Joy

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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

  She slowly descended the stairs, and I could watch her with a calmness in which not a single atom of torment or desire was intermingled. I could see her plunge into and rise out of the crystalline water, and the wavelets which she herself raised played about her like tender lovers. Our nihilistic aesthetician is right when he says: a real apple is more beautiful than a painted one, and a living woman is more beautiful than a Venus of stone. And when she left the bath, and the silvery drops and the roseate light rippled down her body, I was seized with silent rapture. I wrapped the linen sheets about her, drying her glorious body. The calm bliss remained with me, even now when one foot upon me as upon a footstool, she rested on the cushions in her large velvet cloak. The lithe sables nestled desirously against her cold marble-like body. Her left arm on which she supported herself lay like a sleeping swan in the dark fur of the sleeve, while her left hand played carelessly with the whip. By chance my look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite, and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that its lines and colors would have to dissolve like mist. “What is the matter?” asked Wanda. I pointed to the mirror. “Ah, that is really beautiful,” she exclaimed, “too bad one can’t capture the moment and make it permanent.” “And why not?” I asked. “Would not any artist, even the most famous, be proud if you gave him leave to paint you and make you immortal by means of his brush. “The very thought that this extra-ordinary beauty is to be lost to the world,” I continued still watching her enthusiastically, “is horrible—all this glorious facial expression, this mysterious eye with its green fires, this demonic hair, this magnificence of body. The idea fills me with a horror of death, of annihilation. But the hand of an artist shall snatch you from this. You shall not like the rest of us disappear absolutely and forever, without leaving a trace of your having been. Your picture must live, even when you yourself have long fallen to dust; your beauty must triumph beyond death!” Wanda smiled. “Too bad, that present-day Italy hasn’t a Titian or Raphael,” she said, “but, perhaps, love will make amends for genius, who knows; our little German might do?” She pondered. “Yes, he shall paint you, and I will see to it that the god of love mixes his colors.” * * * * *

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

  She smiled graciously at me and called me back, when I was about to withdraw respectfully. “Come, Gregor, have your breakfast quickly too,” she said, “then we will go house-hunting. I don’t want to stay in the hotel any longer than I have to. It is very embarassing here. If I chat with you for more than a minute, people will immediately say: ‘The fair Russian is having an affair with her servant, you see, the race of Catherines isn’t extinct yet.’” Half an hour later we went out; Wanda was in her cloth-gown with the Russian cap, and I in my Cracovian costume. We created quite a stir. I walked about ten paces behind, looking very solemn, but expected momentarily to have to break out into loud laughter. There was scarcely a street in which one or the other of the attractive houses did not bear the sign camere ammobiliate. Wanda always sent me upstairs, and only when the apartment seemed to answer her requirements did she herself ascend. By noon I was as tired as a stag- hound after the hunt. We entered a new house and left it again without having found a suitable habitation. Wanda was already somewhat out of humor. Suddenly she said to me: “Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is charming, and the restrictions, which we have placed upon each other are really annoying me. I can’t stand it any longer, I do love you, I must kiss you. Let’s go into one of the houses.” “But, my lady—” I interposed. “Gregor?” She entered the next open corridor and ascended a few steps of the dark stair-way; then she threw her arms about me with passionate tenderness and kissed me. “Oh, Severin, you were very wise. You are much more dangerous as slave than I would have imagined; you are positively irrestible, and I am afraid I shall have to fall in love with you again.” “Don’t you love me any longer then,” I asked seized by a sudden fright. She solemnly shook her head, but kissed me again with her swelling, adorable lips. We returned to the hotel. Wanda had luncheon, and ordered me also quickly to get something to eat. Of course, I wasn’t served as quickly as she, and so it happened that just as I was carrying the second bite of my steak to my mouth, the waiter entered and called out with his theatrical gesture: “Madame wants you, at once.” I took a rapid and painful leave of my food, and, tired and hungry, hurried toward Wanda, who was already on the street. “I wouldn’t have imagined you could be so cruel,” I said reproachfully. “With all these, fatiguing duties you don’t even leave me time to eat in peace.” Wanda laughed gaily. “I thought you had finished,” she said, “but never mind. Man was born to suffer, and you in particular. The martyrs didn’t have any beefsteaks either.”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She kneaded Indi’s breast as her free hand slipped between the rolls of her waist, fingers walking gently over tender skin. “Am I hurting you?” Indi whispered, pulling her fingers free to stroke Beth’s cheek and leaving a warm streak of saliva down almost to her chin. Beth wriggled, smiling. “Not enough.” “Fuckin’ bullshit!” Leda cried from across the firepit, where stacked driftwood burned just above the tide mark in a circle of dark stones. She had a low, lazy-sounding voice, all vocal fry. Her six-year-old, George, sat curled asleep in her lap, his breath stirring his long brown curls where they fell across his little mouth. “There is no fuckin’ way, Steph.” “I’m telling you I saw him,” said Steph, who was tiny and doughy and had something distinctively trailer-parky about her under the purple hair and lime-green tights and the DYKE knuckle tattoo on her left hand. “He was in a ShopRite in Norwalk, like, six months after T. Day. He was looting beans.” “Steve fucking Martin did not survive the apocalypse.” Fran, wrapped in an old wool blanket at the edge of the circle of firelight, ran again and again through the feeling that had raced up from the pit of her stomach into her throat when she’d held that laminated card with its little XX. She’d had a few puffs of the joint they were passing around, hoping it would mellow her out, but instead it seemed to have stuck her in a short, deep rut. She kept imagining her fingers inside Sophie, the times she’d put her cock in the other girl ( because she promised you a cunt ), and then the body. Dead. Zia leaned forward into the firelight, grinning evilly. “Fuck Steve Martin. Have the new girls heard what happened to the Harry Potter lady?” Most of the women around the fire groaned, though a few straightened up attentively. Beth shook her head, blushing at being made the center of attention. Her bruises were fading from dark purple to brown and yellow, as though someone had spray painted her for autumn camouflage. She sat leaning against Indi’s side, hands in the pouch of her hoodie. It felt so fucking weird to sit on the rocky beach as the stars came out, swapping stories about what had happened to the world’s celebrities when the big one hit. It felt like the end of the world was prowling the limits of the firelight, waiting for the embers to go out. “Okay, so, first off she ended up being a crazy TERF, like, super intense.

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

  “What shall I say? my emotions of fear and surprise were instantly subdued by those of the pleasure I bespoke in great presence of mind from the turn this adventure might take. He seemed to me no other than a pitying angel, dropt out of the clouds: for he was young and perfectly handsome, which was more than even I had asked for, man, in general, being all that my utmost desires had pointed at. I thought then I could not put too much encouragement into my eyes and voice; I regretted no leading advances; no matter for his after-opinion of my forwardness, so it might bring him to the point of answering my pressing demands of present case; it was not now with his thoughts but his actions that my business immediately lay. I raised then my head, and told him, in a soft tone, that tended to prescribe the same key to him, that his mamma was gone out and would not return till late at night: which I thought no bad hint; but as it proved, I had nothing of a novice to deal with. The impressions I had made on him from the discoveries I had betrayed of my person in the disordered motions of it, during his view of me asleep, had, as he afterwards told me, so fixed and charmingly prepared him, that, had I known his dispositions, I had more to hope from his violence, than to fear from his respect; and even less than the extreme tenderness which I threw into my voice and eyes, would have served to encourage him to make the most of the opportunity. Finding then that his kisses, imprinted on my hand, were taken as tamely as he could wish, he rose to my lips; and glewing his to them, made me so faint with overcoming joy and pleasure, that I fell back, and he with me, in course, on the bed, upon which I had, by insensibly shifting from the side to near the middle, invitingly, made room for him. He is now lain down by me, and the minutes being too precious to consume in ultimate ceremony, or dalliance, my youth proceeds immediately to those extremities, which all my looks, humming and palpitations, had assured him he might attempt without the fear of a repulse: those rogues the men, read us admirably on these occasions. I lay then at length panting for the imminent attack, with wishes far beyond my fears, and for which it was scarce possible for a girl, barely thirteen, but tall and well grown, to have better dispositions. He threw up my petticoat and shift, whilst my thighs were, by an instinct of nature, unfolded to their best; and my desires had so thoroughly destroyed all modesty in me, that even their being now naked and all laid open to him, was part of the prelude that pleasure deepened my blushes at, more than same.

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

  Novelty ever makes the strongest impressions, and in pleasures, especially; no wonder then, that he was swallowed up in raptures of admiration of things so interesting by their nature, and now seen and handled for the first time. On my part, I was richly overpaid for the pleasure I gave him, in that of examining the power of those objects thus abandoned to him, naked and free to his loosest wish, over the artless, natural stripling: his eyes streaming fire, his cheeks glowing with a florid red, his fervid frequent sighs, whilst his hands convulsively squeezed, opened, pressed together again the lips and sides of that deep flesh wound, or gently twitched the over-growing moss; and all proclaimed the excess, the riot of joys, in having his wantonness thus humoured. But he did not long abuse my patience, for the objects before him had now put him by all his, and, coming out with that formidable machine of his, he lets the fury loose, and pointing it directly to the pouting-lip mouth, that bid him sweet defiance in dumb shew, squeezes in his head, and, driving with refreshed rage, breaks in, and plugs up the whole passage of that soft pleasure-conduit pipe, where he makes all shake again, and put, once more, all within me into such an uproar, as nothing could still, but a fresh inundation from the very engine of those flames, as well as from all the springs with which nature floats that reservoir of joy, when risen to its floodmark. I was now so bruised, so battered, so spent with this overmatch, that I could hardly stir, or raise myself, but lay palpitating, till the ferment of my senses subsiding by degrees, and the hour striking at which I was obliged to dispatch my young man, I tenderly advised him of the necessity there was for parting; at which I felt so much displeasure as he could do, who seemed eagerly disposed to keep the field, and to enter on a fresh action. But the danger was too great, and after some hearty kisses of leave, and recommendations of secrecy and discretion, I forced myself to send him away, not without assurances of seeing him again, to the same purpose, as soon as possible, and thrust a guinea into his hands: not more, less, being too flush of money, a suspicion or discovery might arise from thence; having everything to fear from the dangerous indiscretion of that age in which young fellows would be too irresistible, too charming, if we had not that terrible fault to guard against.

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

  Thus, happy, then, by the heart, happy by the senses, it was beyond all power, even of thought, to form the conception of a greater delight than what I now am consummating the fruition of. Charles, whose whole frame was convulsed with the agitation of his rapture, whilst the tenderest fires trembled in his eyes, all assured me of a perfect concord of joy, penetrated me so profoundly, touched me so vitally, took me so much out of my own possession, whilst he seemed himself so much in mine, that in a delicious enthusiasm, I imagined such a transfusion of heart and spirit, as that coalescing, and making one body and soul with him, I was he, and he me. But all this pleasure tending, like life from its first instants, towards its own dissolution, lived too fast not to bring on upon the spur its delicious moment of mortality; for presently the approach of the tender agony discovered itself by its usual signals, that were quickly followed by my dear lover’s emanation of himself, that spun out, and shot, feelingly indeed! up the ravished indraught: where the sweetly soothing balmy titillation opened all the juices of joy on my side, which ecstatically in flow helped to allay the prurient glow, and drowned our pleasure for a while. Soon, however, to be on float again! for Charles, true to nature’s laws, in one breath, expiring and ejaculating, languished not long in the dissolving trance, but recovering spirit again, soon gave me to feel that the true mettle spring! of his instrument of pleasure, were, by love, and perhaps, by a long vacation, wound up too high to be let down by a single explosion: his stiffnesss till stood my friend.

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

  In short, she was now as mere a machine as much wrought on, and had her motions as little at her own command, as the natural himself, who, thus broke in upon her, made her feel with a vengeance his tempestuous mettle he battered with; their active loins quivered again with the violence of their conflict, till the surge of pleasure, foaming and raging to a height, drew down the pearly shower that was, to allay this hurricane. The purely sensitive idiot then first shed those tears of joy that attend its last moments, not without an agony of delight, and even almost a roar of rapture, as the gush escaped him; so sensibly too for Louisa, that she kept him faithful company, going off, in consent, with the old symptoms: a delicious delirium, a tremendous convulsive shudder, and the critical dying: Oh! And now, on his getting off she lay pleasure- drenched, and regorging its essential sweets; but quite spent, and gasping for breath, without other sensation of life than in those exquisite vibrations that trembled still on the strings of delight; which had been too intensively touched, and which nature had so ravishingly stirred with, for the senses to be quickly at peace from. As for the changeling, whose curious engine had been thus successfully played off, his shift of countenance and gesture had even something droll, or rather tragi-comic in it: there was now an air of sad repining foolishness, superadded to his natural one of no meaning and idiotism, as he stood with his label of manhood, now lank, unstiffened, becalmed, and flapping against his thighs, down which it reached half way, terrible even in its fall, whilst under the dejection of spirit and flesh, which naturally followed his eyes, by turns, cast down towards his struck standard, or piteously lifted to Louisa, seemed to require at her hands what he had so sensibly parted from to her, and now ruefully missed.

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

  It seems, that having drank too freely before he came upon the rake with some of his young companions, he had put himself out of a condition to go through all the weapons with them, and crown the night with a getting a mistress; so that seeing me in a loose undress, he did not doubt but I was one of the misses of the house, sent in to repair his loss of time; but though he seized that notion, and a very obvious one it was, without hesitation, yet, whether my figure made a more than ordinary impression on him, or whether it was his natural politeness, he addressed me in a manner far from rude, though still on the foot of one of the house pliers come to amuse him; and giving me the first kiss that I ever relished from man in my life, asked me if I could favour him with my company, assuring me that he would make it worth my while: but had not even new-born love, that true refiner of lust, opposed so sudden a surrender, the fear of being surprised by the house was a sufficient bar to my compliance. I told him then, in a tone set by love itself, that for reasons I had not time to explain to him. I could not stay with him, and might even ever see him again, with a sigh at these words, which broke from the bottom of my heart. My conqueror, who, as he afterwards told me, had been struck with my appearance, and liked me as much as he could think of liking any one in my supposed way of life, asked me briskly at once, if I would be kept by him, and that he would take a lodging for me directly, and relieve me from any engagements he presumed I might be under to the house.

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

  "Having done this, he took hold of my rod and pressed it against his gaping anus. The tip of the frisky phallus soon found its entrance in the hospitable hole that endeavoured to give it admission. I pressed a little; the whole of the glans was engulfed. The sphincter soon gripped it in such a way that it could not come out without an effort. I thrust it slowly to prolong as much as possible the ineffable sensation that ran through every limb, to calm the quivering nerves, and to allay the heat of the blood. Another push, and half the phallus was in his body. I pulled it out half an inch, though it seemed to me a yard by the prolonged pleasure I felt. I pressed forward again, and the whole of it, down to its very root, was all swallowed up. Thus wedged, I vainly endeavoured to drive it higher up—an impossible feat, and, clasped as I was, I felt it wriggling in its sheath like a baby in its mother's womb, giving myself and him an unutterable and delightful titillation. "So keen was the bliss that overcame me, that I asked myself if some ethereal, life-giving fluid were not being poured on my head, and trickling down slowly over my quivering flesh? "Surely the rain-awakened flowers must be conscious of such a sensation during a shower, after they have been parched by the scorching rays of an estival sun. "Teleny again put his arm round me and held me tight. I gazed at myself within his eyes, he saw himself in mine. During this voluptuous, lambent feeling, we patted each other's bodies softly, our lips cleaved together and my tongue was again in his mouth. We remained in this copulation almost without stirring, for I felt that the slightest movement would provoke a copious ejaculation, and this feeling was too exquisite to be allowed to pass away so quickly. Still we could not help writhing, and we almost swooned away with delight. We were both shivering with lust, from the roots of our hair to the tips of our toes; all the flesh of our bodies kept bickering luxuriously, just as placid waters of the mere do at noontide when kissed by the sweet-scented, wanton breeze that has just deflowered the virgin rose. "Such intensity of delight could not, however, last very long; a few almost unwilling contractions of the sphincter brandle the phallus, and then the first brunt was over; I thrust in with might and main, I wallowed on him; my breath came thickly; I panted, I sighed, I groaned. The thick burning fluid was spouted out slowly and at long intervals.

• From My People (2022)

  Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Do you ever encounter negative reactions from people when you’re off the set and out in the public, or is it all positive? Tracee Ellis Ross: No, I mean, the one—you know, I have heard, very interestingly, people say things like, “I had no idea I would like your show.” And I always—because that’s the kind of person I am, I’m always, like, “Why? Why didn’t you think you would like it?” “Well, you know, the title.” And I’m, like, “Oh, well, what did the title mean to you, that you wouldn’t like it?” “Well, I thought it was just going to be just about like black people” or something, like, that it was unidentifiable. Or, “I mean, it’s so funny. You guys, I’m so—my family is so much like yours,” you know, as if it’s surprising. And—but that’s the beauty of it. I think that’s the beauty of it. That is the beauty of comedy. And people seem to be moved and changed by it, and I love that. It’s a very rewarding thing. I mean, you can just make entertainment, you can make people laugh, and that in and of itself is a gift and a really joyful part of the job that I have. But to also make people think is also really cool, and to make people talk and have conversations about things that they wouldn’t normally talk about. New Museum Traces Black Stage HistoryThe New York Times JULY 9, 1975 A worn-down black shoe with wooden taps on the heel and toe that belonged to John Bubbles when he danced with Judy Garland at the Palace . . . A check stub for eighty-six dollars—the take-home pay in 1952 for Flournoy Miller, the black writer who created the prototypes of Amos ’n’ Andy . . . Two cow bones—replicas of instruments played in minstrel shows by the “Mr. Bones” . . . A letter from Edward Albee’s father upbraiding a theater manager for referring to black vaudevillians as niggers . . . These are some of the items of theater history that show the long and continuing impact and influence of blacks on the American stage. And while at the moment Broadway is overflowing with black talent, the contributions of blacks in the past, toward making Broadway what it is, have not been so well established. But Helen Armstead Johnson is trying to change that. Dr. Johnson, a perky scholar in her fifties, is starting a Museum of Black Theater History, partly to demonstrate that it was the Afro-American who gave the American stage its first native form. Blacks in the theater in New York go back at least as far as 1821 and the African Grove Theater for free blacks, which was at the corner of Bleecker and Mercer Streets. “They had a garden there,” Dr. Johnson recalled the other day, “and as whites went to Chatham Gardens to sip and drink, blacks went to sip and chat at the Grove.

• From My People (2022)

  My disappointment over my image of the vine-filled Vineyard was soon more than assuaged by the multifarious landscapes at every turn in the road after our visit with the Sviridoffs. Oak Bluffs was calling. So we rented a car and drove through the enchanting towns of Chilmark, West Tisbury, Vineyard Haven, and at last, Oak Bluffs. I’d never been there but had heard about the more-than-century-old, black-owned Shearer Cottage. We immediately set out to find it and spent a night there before we began our Oak Bluffs exploration, which took us to places I had heard about from Bobby, including the Inkwell. There I discovered (well, kind of like Christopher Columbus “discovered” America) one of the main arteries that was the heartbeat of Oak Bluffs: beautiful black bodies of all shapes, sizes, and ages frolicking freely in and out of the water they owned by virtue of years of occupancy. I was so excited about what I was seeing that I immediately got my editor at the New York Times on the phone and convinced him to allow me to extend my vacation by a few days so I could tell the world about something many would find hard to conceive, since even then in 1970, after the Civil Rights Acts abolished the last of the “separate but equal” lie in the South, there were still places in both the North and the South that were not welcoming to people of color. And tell the world I did, on the second front of the New York Times , illustrated with a picture of longtime Vineyarder Teixiera Nash in a huge sun hat. By this time, we had met Dr. and Mrs. Leslie Hayling, who graciously invited us to stay with them in their home with a beautiful grand piano and copious amounts of great food. Over the years and many more trips to the Vineyard with our children Suesan and Chuma and our friends and theirs who joined us, we put down roots—even though they were in the yards of other people. There was the legendary Lee Simmons, who knew (and would share) everybody’s business because everybody found in her a sympathetic mother confessor. And there were longtime Vineyarders like Claudia Bowser, who lived next door to Jessica Harris, whom I came to know as a great culinary anthropologist who could cook as well as write about foods from all over the world, and her diminutive mother, Rhoda, who is long gone from us, but whose Wisdom in a Pouch cards still rest on a table in our home for all newcomers to learn from. While others have decried the loss of Oak Bluffs landmarks that spoke to the so-called historic African American presence here, and while the name Inkwell is now debated among those who believe it carries unkind racial overtones and others who defend it, insisting the name derived from the many writers who waded there, the beach still beckons the older generations and their children.

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

  I failed to notice, for instance, that we never saw them together. Daddy sometimes hung around the stable to drink coffee with Mr. McBride, for Daddy could tell a mare’s age by staring into her mouth, guess a stallion’s weight within twenty pounds, and reckon how many hands high a gelding stood. Daddy had broken cutting horses as a young man, and this earned him a measure of cowboy respect, despite his being Texan, which was reprehensible to most of the hands. Mr. McBride even loaned Daddy his very own blue-spotted Appaloosa free of charge one day to take Lecia and me riding into the mountains. We tied our horses before a country store with an honest-to-God cracker barrel inside. Daddy paid the man to make us roast beef sandwiches on Wonder bread. He used grainy mustard and thin slices of red onion. We also bought tins of pink salmon eggs and rented fly rods and waders for trout fishing. Which remains about the only sport I’ve ever whipped Lecia at right off. Whatever reflex makes her sharp with a gun (she can still pluck a dove from a tree) made her restless in the water. Standing around just bored her. She needed more to do. That afternoon the canvas bag I’d slung around my neck quickly filled up with the shining bodies of flopping trout. When I could no longer carry it, I waded back to the bank to leave it with Lecia, who’d given up and broken out the sandwiches. I nearly laid down my rod too. That would have been a mistake, for the last fish I hauled out of the water that day must’ve weighed five pounds and was all fight. Daddy laughed like hell when it hit. My rod bent double. I staggered out into deeper water hollering for help. He had to wade back to the bank first and get rid of his pole before he could reel the fish in for me. I did manage to get the net under it myself. Together we dragged it flopping on the grassy bank, where it smacked its tail and made Lecia sidestep with an odd daintiness. She actually said ick. Daddy grabbed its tail in two sure hands to whack its head on a rock. Then it lay still, eyes staring ahead. Its gills puffed in reflex. It was not, like the old fish that poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote about, “battered and venerable and homely” with the long mustache of a mandarin. Nor did it have the bulk that thrilled Hemingway in a tuna. But as fish go, it was close to perfect, being clean silver in the sun with that rainbow stripe all pink and blue and yellow-green melted right into its unnicked scales, and not a square inch of moss or tatter to mar it.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Her thighs quivered against his cheeks. She pulled away, strands of mucus and jism stretching and snapping between her cock and his open mouth, and scrambled on her knees to the foot of the bed, where she went down onto her elbows to kiss him just above his swollen clit. Her hair tickled his mound and the crooks of his thighs, trailing through the wetness running out of him onto the towel they’d laid down. She licked him. Her tongue parted his lips. “Oh,” he whispered, his voice quavering as fire lapped at the arc of his pelvis, questing with pale fingers for his spine. “Don’t stop.” He breathed in, air enriching the taste of her cum on his lips. He was crying. When had he started crying? The wet sound of her lips closing on his clit, of her spit sucked back up into her mouth as she began to blow him. He beat a fist against the sheets and stuffed the other in his mouth, biting down hard on his knuckles. “God,” he moaned into his own sweating skin. “God, God, God. Please. Please.” Make me a man. He came with a seething snarl, back arched so that only his shoulders touched the sheets, and reached down to tangle his long fingers in her hair and force her face harder against his crotch. Tremors wracked his body. His thighs tensed so suddenly and with such force that he feared for a moment they’d cramp as a second wave broke small and quiet in the silence of the booming first. Her mouth still worked against him. Alien muscle jacked into his body’s throbbing substrate. He wrapped his thighs around her head, moaning through his teeth, and somewhere in the stretched-out moments afterward, he came a third and final time, the walls of his cunt gripping Fran’s fingers as though afraid she might let go until the strength went out of his legs and he went limp, breathing hard as tears rolled down his cheeks. Fran looked up from his sopping slit, her face slick up to the cheekbones, traces of dark menstrual blood on her lips and chin and the tip of her nose. She looked like a hyena pulling its muzzle out of a carcass. “I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, transfixed and revolted by those smears of red. “I didn’t know.” “I don’t care,” she said, smiling. His blood was in her teeth, too. “I like it.” He swallowed. “Can you hold me?” Her smile faltered. She wiped her face on her forearm. “Yeah, of course.” For a while they lay together in the quiet, Fran’s arms around him, the only sound the distant rumble of the Screw’s pumps and generators. She probably wanted me to hold her, he thought sadly. He licked his lips and tasted her again.

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

  My mother stood and walked up to Ted. “I’m Grandmother Spirit’s only daughter,” she said. My mother’s voice had gotten all formal. Indians are good at that. We’ll be talking and laughing and carrying on like normal, and then, BOOM, we get all serious and sacred and start talking like some English royalty. “Dearest daughter,” Ted said. “I hereby return your stolen goods. I hope you forgive me for returning it too late.” “Well, there’s nothing to forgive, Ted,” my mother said. “Grandmother Spirit wasn’t a powwow dancer.” Ted’s mouth dropped open. “Excuse me,” he said. “My mother loved going to powwows. But she never danced. She never owned a dance outfit. This couldn’t be hers.” Ted didn’t say anything. He couldn’t say anything. “In fact, looking at the beads and design, this doesn’t look Spokane at all. I don’t recognize the work. Does anybody here recognize the beadwork?” “No,” everybody said. “It looks more Sioux to me,” my mother said. “Maybe Oglala. Maybe. I’m not an expert. Your anthropologist wasn’t much of an expert, either. He got this way wrong.” We all just sat there in silence as Ted mulled that over. Then he packed his outfit back into the suitcase, hurried over to his waiting car, and sped away. For about two minutes, we all sat quiet. Who knew what to say? And then my mother started laughing. And that set us all off. Two thousands Indians laughed at the same time. We kept laughing. It was the most glorious noise I’d ever heard. And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean, but, dang, we knew how to laugh. When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. [image "An illustration of a head with two faces, one laughing and one crying, with a cloud above the head and water flowing down." file=image_rsrc4T3.jpg] And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said good-bye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them. Each funeral was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together. All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground. And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt. And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses. [image "An illustration of a storefront labeled ‘Heaven’ with balloons and signs that read ‘If I’m here, I’m open’ and ‘Sale: Disposable halos.’" file=image_rsrc4T4.jpg] Valentine Heart [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] A few days after I gave Penelope a homemade Valentine (and she said she forgot it was Valentine’s Day), my dad’s best friend, Eugene, was shot in the face in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven in Spokane. Way drunk, Eugene was shot and killed by one of his good friends, Bobby, who was too drunk to even remember pulling the trigger.

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

  CHAPTER 6 “I’ll tell you just exactly how my daddy died,” Daddy says. “He hung hisself.” This is easily the biggest lie Daddy ever told—that I heard, anyway. His daddy is alive and well and sitting on his porch in Kirbyville with his bird dogs. I gawk at Daddy’s audacity, while the men in the room shift around at his seriousness. They take this death as gospel. They twist around on their folding chairs like they would rather corkscrew holes in the floor and drop out of sight than hear about somebody’s daddy hanging hisself. Daddy unfolds the blade of his pocketknife—dragging out their squirming for them—and cuts a circle from a log of pepperoni. He lifts it to his mouth on the blade edge, then chews. “This is kind of tough, ain’t it?” It’s Christmas Eve morning in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop. Daddy hasn’t taken me to the Liars’ Club in months, and this is their most special day. I am squirting Cheez Whiz in curlicues on saltines for all the men in hopes that Daddy will notice me helping and invite me back. I miss going places with him. I miss shooting pool and drinking free Cokes and hearing stories with lots of swear words. I’ve been sitting around all month watching cobwebs grow between my mother’s fingers while she lays in bed reading and wishing herself dead. She doesn’t say that, of course, but it’s not hard to figure, even for somebody as dense as Lecia says I am half the time. Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher’s lights me up enough for somebody to read by me. The men meet here every year to swap and start consuming gift bottles of Jack Daniel’s. This year’s is white with a molded pheasant flying out of the brush. Four of these open bottles sit on the card-table corners. In the middle, there’s a little battery-operated monkey Ben bought for his granddaughter. It holds two cymbals. When you turn it on, it bangs them together until you smack the top of its head. Then it bares its teeth and hisses at you. Daddy thinks this is funnier than fart jokes. When he figures the men have gotten shifty enough to change the subject out from under him, he starts back talking. “I knowed they was something wrong with him the day I got back from the war. He was standing in the ditch in front of the house. Cutting grass with a sickle. I seen him a long ways off. Coming down the hill from the train, I was. Walking. And he seen me. But he just keeps swinging that sickle. That grass was about titty-high on him. In them days, the mosquitos would get up and breed in ditch grass like that. Just about eat you alive. Hell, I seen them kill a bull.

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

  I could not help laughing at the fright of the old woman had been put into, which my ignorance, and indeed my want of innocence, had far from prepared me from bespeaking. She had, it seems, apprehended that I fled the shelter to some relation I had recollected in town, on my dislike of their ways and proceedings towards me, and that this application came from thence; for, as Charles had rightly judged, not one neighbour had, at that still hour, seen the circumstance of my escape into the coach, or, at least, noticed him; neither had any in the house, the least hint of suspicion of my having spoken to him, much less of my having clapt up such a sudden bargain with a perfect stranger, thus the greatest improbability is not always what we should most mistrust. We supped with all the gaiety of two young giddy creatures at the top of their desires; and as I had given up to Charles the whole charge of my future happiness, I thought of nothing beyond the exquisite pleasure of possessing him. He came to bed in due time; and this second night, the pain being pretty well over, I tasted, in full draught, all the transports of perfect enjoyment: I swam, I bathed in bliss, till both fell asleep, through the natural consequences of satisfied desires, and appeased flames; nor did we wake but to renewed raptures. Thus, making the most of love, and life did we stay in this lodging in Chelsea about ten days; in which time Charles took care to give his excursions from home a favourable gloss, and to keep his footing with his fond indulgent grand-mother, from whom he drew constant and sufficient supplies for the charge I was to him, and which was very trifling, in comparison with his former less regular course of pleasure. Charles removed me then to a private ready furnished lodging in D.... street, St. James’s, where he paid half a guinea a week for two rooms and a closet on the second floor, which he had been some time looking out for, and was more convenient for the frequency of his visits, than where he had at first placed me, in a house, which I cannot say but I left with regret, as it was infinitely endeared to me by the first possession of my Charles, and the circumstance of losing, there, that jewel, which can never be twice lost. The landlord, however, had no reason to complain of any thing, but of a procedure in Charles too liberal not to make him regret the loss of us. Arrived at our new lodging, I remember I thought them extremely fine, though ordinary enough, even at that price; but, had it been a dungeon that Charles had brought me to, his presence would have made a little Versailles.

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

  I forgot my sufferings instantly, I embraced the Count's knees, tears streaming down my cheeks, I swore to behave myself well; but quite as insensible to my joy as to my pain, "Let us be off," said Bressac, "your actions will speak for you, they alone will govern your fate." We advance; Jasmin and his master exchange whispered remarks; I follow them humbly, without saying a word. In less than an hour we arrive at Madame la Marquise de Bressac's chateau, whose magnificence and the multitude of servants it contains make me see that whatever the post I must hold in the house, it will surely be more advantageous to me than that of drudge to Monsieur du Harpin. I am made to wait in an office where Jasmin most obligingly offers me everything conducive to my comfort. The young Count seeks out his aunt, acquaints her with what he has done, and a half-hour later himself comes to introduce me to the Marquise. Madame de Bressac was a woman of forty-six years, still very beautiful, and who seemed highly respectable and sensible, although into her principles and remarks somewhat of austerity had entrance; for two years she had been the widow of the young Count's uncle, who had married her without any fortune beyond the fine name he brought with him.

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

  Sometimes he took his hands from the semi-globes of her bosom, and transferred the pressure of them to those large ones, the present subjects of his soft blockade, which he squeezed, grasped and played with, till at length in pursuit of driving, so hotly urged, brought on the height of the fit, with such overpowering pleasure, that his fair partner became now necessary to support him, panting, fainting and dying as he discharged; which she no sooner felt the killing sweetness of, than unable to keep her legs, and yielding to the mighty intoxication, she reeld, and falling forward on the couch, made it a necessity for him, if he would preserve the warm-pleasure hold, to fall upon her, where they perfected, in a continued conjunction of body and ecstatic flow, their scheme of joys for that time.

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

  “You laugh!” I moaned, “have you no idea—” She was serious all of a sudden. She raised my head in her hands, and with a violent gesture drew me to her breast. “Wanda,” I stammered. “Of course, you enjoy suffering,” she said, and laughed again, “but wait, I’ll bring you to your senses.” “No, I will no longer ask,” I exclaimed, “whether you want to belong to me for always or for only a brief moment of intoxication. I want to drain my happiness to the full. You are mine now, and I would rather lose you than never to have had you.” “Now you are sensible,” she said. She kissed me again with her murderous lips. I tore the ermine apart and the covering of lace and her naked breast surged against mine. Then my senses left me— The first thing I remember is the moment when I saw blood dripping from my hand, and she asked apathetically: “Did you scratch me?” “No, I believe, I have bitten you.” * * * * * It is strange how every relation in life assumes a different face as soon as a new person enters. We spent marvellous days together; we visited the mountains and lakes, we read together, and I completed Wanda’s portrait. And how we loved one another, how beautiful her smiling face was! Then a friend of hers arrived, a divorced woman somewhat older, more experienced, and less scrupulous than Wanda. Her influence is already making itself felt in every direction. Wanda wrinkles her brows, and displays a certain impatience with me. Has she ceased loving me? * * * * * For almost a fortnight this unbearable restraint has lain upon us. Her friend lives with her, and we are never alone. A circle of men surrounds the young women. With my seriousness and melancholy I am playing an absurd role as lover. Wanda treats me like a stranger. To-day, while out walking, she staid behind with me. I saw that this was done intentionally, and I rejoiced. But what did she tell me? “My friend doesn’t understand how I can love you. She doesn’t think you either handsome or particularly attractive otherwise. She is telling me from morning till night about the glamour of the frivolous life in the capital, hinting at the advantages to which I could lay claim, the large parties which I would find there, and the distinguished and handsome admirers which I would attract. But of what use is all this, since it happens that I love you.” For a moment I lost my breath, then I said: “I have no wish to stand in the way of your happiness, Wanda. Do not consider me.” Then I raised my hat, and let her go ahead. She looked at me surprised, but did not answer a syllable.

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

  Or maybe the question is: Do you want to be the Spokane Indian guy who shot off the reservation like a star and made white people fall in love with his brilliance? Or do you want to be the Spokane Indian who survived the other guy’s flames and sits alone and small and uncelebrated on the rez among all the other space baseballs? Or maybe the question should be: Do you want to be Arnold Spirit Jr., the little asshole who was good at drawing cartoons, playing basketball, doing math, writing English papers, making people laugh, and every other thing but somehow always convinced people that he lived a difficult life despite the fact that he had two loving parents who let him leave our shitty Indian school and go to the awesome white school on the reservation border? Or do you want to be me, Rowdy Polatkin, who is not quite as smart or funny or talented as Arnold Spirit Jr. and is trapped on the reservation and gets beaten by his drunken father once or twice a month while his drunken mother cries in the corner, too afraid to do anything because she’ll get beaten even worse? Pretty goddamn easy choice, don’t you think? SEPTEMBER 8And yeah, I know I just used three curse words in my last entry. And in case you don’t remember them, let me repeat them in order of appearance: asshole, shitty, goddamn. And I know some of you (teachers and preachers) are offended and scandalized, but I also know that most of you cuss when you stub your toe on a table or run over a dog with your car or grab an electric fence that you didn’t know was electrified. So imagine that you are stubbing your toe, running over dogs, and getting fence-shocked every asshole minute of every shitty day of your goddamn life, and then you’ll realize that the only words that can accurately tell the story are the curse words. And if you still don’t understand me or agree with my writing advice, then feel free to use the cut-and-paste button in your head and change “asshole” to “awful,” “shitty” to “terrible,” and “goddamn” to “damn.” SEPTEMBER 9Okay, so I went off on a detour yesterday. That’s okay. Real life is a series of detours, shortcuts, and dead ends. And if you want to tell a good story, then it better be about real life. But in order to make a good story even better, you should also come back and repeat the main point. You should make sure that people “get it.” So let me return to my meteor-versus-meteorite argument. To remind you, the meteor is Arnold Spirit Jr., and I, Rowdy Polatkin, am the meteorite. Arnold used to be my best friend, but now he is my worst enemy. There is nobody you can hate as much as somebody you used to love. A Letter from an EducatorDear Readers,