Longing

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.

Page 146 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Your father half of a foot gone missing in a war when he was a child on the mainland he stepped on a Japanese landmine his shin shot up speared the sky flesh fountain it made him laugh the pain the doctor puzzled his foot back together. He snuck out every day of bedrest lugged his dead foot he found a cave on the fourth day the clouds shaped like colons inside the dark a girl & her shadow eight-limbed . He assumed she came to meet a man or a moon she taught him how to make shadow puppets on the wall of the cave filtering light through fingers pasting the dark over the night in the morning he crawled home spent days practicing silhouettes nightly he climbed to the cave his shadow-tutor casting stories onto stone. Most about revenge: stories the boy who grows his foot back twice as large & clawed & your father never made love to the shadow-girl tried once but the girl was cave rock it hurt to enter her one week a rockslide down the mountain he crawled toward the cave saw its mouth gated by boulders he tackled each stone by the time light broke in morning & no one inside when he spoke her name what he thought was her name: his echo never noticed that before. He danced his shadows along the walls she never answered his hands with her own: When your father told me this story I revised the ending one day the shadow-girl waiting with an oil lamp. She threw it at the entrance to enter the cave he must walk through burn the body that brought him to me when your father met me he shadowed me for days heeled like a bitch broke an umbrella in my fist I said make me a new one he folded it from newspaper oiled so the water leapt off it handle carved from the body of his warpistol he kissed me beneath my skin wasn’t even raining the sun a bullet through us both * WHAT IF YOUR TAIL IS SOME KIND OF REGROWN UMBILICAL CORD? WHAT IF YOU’RE BEING FED THROUGH IT? I KNOW CORDS DON’T USUALLY GROW OUT OF THE ASS, BUT IF I WERE AN UMBILICAL CORD, I’D WANT TO COME BACK AND AVENGE BEING CUT. WHAT ARE UMBILICAL CORDS FOR, ANYWAY? THEY HYPHENATE TWO BODIES. DO YOU SPEAK THROUGH IT LIKE A TELEPHONE CORD? DOES IT CARRY MEMORY FROM THE MOTHER TO THE BABY? —BENGRANDMOTHERLetter [ ]: In which I am the driver [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] Dear [ ] daughter, Jiejie, girl I gave to this country,

• From Bestiary (2020)

  On Sundays, there were tent-sermons and cheese sandwiches. There were buckets of lemonade and the American missionaries’ children, named for the shade they became in the sun: The tallest son was Terracotta, the twins were called Blood, the little blonde girl was Rosewater. Of all the missionary children, Terracotta most resembled his color and went sparrow hunting with Dayi and her cousins, even brought along his own pocket of stones. Dayi and Terracotta shucked off the tail feathers, tore off wings that wore no meat, and grilled the torsos on abandoned sections of chicken wire heated by the sun. Cooked on wire, the sparrows’ meat blackened in a grid pattern, but it tasted better that way: They could pretend they were eating something bred in captivity, something caged to collect fat. Dayi and Terracotta could pretend they shared a word for hunger. Once, he kissed her. They were waist-deep in a river, snakes perming around their ankles. Terracotta taught her to skip stones, but Dayi preferred throwing them in deep, watching the snakes scatter in rings. She liked the way things sank. When he kissed her in the middle of the river, she thought of Jesus walking on water, the river cooling to glass around their bodies. Along the banks, black reeds fringed the water like eyelashes, thick and blinking in the wind. He bent her against the mudbank, buttoned his mouth to her breast. He pinned her by the palms like Jesus, but the holes in her appeared elsewhere. She thought of taking off her gloves, turning him the color of gunshot. She thought: If this is not divinity, then it must be death. After that night by the river, Dayi checked her belly hourly, tapping it like a melon, not sure what she was listening for. The rest of that summer, Terracotta spent more hours with his father in the churchyard, building birdhouses everyone thought were bird traps. When the priests realized the locals had been stealing eggs and hatchlings from the nests and eating them, they dismantled each house. Terracotta grew two feet in one summer. In another year, he would grow a beard. Cheek-rash began to spread among the local girls, until almost every one of Dayi’s schoolmates wore the same pattern of redness on their faces, necks, inner thighs. When Dayi was midwife to one of Terracotta’s bastards, she waited for the mother to fall asleep before bringing the child to her breast, pretending it was hers. The baby responded to every sound but its name, turning its head to birdcall, the telephone, rain. I was born with a red birthmark draped over my belly like lacework. Dayi called this karma, said my skin was her punishment for that day by the river. Dayi promised she’d pay to have it removed when I turned fifteen, no matter how expensive it would be. She said it was a price she’d been waiting to pay. _

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie and I climb the trees and pretend to be monkeys, swinging to steal the neighbor’s apricots like we’re Sun Wukong thieving a peach of immortality from the garden of gods. He was punished for this, but we can’t remember what the punishment was, so we swallow our apricots whole and without mercy. We shit the pits out, and they rattle the pipes of our toilet when we flush. Ma can’t stand us dirty when we come in from the yard, but she’s the kind who calls the sky a stain, who tries to bleach a bruise. Two months ago the church people got a toilet installed for us. When we first used it, we squatted on top with our feet on the seat. It was Jie who told us we were doing it wrong: Our asses were supposed to go inside the halo. Don’t laugh—there was a time you didn’t know how to do this either, when I told you that the toilet is an ear that the sea hears through, and even now I sometimes see you with your head inside the bowl, conversing with another country. _ A boy at the Old Colonial Diner teaches Jie how to make a metal detector out of a radio, a broomstick, cardboard, copper wire. I won’t tell you all the details, in case you try to build one yourself. In return for the lesson, Jie lets him finger her in the back of the diner. Jie washes dishes at the sink while he stands behind, three of his fingers spidering around inside her. His nails snag on her pubic hair and she hisses, twists the faucet hotter, scalds off her calluses. We use the metal detector in the yard behind the house to search for the gold. Jie holds the broomstick and I hold the radio. The copper wire wraps around both ends of the broomstick and the radio is taped to one end, the hair-clump of extra wire dragging on the ground like a tail. Jie switches the radio to AM and the morning news sounds like someone getting strangled, all static, a sound like the sea muffled inside our mouths.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben told me about the weather in which she was fermented: I was conceived during a sandstorm, she said. In Ningxia where she was born, sand formed a pelt over the sky and no one could see for months. They wore wet scarves around their mouths and the sand flayed away their front teeth, their eyelashes. I asked her how she’d known who was who, and Ben answered by closing her eyes and reaching out both arms. We walk like this. She kneaded my cheek, inventing dimples. Her touch could name me better than language. I wanted to say I understood about the sand in her belly: There was also a hunger in me that was more than a body’s. Do you think we’ll get sick, I said, from touching those feathers? In the beginning of the year, when the TV repeated warnings of the Asian bird flu, the teachers had shown up to school wearing face masks with whirring fans. There are so many of you here, we don’t want to get sick. Species could share diseases, they told us, and SARS came from bats and other winged things. When birds and people get too close, they said, one of them gets sick. Ben said she was immune to the bird flu. Her grandmother had died from it and she had been exposed, which meant I was exposed now too. She said I could run away if I wanted to, but instead I stayed and asked her what the symptoms were. It began slow, she told me: First you grew feathers out of your armpits. It would be itchy. Then your lips protruded into a beak and you would only be able to eat sand, seeds, and fingernails. The last symptom was flight. It was safer for your close family members to release you where there was only sky, no telephone wires to get electrocuted on, no windows to mistake for mothers. At a crosswalk, I looked at her before the lights changed. Ben wore her FOB dot on the upper right arm, a vaccine scar the size and shape of my thumbprint. The scar opaled her skin, changing shades depending on the time of day, the season, and where she stood in relation to light. My mother had one too, on her left arm, and I liked the way it puckered like a nipple when it was cold. My mother’s FOB dot was lake-shaped, waiting to be entered. I wanted one too, wanted to dig the scar out of Ben’s arm and swallow its pearl.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “I have no right to complain, I suppose,” she said. “I have a scholarship, a flat. I don’t know what I would be doing if I was still in Kenya. Still, I don’t care for Germany so much. You know, the Germans like to think of themselves as very liberal when it comes to Africans, but if you scratch the surface you see they still have the attitudes of their childhood. In German fairy tales, black people are always the goblins. Such things one doesn’t forget so easily. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the Old Man, leaving home for the first time. Whether he felt that same loneliness …” The Old Man. That’s what Auma called our father. It sounded right to me, somehow, at once familiar and distant, an elemental force that isn’t fully understood. In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him that sat on my bookshelf, a studio portrait that my mother had saved. “He looks so innocent, doesn’t he? So young.” She held the picture next to my face. “You have the same mouth.” I told her she should lie down and get some rest while I went to my office for a few hours of work. She shook her head. “I’m not tired. Let me go with you.” “You’ll feel better if you take a nap.” She said, “Agh, Barack! I see you’re bossy like the Old Man as well. And you only met him once? It must be in the blood.” I laughed, but she didn’t; instead, her eyes wandered over my face as if it were a puzzle to solve, another piece to a problem that, beneath the exuberant chatter, nagged at her heart. I gave her a tour of the South Side that afternoon, the same drive I had taken in my first days in Chicago, only with some of my own memories now. When we stopped by my office, Angela, Mona, and Shirley happened to be there. They asked Auma all about Kenya and how she braided her hair and how come she talked so pretty, like the queen of England, and the four of them enjoyed themselves thoroughly talking about me and all my strange habits. “They seem very fond of you,” Auma said afterward. “They remind me of our aunties back home.” She rolled down the window and stuck her face into the wind, watching Michigan Avenue pass by: the gutted remains of the old Roseland Theatre, a garage full of rusted cars. “Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?” I shrugged. “For them. For me.” That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said. “Why’s that?” “I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My last night living in that house, I took the bag of cabbage out of the refrigerator and slept with my body cleaved to it, cradling its cold. I slipped it under the belly of my nightgown and kissed it, imagined it was growing inside me into you, my not-yet daughter, my slaughter. _ This isn’t the story I promised you. I know. My toes were a toll I paid for this body. You think they were thieved by Hu Gu Po, the tiger who inhabits us like our own bones. Sometimes I want to pluck the rest of my toes like grapes, suck the sweet from their skins. Jie once said I’d better keep my toes and be buried whole or I won’t be allowed into the afterlife, but I don’t believe bodies are born as wholes. We aren’t born anything but holes, throats and anuses and pores: ways of being entered and left. Here’s a lesson about light. In your language, they say life is extinguished. But that assumes our bodies are made of light, and light is always limited. We are sacks of dark, and the dark resists direction, resists capture: When I open the tin where I keep my toes, the dark doesn’t leave in a beam. Light can be measured and spent, a number printed on the backs of lightbulb boxes, but the dark has no quantity. I measure it in memories, in myths. You and I beneath the sheets, your feet feathering in my mouth, flocking out by morning. _ I’m fifteen, a daughter, all knees. First summer in Arkansas and a storm steals leaves off the trees. Arkansas looks like our island, same rain, air so thick we can spoon it into our mouths. We need names here. We try to find them in other things, in the trees, in electric fences, in cow patties coined by our feet. The summer we arrive to the farms, the chickens lay eggs the size of pearls. Everyone needs something new to blame: The rain like diarrhea, brown and sizzling. The unspiced sky, the river too arthritic to bend, the paved roads cracking like lips. The new chinks in town with their bowlegged daughters. What you know: We work first at the chicken farm, scraping shit off the walls with a pallet knife, beheading snakes with rakes. The soil’s made of snakes, so many snakes we eat snake meat for months before the church folk find out and bring us cans of luncheon loaf, boneless bricks of pink. Ma doesn’t trust meat without bones, without organs. All meat in America comes from some species of animal that doesn’t shit or speak or eat. Must be people-meat, Jie says.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Chased each other around the yard even though Ma said someone would see us naked and turn us to salt. But we ran anyway, circling each other until the sky turned over like a bowl and cupped us to the ground. The stars were dandruff and we brushed them off our shoulders. This is what Jie taught me, but please don’t ever learn it: It’s a trick where you hug the hose nozzle in your throat and shotgun the water straight into your belly without swallowing. She said that’s how the people here drink, without needing a mouth, without a way to stop. _ Deeper into my life, I meet a man who says he drove from Texas to LA by himself, back when he’d been in the country for a year and stole a car from outside a Cracker Barrel. He later drove back for his mother, but he couldn’t remember the route he first took, the one where he passed a casino with two stone dragons by the door. He’d won two hands of blackjack and spent it on his first room in the city: a floor above the butcher’s, a building between a church and the restaurant where Ba fried every genre of meat. When the man says he undressed me in the parking lot of a motel, I try to recall myself, the girl I prayed inside, the boy I mistook for an engine. I have no alibi for that night, no other body I could have been in. You know the man. I’m sorry for not saying he’s your father: I wanted you to meet him as I did. I knew his touch before his name. He marries me, but it’s Jie who’s been in my bed the longest: When we shared the mattress, I heard her saddle her wrists every night. Her breath belonging to the back of my neck. She moaned a moat around us both. On our honeymoon in the suburb south of our city, I see my husband’s face in the dark and remember. Jie and I once learned to sound the same. In Arkansas, we used to test Ma by walking to her bedside in the dark, asking, Who am I? Ma always guessed wrong, always named the absent one. We laughed and said she’d never learn to floss apart our voices, tell her daughters apart. One night, when I/Jie went to her bedside and asked who I/she was, Ma took out her fist from under the pillow and punched me/her in the throat, that tender cage where our thirsts perch. She said, You sound different in pain. It’s true: Jie wails like some wounded animal. I go silent, as if the wound is an ear that will eavesdrop on me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When we drove him to the airport, I counted the hours his flight would take, calculated that he would land the hour I woke. I didn’t sleep that night, telling myself that as long as I never woke, he would never land: our father forever midflight. That night, flying my kite in the rain, I saw the paper shrivel into a fist before falling. From the sky, my father said we’d make a new one, a kite so large we could strap it to our backs and leave the country. I lost the kite that night, stayed out till morning to watch it reappear, as if light could undo any loss. It was years before I realized that kites were only puppetry and could only fake their flight. Real flight involved no leashes or strings. Birds did not come with girls tied to them, girls reeling them down, girls the opposite of the sky. My father called from the mainland every week with nothing to say. When we picked up, he was twelve hours ahead in the day, answering from our future. We pulled the phone toward our mother, yanking the spiral cord straight. My father’s roommate—another cousin whose name we didn’t know—sometimes talked to us instead. He complained that my father never spoke, that silence had shrunk his throat to the width of a string. This worried my mother, but comforted me: It meant I could reel him back to me. I knotted the phone cord around my wrist, tugged his voice taut like a kite-string, but I couldn’t pull him back into the sky I could see. _ Meng Jiang Nu grew at the rate of a tree and could be fed only soil, silt, water, insecticide in the form of vinegar. The two families took turns watering her, but she never grew more than an inch per year. By the time she was a girl, her mothers and fathers were dead. She outlived the second generation of the family, then the third, each generation leaving a written set of instructions for the care of the gourd girl: Keep her buried waist-deep in soil at all times. Turn her face to the sun. Stimulate her roots by stroking them. Water her. Prune her hair twice a week. If you see moss on her skin, beat it off with a broom. Meng Jiang Nu was planted in a trench dug between the Meng and Jiang courtyards. Her body was hollow, and the neighborhood boys liked to sneak onto the estate. They carved her a pair of earholes and shouted into them, heard their own names echo back. They dared one another to cut her down, bring her home, plant themselves in her body. In Jiangsu, my mother said, where my ba was born, there were daughtertrees.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was clapping; Tricky rose to say - what he said every night, so that half the audience smiled and said it with him - that You couldn’t get many of those to the pound! Then - as if it were part of the overture to her routine and she could not work without it - I gripped my seat and held my breath, while he raised his gavel to beat out Kitty Butler’s name. She sang that night like - I cannot say like an angel, for her songs were all of champagne suppers and strolling in the Burlington Arcade; perhaps, then, like a fallen angel - or yet again like a falling one: she sang like a falling angel might sing with the bounds of heaven fresh burst behind him, and hell still distant and unguessed. And as she did so, I sang with her - not loudly and carelessly like the rest of the crowd, but softly, almost secretly, as if she might hear me the better if I whispered rather than bawled. And perhaps, after all, she did. I had thought that, when she walked on to the stage, she had glanced my way - as much as to say, the box is filled again. Now, as she wheeled before the footlights, I thought I saw her look at me again. The idea was a fantastic one - and yet every time her gaze swept the crowded hall it seemed to brush my own, and dally with it a little longer than it should. I ceased my whispered singing and merely stared, and swallowed. I saw her leave the stage - again, her gaze met mine - and then return for her encore. She sang her ballad and plucked the flower from her lapel, and held it to her cheek, as we all expected. But when her song was finished she did not peer into the stalls for the handsomest girl, as she usually did. Instead, she took a step to her left, towards the box in which I sat. And then she took another. In a moment she had reached the corner of the stage, and stood facing me; she was so close I could see the glint of her collar-stud, the beat of the pulse in her throat, the pink at the corner of her eye. She stood there for what seemed to be a small eternity ; then her arm came up, the flower flashed for a second in the beam of the lime - and my own hand, trembling, rose to catch it. The crowd gave a broad, indulgent cheer of pleasure, and a laugh. She held my flustered gaze with her own more certain one, and made me a little bow. Then she stepped backwards suddenly, waved to the hall, and left us. I sat for a moment as if stunned, my eyes upon the flower in my hand, which had been so near, so recently, to Kitty Butler’s cheek.

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

  Jihadis did not need the state’s permission but could volunteer whether the authorities and professional soldiers liked it or not. However, these pious volunteers could not solve the empire’s manpower problem, so eventually Caliph al-Mutasim (r. 833–42) would create a personal army of Turkish slaves from the steppes, who placed the formidable fighting skills of the herdsmen at the service of Islam. Each mamluk (“slave”) was converted to Islam, but because the Quran forbade the enslaving of Muslims, their sons were born free. This policy was fraught with contradictions, but the Mamluks became a privileged caste, and in the not-too-distant future, these Turks would rule the empire. The volunteers had created another variant of Islam and could claim that their way of life came closest to that of the Prophet who had spent years defending the ummah against its enemies. Yet their militant jihad never appealed to the wider ummah. In Mecca and Medina, where the frontier was a distant reality, almsgiving and solicitude for the poor were still seen as the most important form of jihad. Some ulema vigorously opposed the beliefs of the “fighting scholars,” arguing that a man who devoted his life to scholarship and prayed every day in the mosque was just as good a Muslim as a warrior. 75 A new hadith reported that on his way home from the Battle of Badr, Muhammad had said to his companions: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and returning to the Greater Jihad”—the more exacting and important effort to fight the baser passions and reform one’s own society. 76 During the Conquest Era, the ulema had begun to develop a distinctive body of Muslim law in the garrison towns. At that time the ummah had been a tiny minority; by the tenth century, 50 percent of the empire’s population was Muslim, and the code of the garrisons was no longer appropriate. 77 The Abbasid aristocracy had its own Persian code known as the adab (“culture”), which was based on the literate artistry and courtly manners expected of the nobility and was obviously unsuitable for the masses. 78 The caliphs therefore asked the ulema to develop the standardized system of Islamic law that would become the Shariah. Four schools of law ( maddhab ) emerged, all regarded as equally valid. Each school had its distinctive outlook but was based on the practice ( sunnah ) of the Prophet and the early ummah. Like the Talmud, which was a strong influence on these developments, the new jurisprudence ( fiqh ) aimed to bring the whole of life under the canopy of the sacred. There was therefore no attempt to impose a single “rule of faith.” Individuals were free to select their own maddhab and, as in Judaism, follow the rulings of the scholar of their choice. Shariah law provided a principled alternative to the aristocratic rule of agrarian society, since it refused to accept a hereditary class system.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Her absence now is the size of the sky. The only thing that fills it is night. At night, I watch your yard-holes gaping for the moon to descend into their mouths like a nipple, fill them with milklight. Two nights after her wedding, she came back to pack the last of her things. Jie said they were driving to Reno for the honeymoon soon, and I told her not to gamble anything she wasn’t willing to lose. Folding the denim skirts she’d sewn on Ma’s Singer, Jie kept her eyes down on the seams and said she never intended to lose anything. I told her she could leave most of her things here—her fake jade bangles that were just glass painted with green nail polish, the mannequin hand she stole from the factory and French-manicured, and that Ma almost threw away because she thought we were using it to masturbate. The soda can tabs she liked to pick up off the sidewalk and pocket, the coins she stole from public fountains and didn’t spend out of respect for what had been wished on them, the shards of a tortoiseshell headband she once broke during a fistfight with another factory girl, though she couldn’t remember what they were fighting over, only that she tore out the girl’s ponytail, flapping open her scalp to the bone. A sun-scoured book stolen from the Montebello Library, a book she couldn’t even read but that had a cover she liked: two blonde girls painted from behind, almost identical except for the angle of their heads, standing in a field full of some ugly species of flesh-colored flower with petals that looked like foreskin. One of the girl’s heads was half-turned, painted in profile, as if she was going to say something, something to make the other girl stay and watch morning make it here alive. Jie never said why she stole it, except once when she said the field reminded her of the island, reminded her of the time we thought we were being chased by a feral mountain dog but it had only been our own two-headed shadow, and when we finally stopped, we were in some other city where we had no Ma or Ba, where we were only sisters. When she asked if the cover reminded me of the island too, I knew she was asking me something else.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was as haughty and as handsome as ever. I gazed at her and had a very vivid memory - of myself, sprawled beside her with pearls about my hips; of the bed seeming to tilt; of the chafing of the leather as she straddled me and rocked ...‘What do you think she would do,’ I said to Zena, ‘if I went over?’‘You ain’t going to try it!’‘Why not? I’m quite, you know, out of her power now.’ But even as I said it, I looked at her and felt that doggishness come over me again — or doggishness, perhaps, is not the term for it. It was like she was some music-hall mesmerist, and I a blinking girl, all ready to make a mockery of myself, before the crowd, at her request ...Zena said, ‘Well I ain’t going nowhere near her ...’; but I didn’t listen. I glanced quickly again at the speakers’ tent, then I stepped out from behind the bush and made my way towards the stall - straightening the knot in my necktie, as I did so. I was within about twenty yards of her, and had lifted a hand to remove my hat, when she turned, and seemed to raise her eyes to mine. Her gaze grew hard, sardonic and lustful all at once, just as I remembered it; and my heart twitched in my breast - in fright, I think! - as if a hook had caught it.But then she opened her mouth to speak; and what she said was: ‘Reggie! Reggie, here!’That made me stumble. From somewhere close behind me came a gruffer answering cry — ‘All right’ - and I turned, and saw a boy picking his way across the grass, his eyes in a scowl and fixed on Diana’s, his hand bearing a sugared ice, which he held before him and sucked at very gingerly, for fear it would drip and spoil his trousers. The trousers were handsome, and bulged at the fork. The boy himself was tall and slight; his hair was dark, and cut very short. His face was a pretty one, his lips pink as a girl’s ...When he reached Diana she leaned and drew the handkerchief from his pocket, and began to dap with it at his thigh - it seemed, he had spilt his ice-cream after all. The other lady at the stall looked on, and smiled; then murmured something that made the pretty boy blush.I had stood and watched all this, in a kind of astonishment; but now I took a slow step backwards, and then another. Diana may have raised her face again, I cannot say: I didn’t stop to see it. Reggie had lifted his hand to lick at his ice, his cuff had moved back, and I had caught the flash of a wrist-watch beneath it ...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took my bags up to my old room, and washed my face; when I came down a little later, the presents I had brought had all been tidied out of sight, and Rhoda was helping Mother peel and boil potatoes in the kitchen. They shooed me away when I offered to join them, and said I was a guest; and so I sat with Father and Davy - who seemed to think that keeping to their usual habits, and hiding themselves behind the Sunday papers, would put me at my ease. We had our dinner, then took a walk to Tankerton and sat pitching stones into the water. The sea was grey as lead; far out upon it there were a couple of yawls and barges - bound for London, where Kitty was. What was she doing now, I wondered, apart from missing me? Later there was tea, after which more cousins appeared, to thank me for their presents and to beg for a look at my handsome new clothes. We sat upstairs and I showed them my frocks, my hat with the veil upon it, and my painted stockings. There was more talk about young men. Alice, I learned - they were surprised she hadn’t told me this - had finished with Tony Reeves from the Palace, and had started stepping out with a boy who worked at the shipyard; he was much taller, they said, than Tony, but not as funny. Freddy, my old beau, was also seeing a new girl, and seemed likely to marry her ... When they asked me, again, if I was courting, I said I wasn’t; but I hesitated over it, and they smiled. There was someone, they pressed - and just to keep them quiet, I nodded. ‘There was a boy. He played the cornet in an orchestra ...’ I looked away, as if it made me sad to think of him, and felt them exchange significant glances. And what about Miss Butler? Surely she had a young man? ‘Yes, a man named Walter ...’ I hated myself for saying it - but thought, too, How Kitty will laugh at this, when I tell her! I had forgotten what early hours they all kept. The cousins left at ten; at half-past everybody else started yawning. Davy saw Rhoda home, and Alice bade the rest of us good-night. Father rose and stretched, then came to me and put his arm about my neck. ‘It’s been a treat for us, Nance, to have you home again - and you grown into such a beauty!’ Then Mother smiled at me - the first real smile that I had seen upon her face that day; and I knew then how really glad I was to be at home, amongst them all. But the gladness didn’t last long. In a few minutes more I said my own good-nights, and found myself alone, at last, with Alice, in our - her - room.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The child spoke it herself, a sound halfway between swallow and song. Be careful what you ejaculate into the sea. A crab could crawl onto your ship and grow your child inside it. *21 My grandfather, having successfully sired children with his wife and a pirate, retired back to his fishing boat. My grandmother didn’t mind having one less person to feed, so he spent the rest of his life scouring the sea, holding the fishing pole between his knees as he doodled maps with both his hands. They were nonsensical maps, maps that were all ocean or all land, that had rivers ending in volcanoes or mountains that punctured the sky and let out all its color. They were maps with no directions, no orientation, no decipherable key. Sometimes the maps were just arterial collections of lines, rivers balled up like thread, roads without beginning or end. They were maps to get lost with, and when passing boats advised him to turn back, head toward safer waters—when dockhands tried to sell him real maps with real trade routes and real countries—he refused. He was trying to be lost, and he was professionally good at it. As long as he was lost, my grandfather believed that Ah Zheng would have to find him, recapture him from home, place him in the bondage of belonging again with someone. I choose to believe that Ah Zheng found my grandfather again, delirious with thirst and far from any coast; I still dream about it; I still see him in a fishing boat, small as a hat; then he’s suddenly overshadowed by a frigate; Ah Zheng on the deck, waving his shirt like a flag, bare-skinned and salt-striped; the logo of Ah Zheng’s new pirate fleet painted in his own blood; a scab-colored crab with a hundred legs; a hundred-legged crab with wings; Ah Zheng scolding Old Guang for leaving their daughter on land, letting her be corrupted by land-hemmed people; but at least there is time enough for a million more children, a million-gendered child; between them, there is an entire century to father; an entire sea to sire. *22 I’m not going to change the sheets for you, not even if you wet yourself. Why do you think you’re sweating so much? Because you’re sick? It’s the sea in you. That stretch of sheet where you’ve pissed the mattress: a shoreline. The heart’s a fish. If you open your mouth, it’ll swim out *23 of you, touch air, die. When I say shut your mouth, I mean survive. _ When I retold my mother the story, a week after I got better, she said all of Ama’s stories were figments of my fever and the only piracy in our family is the bootleg-DVD kind. Our cousins on the island used to send us shrink-wrapped packages full of pirated movies from Hong Kong, and we’d watch them while my mother massaged horse-oil cream into my scalp. She said it’d make me smart.

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

  "The image of Teleny haunted me, the name of Réné was ever on my lips. I kept repeating it over and over for dozens of times. What a sweet name it was! At its sound my heart was beating faster. My blood seemed to have become warmer and thicker. I got up slowly. I loitered over my dress. I stared at myself within the looking-glass, and I saw Teleny in it instead of myself; and behind him arose our blended shadows, as I had seen them on the pavement the evening before. "Presently the servant tapped at the door; this recalled me to self-consciousness. I saw myself in the glass, and found myself hideous, and for the first time in my life I wished myself good-looking—nay, entrancingly handsome. "The servant who had knocked at the door informed me that my mother was in the breakfastroom, and had sent to see if I were unwell. The name of my mother recalled my dream to my mind, and for the first time I almost preferred not meeting her." "Still, you were then on good terms with your mother, were you not?" "Certainly. Whatever faults she might have had, no one could have been more affectionate; and though she was said to be somewhat light and fond of pleasure, she had never neglected me." "She struck me, indeed, as a talented person, when I knew her." "Quite so; in other circumstances she might have proved even a superior woman. Very orderly and practical in all her household arrangements, she always found plenty of time for everything. If her life was not according to what we generally call 'the principles of morality,' or rather, Christian hypocrisy, the fault was my father's, not hers, as I shall perhaps tell you some other time. "As I entered the breakfast-room, my mother was struck with the change in my appearance, and she asked me if I was feeling unwell. "'I must have a little fever,' I replied; 'besides, the weather is so sultry and oppressive.' "'Oppressive?' quoth she, smiling. "'Is it not?' "'No; on the contrary, it is quite bracing. See, the barometer has risen considerably.' "'Well, then, it must have been your concert that upset my nerves.' "'My concert!' said my mother, smiling, and handing me some coffee. "It was useless for me to try to taste it, the very sight of it turned me sick. "My mother looked at me rather anxiously. "'It is nothing, only for some time back I have been getting sick of coffee.' "'Sick of coffee? you never said so before.' "'Did I not?' said I, absently. "'Will you have some chocolate, or some tea?' "'Can I not fast for once?' "'Yes, if you are ill—or if you have some great sin to atone for.' "I looked at her and shuddered. Could she be reading my thoughts better than myself? "'A sin?' quoth I, with an astonished look. "'Well, you know even the righteous——'

• From The Art of Memoir

  reader’s awareness. Nabokov makes you drool like one of Pavlov’s dogs for these moments when he takes one scene in time and stitches it to another. And finding lost connections in these “clicking” or twinning moments becomes what you shop for as you read, thus providing momentum. From early on, each flight from time implies longing and a desperate scramble to reenter the past. So when he sails from one era to start what would (in another writer’s book) be digressive, we gladly fly into another age with Nabokov—it becomes a forward movement, not a sideways detour. I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness . . . is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. “Oneness with sun and stone” sounds not unlike being God. And from his state of timelessness, he is a god at resurrecting the lost. Another twinning example. At one point, he describes a boyhood encounter with General Kuropatkin, head of the Russian Army in the east, who lines up on a divan ten matches for young Vladimir to make a smooth ocean surface. When the general tips the matches up in pairs to look like sharp waves, that pattern represents a stormy sea. Fifteen years later, as Papa Nabokov flees the Bolsheviks across southern Russia, he meets what he presumes is a peasant in a sheepskin coat who asks for a light. Of course it’s the old general, seeking a match. The twin moments are jammed together to reveal a great truth—how the powerful fall, the matches are burnt out and lost. But as for the general himself, he’s a pawn in the pattern, not a character we’ve been made to care about. “I hope that old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point” (emphasis mine).

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I opened my eyes and looked at Alice - and knew at once that I shouldn’t have spoken; that I should have been as dumb and as cunning with her as with the rest of them. There was a look on her face - it was not ambiguous at all now - a look of mingled shock, and nervousness, and embarrassment or shame. I had said too much. I felt as if my admiration for Kitty Butler had lit a beacon inside me, and opening my unguarded mouth had sent a shaft of light into the darkened room, illuminating all.I had said too much - but it was that, or say nothing.Alice’s eyes held my own for a moment longer, then her lashes fluttered and fell. She didn’t speak; she only rolled away from me, and faced the wall. The weather continued very fierce that week. The sun brought trippers to Whitstable and to our Parlour, but the heat jaded their appetites. They called as often, now, for tea and lemonade, as for plaice and mackerel, and for hours at a time I would leave Mother and Alice to work the shop, and run down to the beach to ladle out cockles and crab-meat and whelks, and bread-and-butter, at Father’s stall. It was a novelty, serving teas upon the shingle; but it was also hard to stand in the sun, with the vinegar running from your wrists to your elbows, and your eyes smarting from the fumes of it. Father gave me an extra half-crown for every afternoon I worked there. I bought a hat, and a length of lavender ribbon with which to trim it, but the rest of the money I put aside: I would use it, when I had enough, to buy a season ticket for the Canterbury train.For I made my nightly trips all through that week, and sat - as Tony put it - with the Plushes, and gazed at Kitty Butler as she sang; and I never once grew tired of her. It was only, always, marvellous to step again into my little scarlet box; to gaze at the bank of faces, and the golden arch above the stage, and the velvet drapes and tassels, and the stretch of dusty floorboard with its row of lights - like open cockle shells, I always thought them - before which I would soon see Kitty stride and swagger and wave her hat ...

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama’s first language was not found in books, only in bodies. Tayal was written in the English alphabet, each word a phonetic translation written by missionaries, translated through their hands. The same hands that had beaten children into belief. Those hands were fluent only in punishment. I imagined a missionary transcribing Ama’s body, tracing her tongue on paper and burning it so that she spoke smoke. I read in the kitchen, transcribing into English as much as I could read. When I showed Ben in the morning, she said I should squat over the hole again, but this time it didn’t open its mouth for me. It only works once, I said. What kind of key only works once? Ben said. We tried to feed the holes again, this time with water from our palms. We tried prying them open with sticks. We fed them strips of pork jerky. But they chose silence. At school, I gave Ben my transcriptions on notebook paper. We’d midwifed a language together, delivered it from the dark. When she folded the sheets into her pocket, I told her to be careful, to treat the letter like a daughter. Ben asked me what my ama looked like, and I said I knew her mostly by voice. I reported one of my mother’s memories: Once, Ama striped her face with mud and told them about Hu Gu Po, weighing down her daughters’ bellies with a swallowed story so that they wouldn’t be whipped away by typhoon wind, by wind that flexed the trees like bowstrings. My mother liked to say she and I were born at the same time, into the same story, and that we were just growing at different rates: I grew like a tree and she grew like a riverfish. She said she’d died and been reborn many times in the span of my life. Someday, she said, you’ll go back to the river and give birth to me there, spitting out a jet stream of eggs, all of them me. I’ll dew the skin of your fists. I’ll hatch when you open your hands. GRANDMOTHER Letter I: In which the river is not responsible Dear eldest, Now that you are dead you can see why I never wanted you to live. See how much lighter you are now? barren of a body mother to nothing? You darkest of my daughters in skin in smoke. I burned you this ash is yours rebuild it into anything you want me to be. This letter is not apology . I am not writing for a response a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back. My second husband the soldier lives by the law of loss kill what you cannot carry marry what you cannot bury writing will wring lies from the white open a gate to our griefs. I have no need to grieve what I named .

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Now your ass is rat-free, I said, and she laughed. Another time she drank insecticide and got diarrhea for so many days that our sewage must have dyed the sea brown and bloody. For years I thought babies began as insects, and that’s why you drank insecticide to get rid of them. They began as gnats flying in your belly, and then they matured into flies and then into moths, flying out of the dark of your body and into the light that would incinerate its wings. Jie gets married and the boy hasn’t hit her yet. He’ll do it only once, when he’s home from work and doesn’t like the way she’s asleep on their couch, curled like some kind of animal in his house. She wakes but hasn’t recognized him yet. There’s a palm print on her cheek that will turn autumnal and then shed. When the priest asks if there are any objections to the marriage, I stand up. Ma reaches up for my skirt, tugs me down to the pew. I don’t know why I’m standing, only that I’ve spoken something. It sounds like no or go . Before her wedding, we sit together on the mattress we share for the last time and I ask her why she has to get married so soon, why can’t she wait till I make some money and we can live together, find a place with a room for Ba. We can take him, I say. We can take care of him all day and work at night in a cemetery or something. We’ll buy bars of gold and bury them together. I tell her this with my hands in her hair, braiding it so it’ll wave on its own tomorrow. If I do it wrong it’ll frizz like bad wiring, but I always do it right, oiling my hands beforehand. Jie says, I don’t want him. I don’t want either of them, and she turns around so fast I pull a handful of her hair out. I’m braiding it to the air. That’s how I know she really wants to leave, when she turns around to me: her eyes bright from the pain of my braiding. She smells like my hands. She smells like the vinegar we use to clean Ba’s piss from the floor. — At the front of the church, Jie kisses the boy and I make a fist around Ma’s hands.