Sadness

Passages

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

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• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I have a picture of June at Dino’s from around that time, before the bar and the booths were built. A square of white light falls from the high windows, and June sits on the floor where it lands, perched on the edge of a two-by-four, with the doll she calls Big Baby. She’s wearing a pair of grape-purple Puma high-tops with Velcro straps, and she’s looking somewhere above the camera, eyebrows a little up, mouth pursed, like she’s about to say something. She looks like a doll herself. The photo was taken by a friend who’d been visiting town with her husband. A few weeks later, my friend called with unexpected news: she and her husband had separated. When I look at the photo now, in one of the albums I keep for June, it too seems like a picture of a marriage that’s ending. 9We went to see family for Christmas, and when we got home, rather than thrill as I usually did at being back in our own bed, I felt like I had disappeared en route. Everything and everyone seemed far away. It had been seven months since jury duty, and I had never lost count. I felt worse, not better. To hide from the shame—or was it to escape everything else? To give in to the fantasies?—I tunneled under, sunk even further into my head. I told no one what I was thinking. A friend was having a big birthday at the end of January, and he invited a bunch of us to a rental cabin in the snow. Brandon took the weekend off, and to celebrate the occasion, we bought new winter gloves, hats, and snow pants. For June, I brought along a brand-new copy of Candy Land, my favorite board game as a child. I had grand visions of us playing it, visions that evaporated as soon as I set it up, when I remembered it’s an instant nap for anyone over age ten and June was enraged that it had rules. Instead, we rented cross-country skis. The first afternoon, even June made it a few yards. Then a friend took her back to the cabin, and the two of us got to ski on our own for a while, on a path through the woods. I hadn’t been on skis since I was a kid, and I’d forgotten how quiet it was, the smooth and efficient swish of polyethylene through groomed tracks. We’d needed this, to move together through the cold winter air. Our noses ran, and we licked our lips and wiped them on our sleeves. In the cabin, the heat vent was too close to the bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched my husband and our child, these people I called mine, sweat sticking their twin hair to their twin faces. I put on my headlamp and boots and shuffled to the outhouse. Orion glittered above the tree line.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  I thought of those parachute games children play—the one where you raise your arms to lift the parachute high, as high as it’ll go, and then you quickly step under it and plop down along the edge, trapping the air inside. For a moment the parachute billows above your head like a circus tent. It feels like magic, like time stops. And then, of course, the parachute starts to deflate. Our marriage was like that: the way it was built, we couldn’t inhabit it. It was a structure that didn’t give shelter. This sky falls if we stop holding it up. I don’t think we’ve been happy for a while now, I said. This isn’t only about my sexuality. I watched a wall go up in front of his face. That’s not true, he said. I know what is true for me, I said. We marched around and around the parachute, sizing it up. You’re trying to rewrite history, he said. No, I’m not saying our marriage has been bad, I said. On the whole, it’s been good. Our truths can be different and still valid, I said. I don’t think we want the same things. I want what matters to me to matter to you, and you’re allowed to want the same for yourself. We haven’t been able to do that for each other. Now you’re just being mean, he said. Why are you so mean? I wanted to feel that he was present. I wanted a partner in the everyday muck of domestic life, of parenting, of being a family. It was never about whether he worked nights or whether he remembered to take out the garbage; it was about feeling that he was with me, no matter where he was. I think I’ve been lonely for a long time, I said. Have you been lonely too? I would have done anything for you, he said. I would have given up anything. I would have sold the businesses, moved anywhere, bought a vacation house, anything. I would have done anything to make you happy. Do you really think I could have taken you up on that? I asked. That I could have asked you to leave the restaurants, to choose a new career? Those were offers I could never cash in. Why not? Because you love your work. Your work is you. Maybe you would have given it up for me, but I would never have asked you for it. But I would have! His voice was tight. I would have done it! I don’t want to argue anymore, I said. My eyes stung. Please stop trying to make me stay. Please stop trying to work it out. Please—just let me go. He watched me cry. Maybe this is dumb, he said, but do you want me to let you go in, like, two months, or do you want me to let you go right now? I sob-laughed: I want you to let me go right now.

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

  The old tube spilled out an aquarium-blue light. The whippets were pale and lizardy. Their spines sloped down from high haunches, which left the impression that they had spike heels on their back feet. They were being corralled into individual starting pens while I watched. It depressed me no end, I told Daddy. Not only did a whole slew of other people know the outcome of that race before we even saw the gate fly up, but the dogs themselves were probably long since dead. Daddy puckered his mouth into a sour pinch that said he knew exactly what I meant. Those dogs were deader than doornails, I told him, dead or else lying before somebody’s gas heater farting up a storm. He nodded his head like it made him tired to think. Daddy’s face had shrunk. All his skull’s hollows—temple and jaw and cheekbone—held shadows the color of shale. Maybe I nodded off. Maybe I was woozy and drunk enough to hallucinate over Daddy’s face a death’s head, but for a split second that’s what I saw in his pillow’s trench. Then he sneezed, and I said bless you, and he was back to himself. I pushed the button to shut the TV off. The picture shrank to a little blue star that hurtled backwards through the swampy dark. Then I started shuffling through a shoebox of cassette tapes on the floor till I laid hold to the one with “Pete Karr” on the label in red Magic Marker. I wanted nothing so much as to hear Daddy tell a story, to unreel a story in my head like so much sheer, strong fishing line casting me back to times I’d never lived through and places I’d never been except courtesy of his voice. I held that tape over the aluminum bed rail, in what I guessed was Daddy’s line of sight. “You remember this?” I asked. “Yep,” he said. He grinned on half his face and gave a sharp nod. “Mind if I play it?” “Gone,” he said, which I took to be “Go on,” as in, “Go on ahead, honey, and play it if you want.” I popped it in, then pressed the rectangular button so the brown tape started turning. This all started on the nineteenth day of July in nineteen hundred and twenty. Started at a barrelhouse called Bessie Mae’s back the woods. Place you could get barbecue and strawberry soda pop. Home brew if they wasn’t any government men around. … Course it actually started when Buck Neelan rode the train down into the logging camp. Buck was what you call a sport. Didn’t work nor nothing. Liked to gamble. Liked to fool with other fellas’ women. A man name of Nan Crocket and his brother, Ugh, was working with my daddy that summer when Buck come around. He fooled around and got it in his head that Nan was messing with one of his girlfriends. Hell, Nan was married.

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

  The Vedas, portions of which date from the fifteenth century before Christ, the Laws of Menu, which were completed before the rise of Buddhism, that is, six or seven centuries before our era, and the numerous other sacred books of the Indian religion, enjoin by example and precept entire abstraction of thought, seclusion from the world, and a variety of penitential and meritorious acts of self-mortification, by which the devotee assumes a proud superiority over the vulgar herd of mortals, and is absorbed at last into the divine fountain of all being. The ascetic system is essential alike to Brahmanism and Buddhism, the two opposite and yet cognate branches of the Indian religion, which in many respects are similarly related to each other as Judaism is to Christianity, or also as Romanism to Protestantism. Buddhism is a later reformation of Brahmanism; it dates probably from the sixth century before Christ (according to other accounts much earlier), and, although subsequently expelled by the Brahmins from Hindostan, it embraces more followers than any other heathen religion, since it rules in Farther India, nearly all the Indian islands, Japan, Thibet, a great part of China and Central Asia to the borders of Siberia. But the two religions start from opposite principles. Brahmanic asceticism260 proceeds from a pantheistic view of the world, the Buddhistic from an atheistic and nihilistic, yet very earnest view; the one if; controlled by the idea of the absolute but abstract unity and a feeling of contempt of the world, the other by the idea of the absolute but unreal variety and a feeling of deep grief over the emptiness and nothingness of all existence; the one is predominantly objective, positive, and idealistic, the other more subjective, negative, and realistic; the one aims at an absorption into the universal spirit of Brahm, the other consistently at an absorption into nonentity, if it be true that Buddhism starts from an atheistic rather than a pantheistic or dualistic basis. "Brahmanism"—says a modern writer on the subject261—"looks back to the beginning, Buddhism to the end; the former loves cosmogony, the latter eschatology. Both reject the existing world; the Brahman despises it, because he contrasts it with the higher being of Brahma, the Buddhist bewails it because of its unrealness; the former sees God in all, the other emptiness in all." Yet as all extremes meet, the abstract all-entity of Brahmanism and the equally abstract non-entity or vacuity of Buddhism come to the same thing in the end, and may lead to the same ascetic practices. The asceticism of Brahmanism takes more the direction of anchoretism, while that of Buddhism exists generally in the social form of regular convent life.

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

  The Nestorian church flourished for several centuries, spread from Persia, with great missionary zeal, to India, Arabia, and even to China and Tartary, and did good service in scholarship and in the founding of schools and hospitals. Mohammed is supposed to owe his imperfect knowledge of Christianity to a Nestorian monk, Sergius; and from him the sect received many privileges, so that it obtained great consideration among the Arabians, and exerted an influence upon their culture, and thus upon the development of philosophy and science in general.1599 Among the Tartars, in the eleventh century, it succeeded in converting to Christianity a king, the priest-king Presbyter John (Prester John) of the Kerait, and his successor of the same name.1600 But of this we have only uncertain accounts, and at all events Nestorian Christianity has since left but slight traces in Tartary and in China. Under the Mongol dynasty the Nestorians were cruelly persecuted. The terrible Tamerlane, the scourge and the destroyer of Asia, towards the end of the fourteenth century almost exterminated them. Yet they have maintained themselves on the wild mountains and in the valleys of Kurdistan and in Armenia under the Turkish dominion to this day, with a separate patriarch, who from 1559 till the seventeenth century resided at Mosul, but has since dwelt in an almost inaccessible valley on the borders of Turkey and Persia. They are very ignorant and poor, and have been much reduced by war, pestilence, and cholera. A portion of the Nestorians, especially those in cities, united from time to time, under the name of Chaldaeans, with the Roman church, and have a patriarch of their own at Bagdad. And on the other side, Protestant missionaries from America have made vigorous and successful efforts, since 1833, to evangelize and civilize the Nestorians by preaching, schools, translations of the Bible, and good books.1601 The Thomas-Christians in East India are a branch of the Nestorians, named from the apostle Thomas, who is supposed to have preached the gospel on the coast of Malabar. They honor the memory of Theodore and Nestorius in their Syriac liturgy, and adhere to the Nestorian patriarchs. In the sixteenth century they were, with reluctance, connected with the Roman church for sixty years (1599–1663) through the agency of Jesuit missionaries. But when the Portuguese power in India was shaken by the Dutch, they returned to their independent position, and since the expulsion of the Portuguese they have enjoyed the free exercise of their religion on the coast of Malabar. The number of the Thomas-Christians is said still to amount to seventy thousand souls, who form a province by themselves under the British empire, governed by priests and elders. § 140. The Eutychian Controversy. The Council of Robbers, A.D. 449. Comp. the Works at § 137. Sources.

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

  Madame de Lorsange returned the note to Therese; "Continue, my dear child," said she, "the man's behavior is horrifying; to be swimming in gold and to deny her legitimate earnings to a poor creature who merely did not want to commit a crime, that is a gratuitous infamy entirely without example." Alas! Madame, Therese continued, resuming her story, I was in tears for two days over that dreadful letter; I was far more afflicted by the thought of the horrible deed it attested than by the refusal it contained. Then, I groaned, then I am guilty, here am I a second time denounced to justice for having been overly respectful of the law! So be it, I repent nothing, I shall never know the least remorse so long as my soul is pure, and may I never be responsible for any evil other than that of having too much heeded the equitable and virtuous sentiments which will never abandon me. I was, however, simply unable to believe that the pursuits and inquiries the Count mentioned were really true, for they seemed highly implausible: it would be so dangerous for him to have me brought into court that I imagined there was far greater reason for him to be frightened at the prospect of having to confront me, than I had cause to tremble before his menaces. These reflections led me to decide to stay where I was and to remain, if possible, until the augmentation of my funds might allow me to move on; I communicated my plan to Rodin, who approved it, and even suggested I keep my chamber in his house; but first of all, before I speak of what I decided to do, it is necessary to give you an idea of this man and his entourage.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Her body ached. Her bones felt as though they were burning from the inside out. And then it passed, and they hadn’t talked about it since. It was just part of living now, like getting your appendix out. Except if you got appendicitis now you’d just die in agony unless you were lucky enough to know a surgeon who’d survived T-Day and wouldn’t harvest your blood and sell it to bunker brats for their vampire facials. Not that it had been better when she’d been uninsured and living over Indi’s garage. She ran her tongue carefully over her broken tooth, feeling the ragged flesh around it and the sharp, uneven fragments of its cracked surface. I wonder if there are any dentists left on the East Coast. I wonder if there’s any novocaine, or laughing gas. “There’s a dentist in Seabrook,” said Beth, apparently reading Fran’s mind. The bandage Fran had taped over the other girl’s wounded cheek was crusty with dried blood. “We could trade with him, maybe. We have weed. You think he has weed?” Fran absently transferred her wad of licorice root to the right side of her mouth. Only her absolute certainty that if a man got wind of them she wouldn’t be good for much more than lying down and rolling over on her back to die kept the scream of pain bottled inside her throat. She was on her knees without knowing how she’d got there, duffel lying nearby and hands clasped over her mouth as white-hot barbs of misery crawled down through her jaw. She heaved and puked up bile and blood, both black in the darkness, onto the cracked pavement. Beth, kneeling beside her, rubbed her back as she retched again. “Or I guess we could do it here.” Beth walked her to a rusted-out minivan abandoned on the highway’s shoulder just south of a cut where exposed faces of granite flanked the highway, seams of quartz catching the starlight. They sat on the car’s moth-eaten floor carpeting, dangling their feet in the grass pushing its way up through the pavement, and ate cold balls from the foam case in the duffel. Fran chewed the raw, springy flesh gingerly. She scratched her own in sympathy as she choked down the best source of estrogen five years of reckless experimentation and desperate medical-library raids had been able to turn up. She could practically hear Indi’s voice as she ate. Just pretend it’s one of those fancy chocolates with the gold foil. You know. A Ferrero Rocher. She couldn’t remember what Ferrero Rochers tasted like, and the pungent, gamey stink of the testicle coated her tongue like oil. How many of these things had she choked down since the last of the estradiol had oxidized? Hundreds, probably. She’d eaten more balls than she’d ever sucked cocks. The thought made her unexpectedly blue. Or maybe it was just the humidity. Sweating always made her sad.

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

  “Why, the doctors, the pontiffs of science. Who pervert young people by laying down such rules of hygiene? Who pervert women by devising and teaching them ways by which not to have children? “Yes: if only a hundredth of the efforts spent in curing diseases were spent in curing debauchery, disease would long ago have ceased to exist, whereas now all efforts are employed, not in extirpating debauchery, but in favoring it, by assuring the harmlessness of the consequences. Besides, it is not a question of that. It is a question of this frightful thing that has happened to me, as it happens to nine-tenths, if not more, not only of the men of our society, but of all societies, even peasants,—this frightful thing that I had fallen, and not because I was subjected to the natural seduction of a certain woman. No, no woman seduced me. I fell because the surroundings in which I found myself saw in this degrading thing only a legitimate function, useful to the health; because others saw in it simply a natural amusement, not only excusable, but even innocent in a young man. I did not understand that it was a fall, and I began to give myself to those pleasures (partly from desire and partly from necessity) which I was led to believe were characteristic of my age, just as I had begun to drink and smoke. “And yet there was in this first fall something peculiar and touching. I remember that straightway I was filled with such a profound sadness that I had a desire to weep, to weep over the loss forever of my relations with woman. Yes, my relations with woman were lost forever. Pure relations with women, from that time forward, I could no longer have. I had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit, of a drunkard, and of a smoker. “Just as the victim of the morphine habit, the drunkard, the smoker, is no longer a normal man, so the man who has known several women for his pleasure is no longer normal? He is abnormal forever. He is a voluptuary. Just as the drunkard and the victim of the morphine habit may be recognized by their face and manner, so we may recognize a voluptuary. He may repress himself and struggle, but nevermore will he enjoy simple, pure, and fraternal relations toward woman. By his way of glancing at a young woman one may at once recognize a voluptuary; and I became a voluptuary, and I have remained one.” CHAPTER VI. “Yes, so it is; and that went farther and farther with all sorts of variations. My God! when I remember all my cowardly acts and bad deeds, I am frightened. And I remember that ‘me’ who, during that period, was still the butt of his comrades’ ridicule on account of his innocence.

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

  Gogol, the Russian Molière, says—where? well, somewhere—“the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down.” A wonderful saying. So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The atmosphere seems filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers, which overcomes me and gives me a headache. The smoke of the fireplace curls and condenses into figures, small gray-bearded kokolds that mockingly point their finger at me. Chubby- cheeked cupids ride on the arms of my chair and on my knees. I have to smile involuntarily, even laugh aloud, as I am writing down my adventures. Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper. The days creep along sluggishly in the little Carpathian health-resort. You see no one, and no one sees you. It is boring enough to write idyls. I would have leisure here to supply a whole gallery of paintings, furnish a theater with new pieces for an entire season, a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios, and duos, but—what am I saying—the upshot of it all is that I don’t do much more than to stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am—no false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don’t quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself—I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister, or even that of a minor potentate. Above all else I am a dilettante in life. Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything. I am such a one. But what am I saying? To the business in hand. I lie in my window, and the miserable little town, which fills me with despondency, really seems infinitely full of poetry. How wonderful the outlook upon the blue wall of high mountains interwoven with golden sunlight; mountain-torrents weave through them like ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the heavens into which snowcapped crags project; how green and fresh the forested slopes; the meadows on which small herds graze, down to the yellow billows of grain where reapers stand and bend over and rise up again.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  This is why the novel concentrates on rehabilitating Constance Chatterley through the phallic ministrations of the god Pan, incarnated in Mellors. In the novel’s early chapters we are instructed that her only meaningful existence is sexual and has been distorted by education and the indecent liberties of the modem woman. Married to an impotent husband, Connie mopes through some hundred and thirty pages of unfulfilled femininity. Neither a wife nor a mother, yearning for a child, her “womb” contracting at certain stated intervals, she seeks her fleeting youth in unsatisfactory trips to the mirror, and endless visits to some hen pheasants, whose “pondering female blood” rebukes “the agony of her own female forlornness”20 while affording her some solace by being “the only things in the world that warmed her heart.”21 In the presence of these formidable creatures she “feels herself on the brink of fainting all the time,”22 and the sight of a pheasant chick breaking its shell reduces her to hysterical weeping. In the best tradition of sentimental narrative we first see “a tear fall on her wrist,” followed by the information that “she was crying blindly in all the anguish of her generation’s forlornness…her heart was broken and nothing mattered any more.”23 Thereupon Mellors intervenes out of pity (“compassion flamed in his bowels for her”) and he invites her into the hut for a bit of what she needs. He is characteristically peremptory in administering it: “You lie there,” he orders. She accedes with a “queer obedience”24-Lawrence never uses the word female in the novel without prefacing it with the adjectives “weird” or “queer:” this is presumably done to persuade the reader that woman is a dim prehistoric creature operating out of primeval impulse. Mellors concedes one kiss on the navel and then gets to business: And he had to come into her at once, to enter the peace on earth of that soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of a woman. She lay still, in a kind of sleep, always in a kind of sleep. The activity, the orgasm was all his, all his; she could strive for herself no more.25 Of course Mellors is irreproachably competent and sexuality comes naturally to him. But the female, though she is pure nature to whom civilized thought or activity were a travesty, must somehow be taught. Constance has had the purpose of her existence ably demonstrated for her, but her conversion must take a bit longer: Her tormented modem-woman’s brain still had no rest. Was it real? And she knew, if she gave herself to the man, it was real. But if she kept herself for herself, it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, she felt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking. To be had for the taking.26

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

  After each had announced her very different intentions, the two girls separated without exchanging any promises to see each another again. Would Juliette, who, so she affirmed, intended to become a lady of consequence, would Juliette consent to receive a little girl whose virtuous but base inclinations might be able to bring her into dishonor? and, on her side, would Justine wish to jeopardize her morals in the society of a perverse creature who was bound to become public debauchery's toy and the lewd mob's victim? And so each bid an eternal adieu to the other, and they left the convent on the morrow. During early childhood caressed by her mother's dressmaker, Justine believes this woman will treat her kindly now in this hour of her distress; she goes in search of the woman, she tells the tale of her woes, she asks employment . . . she is scarcely recognized; and is harshly driven out the door. "Oh Heaven I" cries the poor little creature, "must my initial steps in this world be so quickly stamped with ill-fortune? That woman once loved me; why does she cast me away today? Alas! 'tis because I am poor and an orphan, because I have no more means and people are not esteemed save in reason of the aid and benefits one imagines may be had of them." Wringing her hands, Justine goes to find her cure; she describes her circumstances with the vigorous candor proper to her years.... She was wearing a little white garment, her lovely hair was negligently tucked up under her bonnet, her breast, whose development had scarcely begun, was hidden beneath two or three folds of gauze, her pretty face had somewhat of pallor owing to the unhappiness consuming her, a few tears rolled from her eyes and lent to them an additional expressiveness... "You observe me, Monsieur," said she to the saintly ecclesiastic... "Yes, you observe me in what for a girl is a most dreadful position; I have lost my father and mother... Heaven has taken them from me at an age when I stand in greatest need of their assistance... They died ruined, Monsieur; we no longer have anything. There," she continued, "is all they left me," and she displayed her dozen louis, "and nowhere to rest my poor head.... You will have pity upon me, Monsieur, will you not? You are Religion's minister and Religion was always my heart's virtue; in the name of that God I adore and whose organ you are, tell me, as if you were a second father unto me, what must I do? what must become of me ?"

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

  He is a weird old coot, but most of the kids dig him because he doesn’t ask too much of us. I mean, how can you expect your students to work hard if you show up in your pajamas and slippers? And yeah, I know it’s weird, but the tribe actually houses all of the teachers in one-bedroom cottages and musty, old trailer houses behind the school. You can’t teach at our school if you don’t live in the compound. It was like some kind of prison-work farm for our liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders and conservative, white missionary saviors. Some of our teachers make us eat birdseed so we’ll feel closer to the earth, and other teachers hate birds because they are supposedly minions of the Devil. It is like being taught by Jekyll and Hyde. But Mr. P isn’t a Democratic-, Republican-, Christian-, or Devil-worshipping freak. He is just sleepy. But some folks are absolutely convinced he is, like, this Sicilian accountant who testified against the Mafia, and had to be hidden by that secret Witness Relocation Program. It makes some goofy sort of sense, I suppose. If the government wants to hide somebody, there’s probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy. But jeez, I think people pay way too much attention to The Sopranos. Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don’t understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians. “All right, kids, let’s get cracking,” Mr. P said as he passed out the geometry books. “How about we do something strange and start on page one?” I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent. But my lips and I stopped short when I saw this written on the inside front cover: THIS BOOK BELONGS TO AGNES ADAMS Okay, now you’re probably asking yourself, “Who is Agnes Adams?” Well, let me tell you. Agnes Adams is my mother. MY MOTHER! And Adams is her maiden name. So that means my mother was born an Adams and she was still an Adams when she wrote her name in that book. And she was thirty when she gave birth to me. Yep, so that means I was staring at a geometry book that was at least thirty years older than I was. I couldn’t believe it. How horrible is that? My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

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

  Among Sacher-Masoch’s works, Venus in Furs is one of the most typical and outstanding. In spite of melodramatic elements and other literary faults, it is unquestionably a sincere work, written without any idea of titillating morbid fancies. One feels that in the hero many subjective elements have been incorporated, which are a disadvantage to the work from the point of view of literature, but on the other hand raise the book beyond the sphere of art, pure and simple, and make it one of those appalling human documents which belong, part to science and part to psychology. It is the confession of a deeply unhappy man who could not master his personal tragedy of existence, and so sought to unburden his soul in writing down the things he felt and experienced. The reader who will approach the book from this angle and who will honestly put aside moral prejudices and prepossessions will come away from the perusal of this book with a deeper understanding of this poor miserable soul of ours and a light will be cast into dark places that lie latent in all of us. Sacher-Masoch’s works have held an established position in European letters for something like half a century, and the author himself was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government in 1883, on the occasion of his literary jubilee. When several years ago cheap reprints were brought out on the Continent and attempts were made by various guardians of morality—they exist in all countries—to have them suppressed, the judicial decisions were invariably against the plaintiff and in favor of the publisher. Are Americans children that they must be protected from books which any European school-boy can purchase whenever he wishes? However, such seems to be the case, and this translation, which has long been in preparation, consequently appears in a limited edition printed for subscribers only. In another connection Herbert Spencer once used these words: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” They have a very pointed application in the case of a work like Venus in Furs. F. S. Atlantic City April, 1921 VENUS IN FURS “But the Almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.” —The Vulgate, Judith, xvi. 7. My company was charming. Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, true goddess of love. She sat in an armchair and had kindled a crackling fire, whose reflection ran in red flames over her pale face with its white eyes, and from time to time over her feet when she sought to warm them.

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

  And that made me cry. Man, I’ve always cried too easily. I cry when I’m happy or sad. I cry when I’m angry. I cry because I’m crying. It’s weak. It’s the opposite of warrior. “Quit crying,” Rowdy said. “I can’t help it,” I said. “I love her more than I’ve ever loved anybody.” Yeah, I was quite the dramatic twelve-year-old. “Please,” Rowdy said. “Stop that bawling, okay?” “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I wiped my face with one of my pillows and threw it across the room. “Jesus, you’re a wimp,” Rowdy said. “Just don’t tell anybody I cried about Dawn,” I said. “Have I ever told anybody your secrets?” Rowdy asked. “No.” “Okay, then, I won’t tell anybody you cried over a dumb girl.” And he didn’t tell anybody. Rowdy was my secret-keeper. Halloween [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] At school today, I went dressed as a homeless dude. It was a pretty easy costume for me. There’s not much difference between my good and bad clothes, so I pretty much look half-homeless anyway. And Penelope went dressed as a homeless woman. Of course, she was the most beautiful homeless woman who ever lived. We made a cute couple. Of course, we weren’t a couple at all, but I still found the need to comment on our common taste. “Hey,” I said. “We have the same costume.” I thought she was just going to sniff at me again, but she almost smiled. “You have a good costume,” Penelope said. “You look really homeless.” “Thank you,” I said. “You look really cute.” “I’m not trying to be cute,” she said. “I’m wearing this to protest the treatment of homeless people in this country. I’m going to ask for only spare change tonight, instead of candy, and I’m going to give it all to the homeless.” I didn’t understand how wearing a Halloween costume could become a political statement, but I admired her commitment. I wanted her to admire my commitment, too. So I lied. “Well,” I said. “I’m wearing this to protest the treatment of homeless Native Americans in this country.” “Oh,” she said. “I guess that’s pretty cool.” “Yeah, that spare change thing is a good idea. I think I might do that, too.” Of course, after school, I’d be trick-or-treating on the rez, so I wouldn’t collect as much spare change as Penelope would in Reardan. “Hey,” I said. “Why don’t we pool our money tomorrow and send it together? We’d be able to give twice as much.” Penelope stared at me. She studied me. I think she was trying to figure out if I was serious. “Are you for real?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Well, okay,” she said. “It’s a deal.” “Cool, cool, cool,” I said. So, later that night, I went out trick-or-treating on the rez. It was a pretty stupid idea, I guess. I was probably too old to be trick-or-treating, even if I was asking for spare change for the homeless.

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

  We played Almira Coulee-Hartline, this tiny farm-town team, and they beat us when this kid named Keith hit a crazy half-court shot at the buzzer. It was a big upset. We all cried in the locker room for hours. Coach cried, too. I guess that’s the only time that men and boys get to cry and not get punched in the face. Rowdy and I Have a Long and Serious Discussion About Basketball [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] A few days after basketball season ended, I e-mailed Rowdy and told him I was sorry that we beat them so bad and that their season went to hell after that. “We’ll kick your asses next year,” Rowdy wrote back. “And you’ll cry like the little faggot you are.” “I might be a faggot,” I wrote back, “but I’m the faggot who beat you.” “Ha-ha,” Rowdy wrote. Now that might just sound like a series of homophobic insults, but I think it was also a little bit friendly, and it was the first time that Rowdy had talked to me since I left the rez. I was a happy faggot! Because Russian Guys Are Not Always Geniuses [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] After my grandmother died, I felt like crawling into the coffin with her. After my dad’s best friend got shot in the face, I wondered if I was destined to get shot in the face, too. Considering how many young Spokanes have died in car wrecks, I’m pretty sure it’s my destiny to die in a wreck, too. Jeez, I’ve been to so many funerals in my short life. I’m fourteen years old and I’ve been to forty-two funerals. That’s really the biggest difference between Indians and white people. A few of my white classmates have been to a grandparent’s funeral. And a few have lost an uncle or aunt. And one guy’s brother died of leukemia when he was in third grade. But there’s nobody who has been to more than five funerals. All my white friends can count their deaths on one hand. I can count my fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, penis, butt cheeks, and nipples, and still not get close to my deaths. And you know what the worst part is? The unhappy part? About 90 percent of the deaths have been because of alcohol. Gordy gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn’t know Indians. And he didn’t know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reason: the fricking booze. Yep, so let me pour a drink for Tolstoy and let him think hard about the true definition of unhappy families. So, okay, you’re probably thinking I’m being extra bitter. And I would have to agree with you. I am being extra bitter. So let me tell you why.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  They did everything on hard copy in the Screw, locking medical files in a row of huge filing cabinets down in the library. The other woman paused as she entered. “Long day,” said Jane with a rueful smile. “You going to the movie tonight? Clive Owen … God, even when Phil was alive…” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “That woman, the appendectomy,” said Indi, not particularly interested in which actors Jane might have cheated on her husband with. “She was asking for someone. Zoe. Her daughter, I think. You said she came here with a girl.” Jane’s smile faded. She peeled off the glove before responding. Powdered latex popped off of her fingers, digit by digit. “It was six months back or so,” she said. “Before Dr. Downey got sick. A camp girl came in pregnant. We did what we could.” Jane dropped the gloves into the garbage hopper and took her foot off of the pedal, letting the lid snap shut. “She didn’t make it. Pretty sure her name was Zoe.” “And the baby?” “We got him out,” said Jane with the wide-eyed, affected sobriety of someone about to share a particularly juicy piece of gossip. “He had part of her liver stuck in his teeth.” VII. The Cradle of Beauty VII THE CRADLE OF BEAUTY “A little rougher,” Amber panted. They were in the Kennedy room, the older woman spread-eagled on the huge antique four poster, her wrists and ankles held at extension by leather cuffs. The silk sheets were cool against Beth’s knees and the palm of her right hand. With her left she cupped Amber’s throat, her thumb against the line of her jaw. Without speaking, she quickened her tempo. It was Friday. Her shift ended in two hours, and her cock felt like molten lead. Maybe it’ll slough off of my body, she thought, taking her hand off Amber’s neck so she could spit in it and rub it on the other woman’s flushed and puffy cunt and the base of her own dick. Maybe it’ll drip onto the sheets and burn holes in the mattress. Afterward, once Amber had gone, she sat alone on the edge of the bed until her soul came back into her body. As she struggled out of her binder she thought of the summers she’d spent hooking in Boston, strange men fucking her up the ass in motel rooms, back when sometimes a man got off you if you screamed for him to stop. One year she’d worked at a cathouse in Watertown. She’d had regulars. She smiled at the memory of a fat, gentle programmer who liked to be sodomized with the handle of a hairbrush. That hadn’t been so bad. She touched her cheek where first Fran and then Indi had sewn her together. The skin was rough with scar tissue and half-healed scabs.

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

  Why Chicken Means So Much to Me [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] Okay, so now you know that I’m a cartoonist. And I think I’m pretty good at it, too. But no matter how good I am, my cartoons will never take the place of food or money. I wish I could draw a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or a fist full of twenty dollar bills, and perform some magic trick and make it real. But I can’t do that. Nobody can do that, not even the hungriest magician in the world. I wish I were magical, but I am really just a poor-ass reservation kid living with his poor-ass family on the poor-ass Spokane Indian Reservation. Do you know the worst thing about being poor? Oh, maybe you’ve done the math in your head and you figure: Poverty = empty refrigerator + empty stomach And sure, sometimes, my family misses a meal, and sleep is the only thing we have for dinner, but I know that, sooner or later, my parents will come bursting through the door with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Original Recipe. And hey, in a weird way, being hungry makes food taste better. There is nothing better than a chicken leg when you haven’t eaten for (approximately) eighteen-and-a-half hours. And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God. [image "An illustration of a chicken drumstick with rays around it, labeled the Shroud of Kentucky Fried." file=image_rsrc4RN.jpg] So hunger is not the worst thing about being poor. And now I’m sure you’re asking, “Okay, okay, Mr. Hunger Artist, Mr. Mouth-Full-of-Words, Mr. Woe-Is-Me, Mr. Secret Recipe, what is the worst thing about being poor?” So, okay, I’ll tell you the worst thing. Last week, my best friend Oscar got really sick. At first, I thought he just had heat exhaustion or something. I mean, it was a crazy-hot July day (102 degrees with 90 percent humidity), and plenty of people were falling over from heat exhaustion, so why not a little dog wearing a fur coat? I tried to give him some water, but he didn’t want any of that. He was lying on his bed with red, watery, snotty eyes. He whimpered in pain. When I touched him, he yelped like crazy. It was like his nerves were poking out three inches from his skin. I figured he’d be okay with some rest, but then he started vomiting, and diarrhea blasted out of him, and he had these seizures where his little legs just kicked and kicked and kicked. And sure, Oscar was only an adopted stray mutt, but he was the only living thing that I could depend on. He was more dependable than my parents, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and big sister. He taught me more than any teachers ever did. Honestly, Oscar was a better person than any human I had ever known. “Mom,” I said. “We have to take Oscar to the vet.”

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

  [image "The cover of ‘Savage Summer’ depicts a muscular man and a woman in a close, intimate embrace, conveying passion and romance. Prominently displayed are the alternative titles: ‘Apache Heat,’ ‘Lummi Lust,’ and “Yakama Yearning.’" file=image_rsrc4RZ.jpg] “You know,” I said, “I don’t think I ever saw my sister reading one of those things.” “She kept them hidden,” Mr. P said. Well, that is a big difference between my sister and me. I hide the magazines filled with photos of naked women; my sister hides her tender romance novels that tell stories about naked women (and men). I want the pictures; my sister wants the words. “I don’t remember her ever writing anything,” I said. “Oh, she loved to write short stories. Little romantic stories. She wouldn’t let anybody read them. But she’d always be scribbling in her notebook.” “Wow,” I said. That was all I could say. I mean, my sister had become a humanoid underground dweller. There wasn’t much romance in that. Or maybe there was. Maybe my sister read romances all day. Maybe she was trapped in those romances. “I really thought she was going to be a writer,” Mr. P said. “She kept writing in her book. And she kept working up the courage to show it to somebody. And then she just stopped.” “Why?” I asked. “I don’t know.” “You don’t have any idea?” “No, not really.” Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go? That had to be it, right? Something bad had happened to her, right? I mean, she lived in the fricking basement. People just don’t live and hide in basements if they’re happy. Of course, my sister isn’t much different from my dad in that regard. Whenever my father isn’t off on a drinking binge, he spends most of his time in his bedroom, alone, watching TV. He mostly watches basketball. He never minds if I go in there and watch games with him. But we never talk much. We just sit there quietly and watch the games. My dad doesn’t even cheer for his favorite teams or players. He doesn’t react much to the games at all. I suppose he is depressed. I suppose my sister is depressed. I suppose the whole family is depressed. But I still want to know exactly why my sister gave up on her dream of writing romance novels. I mean, yeah, it is kind of a silly dream. What kind of Indian writes romance novels? But it is still pretty cool. I love the thought of reading my sister’s books. I love the thought of walking into a bookstore and seeing her name on the cover of a big and beautiful novel. Spokane River Heat by Mary Runs Away. That would be very cool. “She could still write a book,” I said. “There’s always time to change your life.”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  We can sleep on the roof.” A man’s scream rose up from the woods again, not far off this time, and by unspoken agreement they paused to watch the birds fly in whirring coveys from the trees. Not for the first time, Beth wondered if they were lonely, those things that had been men. If they missed their wives, their mothers, their daughters and girlfriends and dominatrixes. Or maybe they were happy now, free to rape and kill and eat whomever, free to shit and piss and jerk off in the street. Maybe this world was the one they’d always wanted. The rest stop was set back from the highway behind a brake of pine trees. A few rusted-out cars sat abandoned in the parking lot by the low, boxy silhouette of the visitor center. Vending machines lay tipped over and smashed beside the center’s plate-glass doors, which were spider-webbed with cracks and skinned with spots of lichen. The sunlight had faded to a blood-colored smear over the distant mountains. There was a groundskeeper’s shed half-hidden by sumac across the parking lot. Beth kicked the door in and, after some fumbling through the moldy interior by the scant illumination of Fran’s penlight, found a folding aluminum ladder hidden behind bags of mold-speckled fertilizer. She dragged it out and across the yard back to the center, then waited as Fran knotted their climbing rope to the top step so that they could pull it up after them. The new men were stupid, but they could still use a ladder. New men, she thought, gripping the gutter and bracing a foot against the wall. Like Coke Zero. Same great vicious disregard for our lives, none of the socially enforced restraint! The roof felt like another world. Moss grew thick around the tin-plated boiler vent and spread out in a dark green carpet over half the flat tarpaper expanse, stopping at the low wooden retaining wall—half-rotten—that edged its perimeter. A line of fat brown sparrows sleeping on the south eaves eyed them coolly as they laid out their sleeping mats in the starlight. Beth thought about trying for a shot at one, but it would be a mouthful at best and they still had power bars and trail mix. It made her think of the girl, too. The TERF she’d shot. She hadn’t nocked an arrow since. Another fun thing to have PTSD about in the post-civilized wasteland of New England. Beth couldn’t sleep. The stars were out, a brilliant sea broken up by the soft, dark continents of drifting clouds, and she lay staring up at them a yard from where Fran slept curled on her side in an undershirt and bicycle shorts, snoring softly. We’d be back in Seabrook now if it weren’t for me, she thought.

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

  "Oh, yes! He came out again towards the middle of the concert. As he bowed, before taking his place at the piano, his eyes seemed to be looking out for someone in the pit. It was then—as I thought—that our glances met for the first time." "What kind of a man was he?" "He was a rather tall and slight young man of twenty-four. His hair, short and curled—after the fashion Bressan, the actor, had brought into vogue—was of a peculiar ashy hue; but this—as I knew afterwards—was due to its being always imperceptibly powdered. Anyhow, the fairness of his hair contrasted with his dark eyebrows and his short moustache. His complexion was of that warm, healthy paleness which, I believe, artists often have in their youth. His eyes—though generally taken for black—were of a deep blue colour; and although they ever appeared so quiet and serene, still a close observer would every now and then have seen in them a scared and wistful look, as if he were gazing at some dreadful dim and distant vision. An expression of the deepest sorrow invariably succeeded this painful glamour." "And what was the reason of his sadness?" "At first, whenever I asked him, he always shrugged his shoulders, and answered laughingly, 'Do you never see ghosts?' When I got to be on more intimate terms with him, his invariable reply was—'My fate; that horrible, horrible fate of mine!' But then, smiling and arching his eyebrows, he always hummed, 'Non ci pensiam.'" "He was not of a gloomy or brooding disposition, was he?" "No, not at all; he was only very superstitious." "As all artists, I believe." "Or rather, all persons like—well, like ourselves; for nothing renders people so superstitious as vice——" "Or ignorance." "Oh! that is quite a different kind of superstition." "Was there any peculiar dynamic quality in his eyes?" "For myself of course there was; yet he had not what you would call hypnotizing eyes; his glances were far more dreamy than piercing, or staring; and still they had such penetrating power that, from the very first time I saw him, I felt that he could dive deep into my heart; and although his expression was anything but sensual, still, every time he looked at me, I felt all the blood within my veins was always set aglow." "I have often been told that he was very handsome; is it true?" "Yes, he was remarkably good looking, and still even more peculiar, than strikingly handsome. His dress, moreover, though always faultless, was a trifle eccentric. That evening for instance, he wore at his button-hole a bunch of white heliotrope, although camellias and gardenias were then in fashion. His bearing was most gentlemanly, but on the stage—as well as with strangers—slightly supercilious." "Well, after your glances met?"