it back to my house, okay?” “Sure,” Steve said. “Whatever I can do to help, you know?” But Steve didn’t have any idea how to help. He called his father’s office from a phone booth. His father would know what to do. His father would offer to come and get him and Steve would say, Okay. But there was no answer at his father’s office. He wished he’d never come to the airport. He wished he’d stayed at school, then gone to the Y to shoot baskets. Nobody asked if he was okay enough to drive, which he wasn’t, but somehow he made it back to Elizabeth, to Phil’s house, where he pulled the blue convertible into the driveway, turned off the ignition, rested his head against the wheel and gave in to the emotion washing over him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cried, felt his own tears hot and wet running down his face, his throat tight, his nose snotty. He took in a couple of big gulps, willed himself to stop, then got out of the car and started out for home, kicking at stones, leftover chunks of gray snow, whatever was in his way. Fuck fuck fuck! ChristinaHundreds of people were running with Christina, all of them separated from the roaring fire by just a dozen yards. But only she was screaming Jack’s name, until she turned the corner and saw it wasn’t Jack’s house on fire. It was the wooden house down the street and the house next to that, and where there used to be a three-story brick apartment building was rubble and thick black smoke—the whole area a blazing mess, with flames so blindingly bright red and orange she had to turn away. She covered her ears with her hands, against the screaming sirens.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Night after night the story of their lives came together, as though in puzzle pieces, a clump of sky confining the still-empty silhouette of a tree, another piece shaped like a running dog but turning out to be a child’s elbow against four pickets in a fence. One passage, complete in itself but not yet oriented to the rest, would float wonderfully to its correct position on the board. Rachel had been brought up by her father, a Miami real estate investor of a cruelty that surpassed description, though incest, starvation and frequent beatings were hinted at. His evil nature I confused with his daughter’s poetic genius. Whereas DeQuincey sniggered, stuttered and shrugged his way through his gruesome account, never more than a wisecrack away from pain, Rachel refused to tell her story, but when she relented she proceeded with great gravity. Each of them, in fact, competed for my sympathy. One night I told the Scotts of my struggles against homosexuality and of my present effort to be cured through psychoanalysis. Although I maintained a flippant tone about sex, the Scotts both stood as I spoke, then came over to my kitchen chair, drew me to my feet and embraced me, tears in their eyes. “You poor boy,” Mr. Scott said again and again, searching my face for the stigmata of mental illness. “You poor, poor boy. But surely you haven’t acted on these impulses, have you?” It took a moment for me to realize they hoped I had only thought about sex with men but never actually engaged in it. I assured them I was very experienced, though I wasn’t. I exaggerated the depth of my depravity. Although I was content to accept their sympathy, I didn’t want them to pity me for crimes I had merely contemplated. My admission put them off a bit, as though the fact of sex were a coarse redundancy and the idea of it quite sinful enough. My confession spurred them on to more daring feats of self-disclosure. I learned that DeQuincey had also been homosexual briefly, a period just before his marriage and conversion, a period adumbrated as a time of faltering, of humiliation, exhaustion and confusion, of bouts of madness alternating with briefer and briefer zones of lucidity, as an accelerating train leaving the station might roll faster and faster under dim lamps before plunging into the blackout of night. Now he was no longer homosexual, not in any way, nor did he ever experience even the slightest twitch of forbidden desire. This complete change he attributed to Christ and Rachel.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Oh, Lionel,” she said. She rested her palm in his palm again, and he squeezed. It was the first time he had told someone about it. The whole of it. His throat was hot from talking and from trying to make himself known to another person. He put his head down on the table but went on squeezing Sophie’s hand. She threaded her fingers through his. “Anyway. I was okay until last week.” “You went back?” “I had this feeling—this totally random sensation. It was kind of a thought and kind of not a thought. A voice, maybe? Something.” “What did it say?” “You’ll think I’m nuts,” he said dryly. “If you don’t already.” “Then you’ve got nothing to risk.” “That’s true. It said—or showed me?—this image of myself, stepping out into traffic. I was on a sidewalk on my way home from the grocery store. And I was waiting for the light, and there were these cars coming on, and it just seemed possible to step out there and get swept away. It felt so real, for a minute I thought I had done it. But then I was just standing there on the sidewalk. And the cars were going by. And it was so cold. So I checked myself in.” “I think I know what you mean,” she said. People sometimes thought they knew what he meant, but what they usually meant was that sometimes, in their own lives, they had been disappointed. They had been a little unwell in totally manageable ways. What they meant was that they had suffered in the small ways that everyone suffered. But Sophie set the mug down and stroked his wrist as though she were stroking the head of a small animal. “My parents died. And then my sister, a few years ago, died. Overdose. And sometimes, I think, Fuck. Enough. Or sometimes, it’s like, Why not make it a full set?” “Yeah,” he said. “I used to purge. Everybody thinks it’s about being skinny and being light for ballet. They think it’s to look a certain way. But I think most of us purge because of the control. Like, there’s a moment when you go from feeling full and awful to feeling clean and clear and bright. There’s just a moment, right before you get it all out, before you’re burning up and convulsing, when you feel something go ping and you know it’ll be all right. That’s what it’s about. That little ping of clarity. Anyway, I used to purge. When I lived with my grandma. All the other girls in ballet did, too. It’s not special or anything, but I did. And then I got these awful ulcers. And I couldn’t dance because I had no energy and my vision started to get weird? I felt like my body was betraying me.” Lionel sat up then. Sophie’s thumb traced his knuckles.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  When they had sex, she could think only of herself, the friction inside her, the gathering heat between their bodies, the scent of her hair, of her sweat and his, the rhythm of their coming together and falling apart. She didn’t want a oneness with him, as she’d heard some people describe it. What she craved was the white-hot oblivion of an orgasm, riding the rim of it again and again until finally she slipped down into herself and shivered. All of that feels beyond her now. It seems a tragedy to say good-bye to that full-body shudder, that brief glimpse over the edge of herself down into eternity. She’d had it for only a few years before they found the tumor, before her slow withdrawal from life began. She doesn’t feel angry about it all the time. Rather, it’s as though she’d booked a cruise that is, at the last possible moment, canceled—or, more precisely, that her ticket alone has been canceled. The particular agony of it all is that she has to stand on the beach and watch as everyone she loves drifts out to sea without her. They go on eating. The clink of their silverware on the good plates. The rain and wind whipping through the trees outside. Thunder. And the blue glow of lightning rippling overhead. They go on in their strained quiet, and Grace watches the beautiful motion of Big Davis’s hands. The way the knuckles shift and bob like buoys under his skin. And Enid’s sharp, anxious cutting and piercing. They are the last of their kind, she thinks. Her father is gone. Her grandmother. Davis. All that remain are the three of them, and soon these two will have nothing drawing them together. Grace sees in their stiff awkwardness a premonition of her own demise, and her vision briefly grows dim. She feels as though she’s being drawn too quickly up the length of a well. Vertigo. “Gracie?” Enid asks. Grace closes her eyes, waits for the spinning feeling to abate. “I’m all right.” “You don’t look it.” Big Davis presses his hand to her forehead. He hums. “You’re warm.” “I’m fine,” she says, pulling away, but the motion makes her stomach burn. She’s going to be sick. She knows it the moment before it happens, that gurgling, burning retch. She presses her fingers to her mouth, bites down to hold it all in, but it is of no use. Hot acid pulses at the back of her throat, and she feels a blinding, white anger at the fact that she cannot even have the privacy of excusing herself. She must be on display even when she’s about to vomit. This moment of horrible weakness belongs not to her but to them. She hates it.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She had lived there all the years of her life, in and among a rotating series of trailers and cars that Hartjes had been spared only because he’d been sent to live with his grandparents. Then his mother married Francisco’s father, also named Francisco, who had a better job and a small house, so Hartjes went to live with them. Hartjes had not remembered giving his mother his number. That’s what he had been thinking when Francisco told him—shouted, really—as if trying to breach the actual raw distance between them, “She’s dead, she’s dead.” The other thing that Hartjes had been thinking of was how much like a man Francisco sounded—it startled Hartjes to hear him that way. They had last spoken on the night Francisco left for trade school in Georgia. They were in their room, Hartjes lying on the bed, Francisco stuffing clothes into a garbage bag. It was hot, their shirts sticking to their backs. Francisco sat on the edge of the bed, looked over his shoulder at Hartjes, and said, “I’m out of here, kid.” Hartjes shoved at him and said, “Shut up,” because it made him feel good. Francisco stood up, hoisted the black bag over his shoulder. He leaned down and they knocked fists. A friend of his gave him a ride to the bus depot, and then total silence until he called to say that Hartjes’s mother was dead. “Oh,” Hartjes had said that Tuesday on the phone four weeks before. “Oh, all right.” And then Francisco had hung up, and that was that. The apples were not for Hartjes. They were for his friend Simon, who lived in the country. They were not for Simon, either, in fact, but for Simon’s goats. The goats were named Helena, Maria, Bertram, Vicky, Dude, and Guy. Helena was a boy goat, the others were girls. Simon had named them before he knew their sexes, after picking them out at two different farms three years or so before, when they were all babies and awkward, barely weaned at all, when it was still possible to mistake a boy goat for a girl and vice versa if you didn’t know what you were doing. Hartjes cut the apples up for the goats and fed them from the sloping front porch. They had grown accustomed to his way of doing things on these Tuesday visits, and they formed a neat little line and filed up to him one at a time to receive from his palm a chunk of apple. He patted their sides, felt the bristle of their fur, watched the tufts of steam issue from their nostrils. The horizontal bars of their pupils shivered.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  Then last year, my beautiful Beet…a nickname hung on him by the SEALS…died in a firefight with a vicious gang in Africa. That he, a superbly trained professional, should die at the hands of rank amateurs strung out on local drugs was almost beyond belief. I completed my contract, taking a terrible toll on the tribal militia that had killed my beloved. Collecting my own pay and a whopping life insurance settlement as Beet’s beneficiary, I returned to the United States and tarried in the East until it was clear Uncle Sam had no beef with me for my activities of the last five years. Then I returned home. Marcus Markey was an eight-year-old neighbor kid when I left for boot camp at Grand Island Naval Training Station. The boy had lived next door to us since the family returned to Victor upon the death of his GI father in Kosovo. Markey, who had adopted me as his big brother, struggled beside me with all the push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, dips, flutter kicks, running and swimming I did for a month to get ready for boot. He even attempted the Ninjutsu and Israeli Krav Maga moves recommended by the BUD/S—that would be the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training—website. After each workout, he liked to run his hands over my sweaty biceps to test the hard muscle; it bothered me in a vague way I didn’t understand back then. Markey went to the bus station with my family to see me off, and I still recall his thin arms locked around my waist in a good-bye hug, and the tears that soaked my shirt. Now, glancing at him as we strode down the meadow, I could still see traces of that shy, adoring kid in this lanky twenty-three-year-old. He’d retained the creamy complexion and black sloe-eyes that gave him a slightly foreign cast. A once shaggy mop of black hair was cut short in a vaguely military style. But if Markey ever joined up, he was in for a bad time until he got tough enough to secure his own ground. It wasn’t just that he was far beyond merely handsome; his long, curled lashes alone would earn him grief in the barracks. Markey could have been a beautiful girl except for the Adam’s apple. I wondered if he had ever cross-dressed. There wasn’t a sign of a beard on his smooth skin, although I’m sure there was one; it merely cleaned up well. There wasn’t much of the kid I knew fifteen years ago in this fantastic youth—except for the shy, diffident demeanor. “Kinda small,” he observed wryly as we reached the fallen stag. “It’ll make good venison. Well, let’s get at it,” I suggested, noting the absence of any pride in the kill. “We’ve gotta field dress him.” “You mean cut him up?” The words were almost strangled. “You want to leave him for the coyotes?” “N-no. Of course not. But I don’t know how.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was given a bunk in a cold cabin that smelled of mildewed canvas; Ralph was led off somewhere else. As I tried to fall asleep I thought of him. I pitied him, as my mother wanted me to. I pitied him for his dumb animal stare, for his helpless search after relief—for his burden. And I thought about the plays I would direct. In one of them I’d be a dying king. In my trunk I’d brought some old 78s of Boris Godounov . Perhaps I’d die to those tolling bells, the Kremlin surrounded by the forces of the pretender, his face red and swollen with desire. There was a week to go before the other campers were due to arrive. Some local men with scythes swept their way through the overgrown grasses. Someone else repaired the leaking roof in the main house. Stocks of canned food were delivered. The various cabins were opened and aired and swept out. A wasp’s hive above the artesian well was bagged and burned. The docks were assembled and floated between newly implanted pylons. The big war canoes came out of winter storage and were seasoned in the cold lake. I worked from the first light to the last—part of my duty as a junior counselor. Ralph had no chores. He stayed in his cabin and came out just for his meals, led wherever he trudged by the big implacable bulge with the wet tip in his trousers. Every afternoon I was free to go off on my own. The chill still rose off the lake but at high noon the sun broke through its clouds like a monarch slipping free of his retinue. The path I took girdled the hills that rimmed the lake; at one point it dipped and crossed a bog that looked solid and dry, planted innocently in grasses, but that slurped voluptuously under my shoes. I’d race across and look back as my footprints filled with cold, clear water. A hidden bullfrog makes a low gulp and repeats the same sound but more softly each time under the steady high throb of spring peepers in full chorus. A gray chipmunk with a bright chestnut rump scurries past, his tail sticking straight up. Canoe birches higher up the hill shiver in a light breeze; their green and brown buds are emerging from warty, dark brown shoots. A hermit thrush, perched on a high branch, releases its beautiful song while slowly raising and lowering its tail. I came to know every turn in the path and every plant along the way. One day, late in the summer, I pushed farther into the woods than I’d ever ventured before. I clambered through brambles and thick undergrowth until I reached a logger’s road sliced through the wilderness but now slowly healing over. I followed that road for several miles. I entered a broad field and then a smaller clearing surrounded by low trees, although high enough to cut off all breezes.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  There were places in the world where one couldn’t get apples year-round or get bananas in the middle of the winter. There were places in the world where you had to wait for the seasons to change, and where seasons didn’t mean just the state of precipitation but also commerce, industry, economy. Apples in February were a sign of good fortune, or that misfortune lurked elsewhere. The cashier grinned and chirped as he weighed the fruit. That Tuesday made four weeks since Hartjes’s mother had died suddenly. He had not seen her for seven years. Francisco, his stepbrother, had told him over the phone. At the time of her death, his mother had been living in the same narrow town in south Alabama, with its Catholic church, remarkable only because it did not also have a Baptist church. She had lived there all the years of her life, in and among a rotating series of trailers and cars that Hartjes had been spared only because he’d been sent to live with his grandparents. Then his mother married Francisco’s father, also named Francisco, who had a better job and a small house, so Hartjes went to live with them. Hartjes had not remembered giving his mother his number. That’s what he had been thinking when Francisco told him—shouted, really—as if trying to breach the actual raw distance between them, “She’s dead, she’s dead.” The other thing that Hartjes had been thinking of was how much like a man Francisco sounded—it startled Hartjes to hear him that way. They had last spoken on the night Francisco left for trade school in Georgia. They were in their room, Hartjes lying on the bed, Francisco stuffing clothes into a garbage bag. It was hot, their shirts sticking to their backs. Francisco sat on the edge of the bed, looked over his shoulder at Hartjes, and said, “I’m out of here, kid.” Hartjes shoved at him and said, “Shut up,” because it made him feel good. Francisco stood up, hoisted the black bag over his shoulder. He leaned down and they knocked fists. A friend of his gave him a ride to the bus depot, and then total silence until he called to say that Hartjes’s mother was dead. “Oh,” Hartjes had said that Tuesday on the phone four weeks before. “Oh, all right.” And then Francisco had hung up, and that was that. The apples were not for Hartjes. They were for his friend Simon, who lived in the country.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  It bears an uncaged bird (see the Penguin English Library edition [1967], pp. 94- 100). The starling that had learned only those “four simple words” is most important because it partakes of Lolita’s origin, and its lament is at the book’s center. Lolita’s initial inspiration, writes Nabokov, was “prompted by a newspaper story about an ape [in the Paris zoo] who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage” (p. 311). H.H., the “aging ape” writing from prison, whose impossible love metaphorically connects him with that imprisoned animal, learns the language, in his fashion, and records his “imprisonment.” His narrative is the “picture” of the bars of the poor creature’s cage—and an orchestration of the starling’s four simple words. vair: gray; the pale color of miniver fur. Soleil Vert: French; Green Sun. L’autre soir ... de ta vie?: “The other night, a cold air [italics mine—A.A.] from the opera forced me to take to my bed; / Broken note—he who puts his trust in it is quite foolish! / It is snowing, the decor collapses, Lolita! / Lolita, what have I done with your life?” The four lines are a splendid parody and pastiche of various kinds of French verse. The alexandrine verse of line one (see Ne manque ... Qu’il t’y) scans perfectly in French. The air froid is an untranslatable pun (air: melody; draft or wind). Line two is a traditional saying, originating with Virgil, though it is in fact drawn here from Le Roi s’amuse (1832), a play by Victor Hugo: Souvent femme varie, Bien fol est qui s’y fie! Une femme souvent N’est qu’une plume au vent. These lines are sung by the King, first in Act IV, scene ii, in a cabaret. The first two lines are repeated from off stage in Act V, scene iii, which informs Triboulet (or Rigoletto) that the King is still alive (he had planned to murder the King, but kills his daughter instead). The play was performed only once before being banned by royal decree. It is the source of Verdi’s Rigoletto (1851); Piave adapted the words and Verdi was responsible only for the music. The French version, which H.H. undoubtedly knows, is Rigoletto, ou Le Buffon du prince. Rigoletto is appropriate, since, figuratively speaking, H.H. is in his own right a grotesque clown. For Hugo, see Don Quixote. Line three of H.H.’s pastiche is overly sonorous, but the burlesqued entreaty of line four manages to express both the “truth and a caricature of it” (the artistic intention of Fyodor in The Gift, p. 200). pederosis: see tennis ball ... my ... darling.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  In my car I begin to swear. My hands are shaking so badly I drop my keys and I leave them on the floor as I sit uttering all manner of epithets, none of which relieve the pain of his intrusion. “Fuck, shit, goddamn fucking shit,” and on and on until I run out and sit like some dazed victim. Carl and I were together twenty-six years. Carl Perry, master plumber and twenty years my senior; Carl, the man who took up the raw student and taught him about sex and life. Plumbers can be more than the grunting man snaking out the toilet. They can be surprisingly well read, witty, sexy and above all caring. That was Carl. He supported me as I pursued my degrees, encouraged me with the teaching job, and stuck by when I had to overcome sexual discrimination to gain tenure. He was my life and when his heart failed and he departed at sixty-eight, I was bereft. My lover, my mentor, had gone. The emptiness was of such enormity that I nearly lost my job and at times considered packing in my life. There would never be another Carl because, without him, I slipped into his older-man realm, which I’d never considered myself part of until I found myself alone. How is a man to make such a transition? I had adored his embrace. A bear of a man, he babied me terribly. He petted and consoled, he loved and fucked. He taught me life’s perspective, which is possibly the best lesson of all. And then he left me to take up his role. It seemed impossible. He died in July, so I had six weeks until the fall semester. On the first day of classes I was annoyed by the crush of students and was shaky in front of my class. I began Fiction Writing by parroting myself because I could not summon the energy to create anything new, and it worked fine and I got things going; I began to surface. And then Cody Morse arrived, a latecomer who eyed me with such certainty that I knew he had been sent to ease my burden. He had a farm boy quality, rough and unkempt. He always wore rumpled khakis, never jeans, and a battered brown leather jacket over dingy T-shirts. He approached me after class his first day, said he wanted to be a writer, wanted to know who to read. I told him all would be covered in class but he fidgeted with such impatience that I crossed a line I’d never before considered. “I could tutor you privately if you like,” I offered. He grinned. “That would be great. When can we start?” I knew what was going to happen and so did he because he adjusted his cock as he spoke. We set a time for him to come by the house one evening. “Give it a try,” I said. “Cool.”

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Consequently, males of many primate species have evolved to create new reproductive opportunities for themselves by killing all the dependent offspring of females when they gain control of the group. When a female’s dependent child is killed, the fact that she is no longer breast-feeding will cause her to go into estrous, at which point she will resume mating. Infanticide is a selfish male solution to the problem of how to capitalize quickly on the advantages of having won the male-male competition. However, the results are devastating for female reproductive success and for the population as a whole. For example, in Chacma Baboons (Papio hamadryas ursinus) in Botswana, infanticide by males accounts for 38 percent of all infant mortality—as high as 75 percent in some years—and is more significant than any other cause of death. While infanticide gives the new dominant male new opportunities for mating, the impact on the lifetime reproductive success of females is entirely and tremendously negative. Infanticide wastes all of the reproductive investment the female alone has made during the long period she spent gestating and breast-feeding that offspring. And because the maximum number of offspring she can have during her lifetime is fewer than ten, each child she loses to infanticide is a substantial blow to her ability to pass on her genes to the next generation. Infanticide by males is a premier example of sexual conflict. It furthers the selfish reproductive interests of the dominant males at the expense of the reproductive interests of the females. However, this process is not just bad for the females of the species; it’s inherently maladaptive, because the overall population of the species can be diminished as a result. Infanticide is not adaptive, because it does not improve the fit of the organism to its environment. Rather, infanticide evolves by male-male competition with each dominant male trying to gain advantage over other, previous males. But unlike the typical male-male battles like elk stags fighting it out with their antlers, infanticide is sexual conflict because it harms the evolutionary interests of females.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Hartjes and his eleven cousins had been running around the rusty swing set, trying to coax it back into life, when out the wasps had come, and Hartjes, being slower and clumsier, had tripped and made himself an easy target. They’d stung him and he’d gone screaming into the house, and his mother had said it. “Then what am I supposed to say? I’m sorry?” Simon asked. “I just didn’t want you thinking I had lied about it, that’s all. I didn’t want you thinking it was a joke or that I’d made it up just to have something to say. I just wanted you to know that. I wasn’t complaining.” Hartjes drank the water he had been nursing, which was lukewarm now and tasted faintly of metal from the pipes. Simon hummed. He stirred the stew, which smelled to Hartjes like tomatoes and pepper, with the musky scent of venison. When Hartjes let his chair rock back and forth, balancing himself with the wide set of his feet, it sounded like a swinging door. His hunger felt distant, like it belonged to someone else. Sweat collected against his forehead, and he wiped at it. The skin at the lower part of his spine was hot and dry. His eyes were stinging. Near the back door, Simon had put three red clay pots on a low bench. The bench had been a pew at Saint Anne Lutheran Church before the church had burned to the ground. Simon used to go out to the blackened ruins to sit in what was left of its pews and gaze out into the valley of pine and cedar and oak trees, the wind on his face and the scent of soot rising all around him. When he was out there, he told Hartjes as they twisted the pews from the foundations into which they had been bolted, searching for one that wouldn’t crumble to ash, when he was out there, it seemed that the whole world went away, all his problems, all his needs—hunger, pain, money, viral load, all of it. Hartjes could understand that. He could understand how a person could get to needing that, stillness in the world. Simon and Hartjes had rescued the pews and scraped them down to their bones, and then they’d polished, coated, and lacquered them until they were smooth with a rich stain. All that work to use them for indoor plants: large, leafy green things with heads like that of a Saint Bernard or a Newfoundland, lolling in the winter light. • • • Simon and Hartjes ate their stew on the porch in the cold. Simon turned his portable space heater on its back under the slats of the bench, and the two of them sat with their legs tucked under them, though for Hartjes it was a struggle because he was thick through the haunch and some fifteen or twenty pounds heavier than Simon.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Henry’s family was so close. It worried her sometimes that she was fourth in line after Irene, Rusty and Miri. Not that they hadn’t welcomed her into the family. But he was so attached to them. She’d learned quickly never to say a critical word about any of them. As far as Henry was concerned, they were perfect. A hard act to follow. MiriRusty gave a little cough to get the attention back to the toasts. She held up her glass. “Here’s to the best brother a girl could ever have. And you know I mean that, Henry. May you and Leah enjoy health and happiness always.” Then she choked up. “Here, here…” Ben Sapphire said. Miri was surprised when he held up his glass because it wasn’t like he was one of the family. Still, no one stopped him from speaking. “Leah,” Ben Sapphire said, “you are joining a kind, generous, loving family. They rescued me when I thought my life was over and helped me find a reason to keep going.” Now Miri was really surprised. She’d never heard Ben Sapphire say much of anything, let alone something so deep. At least it sounded deep to her. She was trying to think of what she could possibly say after that when Alma clutched her arm. Miri could tell she was growing more and more anxious. Now her hands shook as she passed Miri a note card. “I can’t make speeches,” she whispered. “Will you do it for me?” So Miri held up her glass the way the others had, and read, “Aunt Alma is so happy that Henry and Leah are marrying.” Miri glanced over at Aunt Alma, who gave her a nod and a small, grateful smile. “And she looks forward to the day you bring your children to her house to play in her yard.” “Please,” Irene said. “Don’t rush them. They’re not even married yet.” Then everyone laughed, except Alma, who was embarrassed by what she had asked Miri to say for her. Miri didn’t say any of the things she might have said to Henry alone. He was just thirteen years old when she was born. All of her childhood memories involved him. He was gentle with her and always kind. He never lied, never shied away from taking her questions seriously. When he went away to war she couldn’t stop crying. Every morning and every night she prayed for him. She prayed to a god she didn’t know, not the god from the High Holidays, but some other god, who wouldn’t be too busy to listen. Every night when she sat down to supper with Rusty and Irene, they joined hands, bowing their heads and closing their eyes. That meant they were thinking of Uncle Henry, who was over there. Irene pasted a blue star in her window, signaling she had a son in the military.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Not that she wanted to see his family photos, but he’d brought an album to Irene’s one day and she knew Irene expected her to be polite. She couldn’t tell him that when she pictured his beloved Estelle, it was inside the ball of fire that had fallen out of the sky. No, she could never tell anyone that. Well, maybe Natalie, since she claimed to have a special connection with Ruby Granik, but if Ruby knew anything about Estelle Sapphire, Natalie hadn’t shared it with Miri. They’d held the funeral for Estelle three days after the crash. Irene had baked for the shiva at the Sapphires’ house in Bayonne, and now Ben Sapphire’s sons were headed back to Chicago and Los Angeles with their wives and children. Once they’d left, Ben offered to drive Miri and her friends to the Y, or wherever they wanted to go, in his fancy new car, but Miri wasn’t about to let him drive her anywhere. He was too old, too hairy and sometimes—you never knew when—he’d break down and cry. It was dangerous to drive that way, wasn’t it? She understood he was sad. She understood why. But she wasn’t ready to accept a ride from him. “Thank you,” she said to his offer, “but my friend’s father is driving us tonight.” He nodded. “Maybe another time.” “Yes, another time.” Ben SapphireHe’d open the door to the house in Bayonne, the house where he and Estelle had raised their family, calling out, Stellie, honey, I’m home —but no one ran into his arms, no one slept curled around him, telling him every night before they went to sleep how much she loved him. Estelle was gone, gone forever. He wanted to believe he’d catch up with her on the other side but he didn’t believe in the afterlife. It was all shit. Dead is dead. Dead and buried. All he had left was his memories and their children and grandchildren. He and Estelle had vowed long ago they would never become a burden to their children. The children had their own lives. And he wanted it that way. He didn’t know what his future held. Only that he had to get out of that house. He’d already made the decision to put it on the market. His daughters-in-law had disposed of Estelle’s things. They’d taken the good jewelry and furs for themselves, with his blessing. The new leather gloves, gloves Estelle hadn’t yet worn, they gave to Irene for the compassion she’d shown Ben since the crash. He could see Irene didn’t want the gloves. But what could she do? She was a mensch. She thanked them for thinking of her. Now Ben would move to the Elizabeth Carteret hotel until he found an apartment that suited him. In the meantime, there was always Irene’s couch. After the funeral, he wanted to talk to the rabbi about something so personal, so shameful, it was eating away at him.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I mean, such is the formal agreement with the so-called authorities. Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up. And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears. 3 0 Leaving as I did Coalmont around four in the afternoon (by Route X—I do not remember the number), I might have made Ramsdale by dawn had not a short-cut tempted me. I had to get onto Highway Y. My map showed quite blandly that just beyond Woodbine, which I reached at nightfall, I could leave paved X and reach paved Y by means of a transverse dirt road. It was only some forty miles long according to my map. Otherwise I would have to follow X for another hundred miles and then use leisurely looping Z to get to Y and my destination. However, the short-cut in question got worse and worse, bumpier and bumpier, muddier and muddier, and when I attempted to turn back after some ten miles of purblind, tortuous and tortoise-slow progress, my old and weak Melmoth got stuck in deep clay. All was dark and muggy, and hopeless. My headlights hung over a broad ditch full of water. The surrounding country, if any, was a black wilderness. I sought to extricate myself but my rear wheels only whined in slosh and anguish. Cursing my plight, I took off my fancy clothes, changed into slacks, pulled on the bullet-riddled sweater, and waded four miles back to a roadside farm. It started to rain on the way but I had not the strength to go back for a mackintosh. Such incidents have convinced me that my heart is basically sound despite recent diagnoses. Around midnight, a wrecker dragged my car out. I navigated back to Highway X and traveled on. Utter weariness overtook me an hour later, in an anonymous little town. I pulled up at the curb and in darkness drank deep from a friendly flask. The rain had been cancelled miles before. It was a black warm night, somewhere in Appalachia. Now and then cars passed me, red tail-lights receding, white headlights advancing, but the town was dead. Nobody strolled and laughed on the sidewalks as relaxing burghers would in sweet, mellow, rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. S herry-red letters of light marked a Camera Shop. A large thermometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov’s Jewelry Company had a display of artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff Laundry.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Someone called earlier to cancel our appointment.” Mrs. Jones’s voice went very low and soft as if she were about to share a secret. “I was wondering if you happen to know if the pilot was Mrs. Barnes’s son?” Mrs. Barnes’s son? Mrs. Barnes, who she’d met once, when Daisy sent her to the Osners’ house with a package? Mrs. Barnes’s son was in that flaming wreck? “Christina? Are you there?” “Yes, I’m still here.” Her voice sounded small and unsure of itself. She cleared her throat several times. “I’m asking because I know Mrs. Barnes from working at the Osners’,” Mrs. Jones said, “and if…well, I’d like to be there.” Christina was barely able to hold herself together. She rolled out a piece of Scotch tape and stuck it to her arm as if that would help. “I’ll call if I hear anything.” She went back to the lab, picked up the broom, swept up the mess and washed off the floor. She felt overwhelmingly tired, as if she hadn’t slept for days. She felt if she didn’t lie down immediately she would keel over. She lay down on the sofa in the waiting room, where she smelled something terrible, something burned or burning. What was it? She sniffed her arms, a handful of her hair. It was coming from her, her hair, her skin, the clothes she wore under the white lab coat. All of her smelled terrible. Maybe she would always smell that way, a reminder of what she’d seen. She could wash and wash and still it would be there. Christina Demetrious, the girl who smelled like fire and smoke, and death. She closed her eyes. An hour went by, maybe two, then there was a knock on the office door. Daisy had instructed Christina to keep the door locked when she was alone in the office. “Who is it?” she asked. “Christina? Christina, are you okay?” She opened the door and fell into Jack’s arms. MiriMiri was relieved when Dr. O and Daisy rushed into the house. Mrs. Barnes was still on the floor covered by the quilt. She still hadn’t said a word. Dr. O bent down to check her pulse. As he did, he glanced toward the basement door, and for the first time Miri was aware of the music coming from downstairs. “Is it true?” Mrs. Barnes asked Dr. O. He answered, “Yes. I’m so sorry.” Mrs. Barnes nodded. Dr. O helped Mrs. Barnes to her feet and led her to a chair at the kitchen table. Daisy brought her a glass of water and handed her a pill. But Mrs. Barnes’s hands were shaking so badly Daisy had to put the pill into Mrs. Barnes’s mouth, then hold the water glass to her lips. Mrs. Barnes swallowed without asking what it was. “Is there anyone I can call for you?” Daisy asked. “My other son, Charles. He’ll call my daughter,” Mrs. Barnes said.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She wasn’t trouble to them. She was just Grace. What she misses most of all is that feeling of autonomy. Being able to go wherever she wanted. Whenever she wanted. The feeling of being able to lift her fork and not have to think about what it will cost her later. Oh, she misses it. The carelessness of those four years. How easy it was. But now she misses her hair. She misses the moisture in her skin. She misses hunger. Not for food, exactly, or even the sensation of appetite, which remains, if much attenuated. She misses sex, the desire for sex, the capacity for sex. Before her diagnosis, she had been fucking a white boy named Jonas. He had played lacrosse at the University of Virginia. He was tall and firm. He came from money and his family had a second house in the mountains. Her friends had tried warn her about him. Not that he was dangerous or bad, but that white men were a particular kind of hazard. She was light-skinned, they said, susceptible. But it wasn’t like that, Grace didn’t think. She wasn’t thinking about her parents. She wasn’t thinking about how she’d been watched by her grandmother and aunts, or what it meant that her mother didn’t speak to her own family anymore because she’d run off with a black man. Grace was careless and free, and what she thought about was what felt good. Having been deprived of it her whole life, having spent all her time thinking about what other people thought, she’d given herself over to Jonas because he made her laugh and made her feel like she was showing him everything about his body and hers both. With Jonas it was always so good, so easy. He was so pliant, willing to give in to her, to give way to her desires. When they had sex, she could think only of herself, the friction inside her, the gathering heat between their bodies, the scent of her hair, of her sweat and his, the rhythm of their coming together and falling apart. She didn’t want a oneness with him, as she’d heard some people describe it. What she craved was the white-hot oblivion of an orgasm, riding the rim of it again and again until finally she slipped down into herself and shivered. All of that feels beyond her now.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Well, her phrasing was less childish than her hand, I thought, as though the letter were a composition in class that concerned me in no way. Even as this attitude broke over me but before I was drawn into another, more troubling one, I had time to notice she said I was one of her very best friends, an honor I’d been unaware of until now, as who had not: I registered the social gain before the romantic loss. Unless (and here I could taste something bitter on the back of my tongue)—unless the “mature” advice (“I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while”) was actually a denial of the consolation prize, a way of keeping me out of her circle at the very moment she was pretending to invite me into it. Could it be that the entire exercise, its assured tone, the concision and familiar ring of the phrasing, figured as nothing more than a “tribute” (her word) she had piled up before the altar of her own beauty? How many people had she shown my letter to? But then all this mental chatter stopped and I surrendered to something else, something less active, more abiding, something that had been waiting politely all this time but that now stepped forward, diffident yet impersonal: my grief. For the next few months I grieved. I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for? I cried during gym class when someone got mad at me for dropping the basketball. In the past I would have hidden my pain but now I just slowly walked off the court, the tears spurting out of my face. I took a shower, still crying, and dressed forlornly and walked the empty halls even though to do so during class time was forbidden. I no longer cared about rules. I let my hair grow, I stopped combing it, I forgot to change my shirt from one week to the next. With a disabused eye I watched other kids striving to succeed, to become popular. I became a sort of vagabond of grief or, as I’d rather put it, I entered grief’s vagabondage, which better suggests a simultaneous freedom and slavery. Freedom from the now meaningless pursuit of grades, friends, smiles; slavery to a hopeless love.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Then all we of the house, with all the Citizens, ranne incontinently after her to take the sword out of her hand, but she clasping about the tombe of Lepolemus, kept us off with her naked weapon, and when she perceived that every one of us wept and lamented, she spake in this sort: I pray you my friends weepe not, nor lament for me, for I have revenged the death of my husband, I have punished deservedly the wicked breaker of our marriage; now is it time to seeke out my sweet Lepolemus, and presently with this sword to finish my life. And therewithall after she had made relation of the whole matter, declared the vision which she saw and told by what meane she deceived Thrasillus, thrusting her sword under her right brest, and wallowing in her owne bloud, at length with manly courage yeelded up the Ghost. Then immediately the friends of miserable Charites did bury her body within the same Sepulchre. Thrasillus hearing all the matter, and knowing not by what meanes he might end his life, for he thought his sword was not sufficient to revenge so great a crime, at length went to the same Sepulchre, and cryed with a lowd voice, saying: o yee dead spirites whom I have so highly and greatly offended, vouchsafe to receive me, behold I make Sacrifice unto you with my whole body: which said, hee closed the Sepulchre, purposing to famish himselfe, and to finish his life there in sorrow. These things the young man with pitifull sighes and teares, declared unto the Cowheards and Shepheards, which caused them all to weepe: but they fearing to become subject unto new masters, prepared themselves to depart away. THE THIRTY-THIRD CHAPTER How Apuleius was lead away by the Horsekeeper: and what danger he was in.