Tenderness

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 Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  Being invited to engage with someone in an intimate way, to entwine your lips with theirs, to slip your tongue into their mouth, to put your hands on their body in ways that no one else does is a gift, an act of vulnerability and trust. So when that almost inevitable moment comes when I realize that, for a new lover, this act that we are undertaking together once began for them as a violation, my stomach faithfully drops. The best I can do, usually, is to try to stay present and loving, as an act of resistance and reclamation. I’d like to think that the fact that so many of my partners are survivors is exceptional: maybe it’s because I’m queer; maybe it’s because I’m Latinx, a child of immigrants; maybe it’s because many of my partners are people of color and immigrants too. I know the statistics—that one in four girls and one in six boys (based on how they were assigned at birth) are sexually abused as children; I know that for people of color, especially Black and Latinx folks, those rates are even higher. In the grand scheme of things, even though the kiss list in my journal takes up a full page, my sample size is small. It’s likely that many of my friends are survivors too—or that many of them find themselves having the same realization, over and over again, with new lovers as I do. I know that my own trauma shapes all of my relationships and interactions: though I’m not a survivor and I wasn’t sexually abused as a child, my early family dynamics have left me with all sorts of distorted ways of relating to others. I’m a caretaker and a caregiver; a top and caballero if I’m feeling romantic and want to reclaim my machista Cuban roots in my own queer feminist way. But the shadow side of it means that my default is to put other people’s needs and desires before my own. In some ways, my instinct to put myself last has served me well in my relationships, particularly with the partners who have experienced sexual abuse: being deferential, attentive, and accommodating has helped my lovers feel some sense of safety as they navigated their own complicated relationships with sex and boundaries as survivors. But I was also forced to confront that, in other ways, my selflessness may be the result of my own coping mechanisms, and be reinforcing unhealthy approaches to sex. If I peruse my list of partners, there are probably only one or two people about whom I could say confidently that our relationship never involved any sex that I performed out of obligation, rather than actual desire. Then, during sex with a relatively new partner recently, we agreed at the outset of one encounter that we would focus on my pleasure. A few minutes into it, I burst into sobs and cried for the better part of ten minutes.

• From Querelle (1953)

  126 I JEAN GENET Querelle he ceased to think of him as a man who loved women and relaxed into the special atmosphere that a man who loves men always ca11s forth. Between them, for them alone, a uni verse came into being (with its own laws and its secret, invisible understandings) that totaiiy excluded the idea of woman. At the moment of pleasure a certain tenderness had disturbed the relationship between those two-it affected the boss in particu lar. Tenderness is not quite the right word, but it does serve to indicate the melange of gratitude toward the body providing one with pleasure, of the sweetness of the moment of joy, of physical exhaustion and even disgust drenching, relieving, sink ing and raising your spirits, and finally, of sadness; and this poor touch of tenderness, manifested like a kind of quiet and color less flash of lightning, then continues to subtly influence and alter the simple physical relationship between men. Not that this becomes anything even approaching the true love between man and women, or between hvo beings one of whom is fe minine, but it is the absence of woman in this universe that obliges the two men to call forth a measure of womanliness in themselves. To invent the woman. It is not the weaker, or the younger, or the more gentle of the two who succeeds better in this, but the one who has more experience in it, frequently the stronger and older man. A complicity unites the hvo men, but while it arises from the absence of woman, that complicity calls forth the woman who joins them together by her very absence. Thus there need be no fakery in their dealings in that regard, no need t o be anything but what they are: two males, most virile, perhaps jealous of each other, perhaps even hating, but never loving each other. Almost inadvertently Nono had told Robert everything. Nono had never tried to seduce Robert, nor had Robert, knowing the rules of the game, ever asked him for· the Madam's favors. In fact, when he first came to the brothel as a client he only noticed Madame Lysiane when she picked him out herself. Noticing what he thought was Robert's in difference to the idea of his brother's sleeping with him, Nono

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Eventually the coughing subsided—it had been bronchial in nature, that hollow, echoing sound—and he could breathe again. He felt stunned, slapped, like he’d been dipped into some other world tucked just under this one and brought back too quickly. Sophie was sitting next to him, one hand gripping his, the other making circles on his back. A bead of sweat clung to the corner of her mouth. A red clip kept hair off her face. He had always admired her, thought her talent terrifying. Sophie. She gave him a tentative, sad smile. She let him drink from her bottle. The water was flat and warm. It had a coppery taste. “We better get inside,” she said. “All right,” he said, and he let her take him by the arm again, to get him on his feet. But then he was ready to stand on his own, or else he didn’t want her to think that he couldn’t. She put her arm around his waist to steady him and they went into the hall, where they could already hear the music starting up again. How long had it been since he’d spoken to Sophie? Alek sat on the floor now and began to stretch. First his legs. Then his back. He stretched to the tips of his toes, pressing himself flush against the tops of his thighs, holding the position for as long as he could. He could feel the cough gathering along the edge of his lungs, that tickling heat. He suppressed it as best he could. He counted to twenty and released the stretch, then lay on his back. The cough came quickly, loudly, and filled the empty room in the way a lonely prayer might fill a cathedral.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “No, no,” she said, smiling and holding his hand. “It’s sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all over now.” And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay down and was still. Though he thought her stillness suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and excitement with which, as she came from behind the screen, she said “nothing,” he was so sleepy that he fell asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of her breathing, and understood all that must have been passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She seemed struggling between regret at waking him, and the desire to talk to him. “Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy.... We ought to send for Lizaveta Petrovna.” The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed, holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon during the last few days. “Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit afraid,” she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his hand to her bosom and then to her lips. He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft curling hair under her night cap, was radiant with joy and courage.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “What does he keep reading philosophy of some sort for all this year?” she wondered. “If it’s all written in those books, he can understand them. If it’s all wrong, why does he read them? He says himself that he would like to believe. Then why is it he doesn’t believe? Surely from his thinking so much? And he thinks so much from being solitary. He’s always alone, alone. He can’t talk about it all to us. I fancy he’ll be glad of these visitors, especially Katavasov. He likes discussions with them,” she thought, and passed instantly to the consideration of where it would be more convenient to put Katavasov, to sleep alone or to share Sergey Ivanovitch’s room. And then an idea suddenly struck her, which made her shudder and even disturb Mitya, who glanced severely at her. “I do believe the laundress hasn’t sent the washing yet, and all the best sheets are in use. If I don’t see to it, Agafea Mihalovna will give Sergey Ivanovitch the wrong sheets,” and at the very idea of this the blood rushed to Kitty’s face. “Yes, I will arrange it,” she decided, and going back to her former thoughts, she remembered that some spiritual question of importance had been interrupted, and she began to recall what. “Yes, Kostya, an unbeliever,” she thought again with a smile. “Well, an unbeliever then! Better let him always be one than like Madame Stahl, or what I tried to be in those days abroad. No, he won’t ever sham anything.” And a recent instance of his goodness rose vividly to her mind. A fortnight ago a penitent letter had come from Stepan Arkadyevitch to Dolly. He besought her to save his honor, to sell her estate to pay his debts. Dolly was in despair, she detested her husband, despised him, pitied him, resolved on a separation, resolved to refuse, but ended by agreeing to sell part of her property. After that, with an irrepressible smile of tenderness, Kitty recalled her husband’s shamefaced embarrassment, his repeated awkward efforts to approach the subject, and how at last, having thought of the one means of helping Dolly without wounding her pride, he had suggested to Kitty—what had not occurred to her before—that she should give up her share of the property. “He an unbeliever indeed! With his heart, his dread of offending anyone, even a child! Everything for others, nothing for himself. Sergey Ivanovitch simply considers it as Kostya’s duty to be his steward. And it’s the same with his sister. Now Dolly and her children are under his guardianship; all these peasants who come to him every day, as though he were bound to be at their service.” “Yes, only be like your father, only like him,” she said, handing Mitya over to the nurse, and putting her lips to his cheek. Chapter 8

• From Escape (2007)

  My grandmother Jenny was one of the buffers between us and our mother’s volatility. I learned early on as a child to be a barometer for my mother’s mood swings. Her moods could change hour to hour; I always had to pay attention to which frame of mind she was in and adapt accordingly. But Grandma gave Mother some breathing room, especially when the smaller children were driving her crazy. Whatever my mother’s mental issues were, she was overall a much better mother than many of the women in the community. Grandma came over almost every day and helped care for us. If she got to our house early enough in the morning, there would be no spankings. My grandmother was in her mid-sixties. I think she always seemed so much older to me because she was in very poor health. Women age rapidly in the FLDS. Most have hard lives and often a dozen or more children. Women look okay in their thirties and then age dramatically in their forties. My mother was the youngest of Grandma’s ten children and was born late in Grandma’s life, so my grandmother was very, very old when I knew her. She was heavyset, wrinkled, and worn. Her hair was gray and her eyes were bad, but her spirit was strong and she could tell a story like no one else. I remember sitting in her lap for hours as she told me stories about the Old West and the southern states before the Civil War. Grandma’s husband had died when my mother was two years old. My grandmother—who came from polygamist bloodlines—then was married to an apostle in the FLDS and became part of a plural marriage for the first time. My grandmother believed plural marriage was the most sacred aspect of our faith and told me story after story about how the Mormon Church had been the church of God until it abandoned polygamy. She told me with great pride that her great-grandfather, Benjamin F. Johnson, was one of the first men whom the prophet Joseph Smith introduced to the holy principle of celestial marriage in the nineteenth century. (Smith was rumored to have had between thirty-three and forty-eight wives himself. It’s been said that his youngest wife was fourteen when they married.) The principle of celestial marriage is what defines the FLDS faith. A man must have multiple wives if he expects to do well in heaven, where he can eventually become a god and wind up with his own planet.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  She thanks us for giving her a choice. To me, she says with some of her old humor, “You’re an organizer to the end.” It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts. From that moment on, I accept Wilma’s wisdom. Seeing that I need a task, Wilma’s daughters assign me the duty of making sure each visitor’s contribution is recorded on a list in the kitchen. I write names down next to rhubarb and peach pies, vats of sweet iced tea, and trays of cornbread. A high school student carries in crates of bottled water, and a silent man in overalls mows the lawn just because it needs it. Wilma’s family wants to be able to thank each person, hence the list. Once again the individual honors the community, and vice versa. I finally understand why Winterhawk, Charlie’s son by an earlier marriage, turned down a scholarship to Dartmouth and stayed here instead. It was not just land that brought Wilma home; it was also community. At the long kitchen table, knowing Wilma creates a bond among us, and strangers talk. The husband of her dear friend who died in the car crash has been here for days, and explains that Wilma helped to raise their daughter. Gail Small, Wilma’s friend and one of the activists she admires and profiled in her book Every Day Is a Good Day, has come all the way from the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana. There, Gail has waged a lifetime battle to keep extractive and exploitive energy companies from destroying the land, and to keep religious schools from abusing the next generation. As she says, “Children were sexually molested by priests and nuns, then came home to spread the cancer themselves.” She started not only an environmental group called Native Action, but also a high school on the reservation. Oren Lyons has come from his home in upstate New York, the headquarters of the governing body of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee. It is the oldest continuous democracy in the world.20 Whenever Wilma or I used to ask him something serious, he always answered, “I have to consult with my women elders first.” In fact, it was the equality of women in those nations that inspired white women neighbors to begin organizing the suffrage movement. Wilma’s own mother is there every morning, having walked from her house just down a dirt road. She tells me that Wilma took her to Ireland to see her own hereditary land for the first time. We both know that she will outlive her daughter. I’ve promised to bring Wilma conversations from her kitchen table, since she is unable to have them herself.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  She hesitated. “I think she sat with me for almost two hours. For well over an hour, we didn’t neither one of us say a word. It felt good to finally have someone to lean on at that trial, and I’ve never forgotten that woman. I don’t know who she was, but she made a difference.” “I’m so sorry about your grandson,” I murmured. It was all I could think of to say. “Well, you never fully recover, but you carry on, you carry on. I didn’t know what to do with myself after those trials, so about a year later I started coming down here. I don’t really know why. I guess I just felt like maybe I could be someone, you know, that somebody hurting could lean on.” She looped her arm with mine. I smiled at her. “That’s really wonderful.” “It has been wonderful. What’s your name again?” “It’s Bryan.” “It has been wonderful, Bryan. When I first came, I’d look for people who had lost someone to murder or some violent crime. Then it got to the point where some of the ones grieving the most were the ones whose children or parents were on trial, so I just started letting anybody lean on me who needed it. All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they’re not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don’t care. I don’t know, it’s a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.” I chuckled when she said it. During the McMillian hearings, a local minister had held a regional church meeting about the case and had asked me to come speak. There were a few people in the African American community whose support of Walter was muted, not because they thought he was guilty but because he had had an extramarital affair and wasn’t active in the church. At the church meeting, I spoke mostly about Walter’s case, but I also reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” The woman’s accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can’t simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers. When I chuckled at the older woman’s invocation of the parable, she laughed, too. “I heard you in that courtroom today. I’ve even seen you here a couple of times before. I know you’s a stonecatcher, too.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  One of the students coughed, and Lionel looked up sharply. The boy with the security concerns was staring at him. No. The boy was staring beyond him at the board, at the question that was not a question. French Absolutism. Lionel felt sorry for him, because he looked like he was drowning and he knew it. Poor kid. Lionel wanted to lean over and ruffle his hair, to say it would be okay, that no matter what he wrote in the blue book, it would be okay, that this was temporary and at the end of the two hours it would pass, would collapse down into the general topography of his life, and he’d forget this panicked, drowning feeling. The guy licked his lips and put his head down—back to work. Lionel glanced at the clock over the door. There was time. • • • After the exam, Lionel took the fifteen blue books up the stairs to the history department’s office. He gave them to the departmental secretary, a broad, bland-faced woman with a skin tag like a perpetual crumb at the leftmost corner of her mouth. The secretary took the papers, shuffled them, and stared at Lionel reproachfully. He shrugged uneasily at her, signed the form saying that he’d done what he’d been asked, and left. The look, he suspected, was because he’d had to cancel the last several proctoring appointments with the history department when he had been in the hospital. He could still hear her voice, scratchy on the phone, when he called to say he wouldn’t be able to make it. “Your generation is killing this nation with your carelessness,” she’d said, and hung up on him before he could respond. He’d stood in the reception area of the psychiatric care facility, staring at his reflection in his phone screen, thinking, well, maybe that was true, maybe they were killing the country and killing the world, but they were also killing themselves, and what would it list on his death certificate as cause of death, if not carelessness, misadventure. It was a serious thing to kill a world. He’d stood there with the clipboard of paperwork in his hand, had only called her because the act of lifting the clipboard to sign his name had brought to mind the fact that at that moment he was supposed to be somewhere else, on campus, giving an exam instead of admitting himself. But she didn’t care about that, and he didn’t blame her. He’d caused a mess. She was entitled to her feelings.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

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

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Did she know the whole of it? About this morning, too? The more he let her touch him, be kind to him, the worse it would be when she found out everything. The harder it would be to salvage anything like friendship. “I can afford a cup of coffee at least,” she said. Lionel could feel the small mound of his wallet in his pocket. “Next time’s on you.” “Is it always so busy?” Lionel asked. Overhead, Christmas music was playing. It was only November. “Very funny.” Sophie said. “It’s our slow season, I guess. The calm before the storm.” “Finals.” “Bingo. You must get busy, too, around then,” she said. “I don’t really know. It’s my first finals season as a proctor,” Lionel said. The coffee burned his tongue. “You proctored today, right? What kind of test? Can you say?” She leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Her eyes seemed lit with real curiosity. “History,” Lionel said. She had a mole on her neck, black as a pupil. She had bright blue eyes. She had painted her fingernails pale matte pink. The tips of her fingers were cracking and white. She caught him looking at her hands. “If I don’t paint them, I chew,” she said a little self-consciously. She pulled her hands away and put them behind her knees. She’d put her feet up on the chair again. “You were saying . . . the history test?” “Oh, yeah. There was this one kid who was really up my ass about security. He acted like I was spying on his data or something. They all have to write their student ID numbers down to sign in. As protocol, I guess.” Sophie nodded like it made all the sense in the world, and Lionel wasn’t sure if she was nodding because she thought the student had a point or if she agreed he’d made too much of it. “But after that, it was fine. I just had to write the words ‘French Absolutism’ on the board and wait until they were done.” “Wow. What if they have questions?” “I think that’s why they don’t have the history TAs do it? Because they might give them information they’re not supposed to have? They pick a total idiot like me.” She gave him a look. “Weren’t you, like, doing NASA research as a child or something? You’re not an idiot.” “No, that’s not me. I’d make a terrible engineer,” Lionel said too seriously. “I did go to math camp, though. Guilty by association.” “Math camp? That’s not just a movie trope?” Sophie made a show of leaning forward, putting her chin on her palms. “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I went for, like, twelve years. The last as a counselor.” “Holy shit. What’s it like?” Lionel swirled the coffee in the cup, aware of the gesture as he performed it, knowing that it had little utility, that it was something performed to make him look a certain way, pensive, thoughtful.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “Stop it,” Lionel said, but Charles just assumed his posture. Lionel huffed and spun around, and Charles did the same. Charles’s ability to copy not only his actions, but also the attitude each action contained, was uncanny. Lionel had the feeling of watching himself in a mirror, though on a delay. After a while, he forgot to be angry at Charles. They sat facing each other, doing mirrored gestures. “This is one of the first things I learned to do. You learn to watch people. Imitate. Improvise.” “You’re really good at it,” Lionel said. “No. I’m not. The best people make you feel like you’re copying them. This isn’t even close.” Their palms didn’t touch, but Lionel could feel the static from Charles’s skin. The human warmth of him. When Lionel sped up, Charles sped up. Except there was no gap between Lionel doing the thing and Charles adjusting. It seemed that they decided upon what they would do at the same moment. Lionel reversed direction, but there was Charles right in front of him. No matter what he did, there was Charles. They made a circuit with their hands, a figure out. Then more complicated sinuous patterns. “We’re all just selfish assholes,” Lionel said. “Just like Sophie said.” After a few minutes, Charles said, “I need a haircut.” “You do,” Lionel said, but he was only half paying attention. “You weren’t supposed to agree,” Charles said, a little pained. “But it’s true. You’re kind of shaggy.” • • • Charles sat in the chair with a towel draped over his shoulders. Lionel got the trimmers from the bathroom. He didn’t like electric clippers. The buzzing irritated something fragile in him, and the vibrations sometimes stayed stuck in his head for a long time. But ever since the hospital, he had been too anxious to use manual razors—as if a part of him worried that, with sufficient opportunity, he might try again. He found that he could use the clippers on the lowest setting. Mostly, he used them for his head because his facial hair was far from formidable. He reconsidered this as he looked at Charles’s broad head, shaggy like a large, friendly dog’s. There was also the fact that Charles had white-people hair, which was a unique complication in this endeavor. White-people hair was smooth and slippery. He didn’t know how it would react to the trimmers. His own hair was woolly, fibrous. It came away in clumps, little balls of light brown fluff. It was easy to shear him. “Okay,” he said, turning on the clippers. “Let’s do this, I guess.” “That does not inspire confidence,” Charles said. “I’ll have to take it all off. I can’t do anything else.” There was a pause. He could feel Charles turning that thought over in his head. He thought he could suggest that Charles take care of the front and instruct him on how to do the back or the sides. He bit the tip of his tongue.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Charles made a small circle in the snow, a place that he excavated with his bare hands. When he was done, his fingers were red and numb. He put them under Lionel’s shirt and held them there against his skin. Lionel shivered, but he didn’t move or make Charles take his hands away. He could do this, could give his heat, at least. Then Charles set the hair down in the middle of the circle and tried to light it, but it wouldn’t stay lit. A couple of strands turned bright orange then immediately burned themselves out. The ground was dampening the other hairs, making them hard to burn. Lionel went back into his apartment and came out with a small pot. He set it on the ground and put the hair inside. He took out a sheet of paper and handed it to Charles. “Try this,” he said. Charles smiled at him and crouched over the pot. He lit the paper and nestled it into the hair. The smell was awful, as the strands turned to fire, like little worms writhing as they burned themselves out. Their light was insufficient to illuminate anything, but for a while, it was beautiful to watch. Charles put his arms around Lionel, and Lionel leaned back against him. The wind was at their faces, the smoke rising toward them, then above them, and then away. Lionel felt he might fall asleep right there, standing up—drift off and never come back to his body. The snowfall was even and slow. “Let’s go inside.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThank you, in no particular order, to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Cal Morgan, Claire McGinnis, Sophie Missing, Jimena Gorraez, Zeljka Marosevic, Catalina Trigo, Jacey Mitziga, Sylvie Rabineau, Antonio Byrd, Derrick Austin, Sarah Fuchs, Natalie Eilbert, Christopher Sprott, Verrazzani Mitchell, Hux Michaels, Lan Samantha Chang, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, Sasha Khmelnik, Philip Wallén, and Lyz Lenz. Thank you to the editors who took these stories on in other forms: Michelle Tudor at Platypus Press, who published a version of “Potluck” as “They Belong Only to Themselves.” Alex McElroy, who published a version of “Flesh” at Gulf Coast as “God Is Not Flesh, But Air.” Adeena Reitberger, who published a version of “As Though That Were Love” in American Short Fiction. Michelle Lyn King, who published a version of “Proctoring” as “French Absolutism” in Joyland. Meakin Armstrong, who published a version of “Anne of Cleves” in Guernica. Sarah Lyn Rogers, who published a version of “What Made Them Made You” as “Grace” at The Rumpus. ABOUT THE AUTHORBrandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction. [image "Penguin Random House publisher logo" file=image_rsrc2GB.jpg] What’s next on your reading list?Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _140348931_

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  “I just mean—he isn’t always considerate of other people.” She was amused as she said it, and Lionel relaxed. They squeezed together against the side of the house. Lionel felt he could breathe again. Sophie offered him her cup, and when Lionel hesitated, she clarified, “Water.” “In that case,” Lionel said. The lukewarm water tasted vaguely like beer—someone had done a pretty halfhearted job of rinsing the cup out before refilling it or had simply refilled it without rinsing it at all. But he was aware, the moment he took the first sip, that he was powerfully, endlessly thirsty. He couldn’t stop drinking. The water passed through his mouth and down the back of his throat, where it dissolved into nothing. He kept drinking to satisfy his dry tongue, and before he knew it, he had drunk all of Sophie’s water. She looked at him in a way that was either impressed or annoyed. “Sorry.” “The hour of thirst is upon us.” Lionel offered to replenish the cup, but she shrugged and said it was fine. She’d brought a lightweight blanket out on the porch and draped it over their legs. “I’m sorry if I was being bitchy before,” she said. “In the kitchen.” “You weren’t.” “I was, but thank you. I just hate when people lie about how they feel.” “You must be bitchy all the time, then.” “I consider myself an honest person.” “It must be nice to have a robust sense of yourself.” Lionel could feel through the house siding the pressure of Sophie’s head turning toward him. He could tell, too, from the subtle realigning of her shoulder against his arm. “Now, that was a bitchy thing to say.” “It’s been a long few weeks,” he said. A kind of heat passed between them. Some kind of animal recognition. Sophie’s eyes were blue. She had bleached hair, but it was luminous and healthy-looking. Her mouth was full and soft, and she had a small scar on her chin. It was an unfamiliar sensation—or, no, it was familiar, but not one he was accustomed to feeling toward women. It was not desire as he understood or remembered it, exactly, not a desire to have sex with Sophie or to see her naked, but he wanted to reach out and touch her and be touched by her. He wanted to feel her against him. She had a perfectly tranquil expression, and he felt he might tell her anything about himself if only she might ask. Under them, the porch boards were cold and drafty. Sophie shivered and looked toward Charles, severing the moment. “Charlie said you proctor exams.” “Yeah—for the university. It’s only a few days a week, though.”

• From Escape (2007)

  I kneeled beside her and put my arm around her and helped her get up. I guided her to a chair, covered her with a blanket, and offered to get her some hot tea. I came back with a mug of peppermint tea for her and placed it beside her easy chair. Then I went to find Merril. Merril was in his office with his adoring teenage daughters around him. They were laughing and giggling. I stood by the door until Merril noticed me. “There’s my Carolee. How are you doing tonight?” Carolee was Merril’s pet name for me, which I never liked. But it was better than when he accidentally called me by one of his daughters’ names. I looked at him and replied, “I’m doing great, but I can’t say that for all of your wives.” “What concerns could my lovely wife Carolee have?” “Merril, have you seen Ruth since you’ve been home?” “Yes, she came up here and talked to me a while ago.” “Then you know she’s extremely ill and somebody needs to do something for her. I found her downstairs, crying and shaking all over.” He was dismissive. “I will look into it, and thank you, Carolee, for your concern.” I went back to her room, but she was gone. The peppermint tea was untouched. Then I heard the shrieks and ran to the kitchen. Ruth was throwing different things around and breaking some glass bowls. “I am going to get the devil out of you if I have to break you to do it.” Several of the smaller children were watching her and laughing. When she paused I said quietly, “Ruth, do you think you’ve gotten the devil out of enough of the dishes now?” She seemed to snap into reality. “Yes, I think I can get the devil out of the other dishes later.” I reminded her that she hadn’t drunk her peppermint tea. She thought she had. I suggested we go back to her room and she could try sipping it through a straw. I made her half a sandwich. It was tedious work coaching her to eat and drink, but after two hours she finished the sandwich and tea. I rubbed her shoulders until she seemed to be asleep. Cathleen and I were both up the next morning at five. She told me how ghastly the past few days had been and how upset she was about Merril’s reaction to Ruth’s madness. “The way I’m being treated is completely unacceptable,” she said. “There is no way I’m going to stand for it. Uncle Roy and his other wives always treated me like I was their little princess. I have been a princess to a prophet of God and I will not be treated as something lesser by people who are nobodies.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  I thought you liked it.” “I do like it,” he said. “I do. You look great.” “I don’t believe you,” Charles said. His feelings were hurt. Lionel got up from the bed and gathered Charles’s hair into his hands. “We have to burn it,” he said. “Why?” Charles asked. “So that birds don’t take it and make you crazy. It’s something my grandma says.” “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” • • • CHARLES MADE a small circle in the snow, a place that he excavated with his bare hands. When he was done, his fingers were red and numb. He put them under Lionel’s shirt and held them there against his skin. Lionel shivered, but he didn’t move or make Charles take his hands away. He could do this, could give his heat, at least. Then Charles set the hair down in the middle of the circle and tried to light it, but it wouldn’t stay lit. A couple of strands turned bright orange then immediately burned themselves out. The ground was dampening the other hairs, making them hard to burn. Lionel went back into his apartment and came out with a small pot. He set it on the ground and put the hair inside. He took out a sheet of paper and handed it to Charles. “Try this,” he said. Charles smiled at him and crouched over the pot. He lit the paper and nestled it into the hair. The smell was awful, as the strands turned to fire, like little worms writhing as they burned themselves out. Their light was insufficient to illuminate anything, but for a while, it was beautiful to watch. Charles put his arms around Lionel, and Lionel leaned back against him. The wind was at their faces, the smoke rising toward them, then above them, and then away. Lionel felt he might fall asleep right there, standing up—drift off and never come back to his body. The snowfall was even and slow. “Let’s go inside.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you, in no particular order, to Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Cal Morgan, Claire McGinnis, Sophie Missing, Jimena Gorraez, Zeljka Marosevic, Catalina Trigo, Jacey Mitziga, Sylvie Rabineau, Antonio Byrd, Derrick Austin, Sarah Fuchs, Natalie Eilbert, Christopher Sprott, Verrazzani Mitchell, Hux Michaels, Lan Samantha Chang, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, Sasha Khmelnik, Philip Wallén, and Lyz Lenz. Thank you to the editors who took these stories on in other forms: Michelle Tudor at Platypus Press, who published a version of “Potluck” as “They Belong Only to Themselves.” Alex McElroy, who published a version of “Flesh” at Gulf Coast as “God Is Not Flesh, But Air.” Adeena Reitberger, who published a version of “As Though That Were Love” in American Short Fiction.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Reeling with sleepiness, she bumped into the corner of an armchair, at which point he, simultaneously sitting down in it, took her by the hip and drew her close. She straightened, stretching up like an angel, for a split second tensed every muscle, took another half step, and softly descended onto his lap. “My sweetheart, my poor little girl,” he spoke in a kind of general mist of pity, tenderness, and desire, as he observed her drowsiness, her wooziness, her diminishing smile, palpating her through the dark dress, feeling, through the thin wool, the band of the orphan’s garter on her bare skin, thinking how defenseless, abandoned, warm she was, reveling in the animate weight of her legs as they slithered apart and then, with the faintest corporeal rustle, recrossed at a slightly higher level. She slowly entwined a somnolent arm, in its snug little sleeve, around his nape, engulfing him with the chestnut fragrance of her soft hair.… (pp. 81–82) But the narrator fails as both enchanter and lover, and soon afterwards dies in a manner which Nabokov will transfer to Charlotte Haze. While the scene clearly foreshadows the first night at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, its straightforward action and solemn tone are quite different, and it compresses into a few paragraphs what will later occupy almost two chapters (pp. 119–133). The narrator’s enjoyment of the girl’s “animate weight” suggests the considerably more combustible lap scene in Lolita, perhaps the most erotic interlude in the novel—but it only suggests it. Aside from such echoes, little beyond the basic idea of the tale subsists in Lolita; and the telling is quite literally a world apart. The Enchanter went unpublished not because of the forbidding subject matter, but rather, says Nabokov, because the girl possessed little “semblance of reality.”14 In 1949, after moving from Wellesley to Cornell, he became involved in a “new treatment of the theme, this time in English.” Although Lolita “developed slowly,” taking five years to complete, Nabokov had everything in mind quite early. As was customary with him, however, he did not write it in exact chronological sequence. Humbert’s confessional diary was composed at the outset of this “new treatment,” followed by Humbert and Lolita’s first journey westward, and the climactic scene in which Quilty is killed (“His death had to be clear in my mind in order to control his earlier appearances,” says Nabokov). Nabokov next filled in the gaps of Humbert’s early life, and then proceeded ahead with the rest of the action, more or less in chronological order. Humbert’s final interview with Lolita was composed at the very end, in 1954, followed only by John Ray’s Foreword.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The paper rustled, lowered. Their eyes met. Simon’s expression narrowed briefly, and Hartjes could see the momentary flutter of his concentration changing focus. Whatever was in Simon’s mind slackened. Hartjes wondered if it was fleeting pity or something else. Simon raised the paper. Hartjes felt relief to have a barrier between them again. “Oh, well, sucks for you, pal.” Hartjes felt a nudge on his thigh from Simon’s foot, and he reached under the table and caught it. He ran his thumb down the instep, dug his fingers there, where a foot was tender and vulnerable, and Simon let out a low groan that turned, suddenly, into a startled cry.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She wanted to cry again. She almost cried again. She put her arm over her face. “What’s wrong?” Sigrid said. She could feel Sigrid’s shoulders under her legs. “What’s wrong, Marta? Do you want to stop?” “No,” she said hoarsely. “I’ve just. I’ve never.” “Oh, Marta,” Sigrid said. She kissed Marta’s thigh and then her knee. “It’s okay.” “I’m afraid I’ll mess it up,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll see me.” Marta looked at Sigrid, who was looking up at her, those green eyes. “I see you,” Sigrid said. “You’re wonderful.” Marta did cry. She cried, but Sigrid didn’t stop. She seemed to know that the crying meant that Marta didn’t want her to stop. It hadn’t been that way with Peter, Marta thought. It hadn’t been like that. She had not cried with him. She had not felt nervous with him. Because with Peter there hadn’t been any room for her feelings at all. • • • Marta worked in a cubicle at the plant. The walls were thin and covered in a kind of coarse linen fabric. She had tacked up a picture of her parents and a couple of pictures of herself from summer camp when she was a girl, when she’d had thick glasses and a shaggy bobbed haircut. One of the pictures showed Marta as a smiling seven-year-old standing at the edge of a dock, the water a deep green, the sky over the bursting hills a smooth, tranquil blue. It gave her something pretty to look at when her eyes grew tired and the columns of figures and sums swam together. Her desk was tidy except for the in-box, where people from other departments dropped their own reports, and Marta had to organize them and figure out what she was supposed to do with them. She’d been working at the plant for about five years, and the work had adhered to her like the accumulation of calcium in a pipe, until she was no longer sure if she’d always been suited for the job or had simply become suited through prolonged exposure. In the plant, there was always the sound of dripping water and the dull, distant roar of surf. The hallways had flickering green lights, and when she walked from tunnel to tunnel, climbing up the ladders to inspect the tanks and take down their measurements, it was like moving through an emerald dream. Not many people worked in the plant, not on Marta’s shift—maybe thirty in all. There were of course the men who worked underground, who did the real work and sometimes were burned by acid or lye, who came up the elevators screaming because they’d gotten their hand caught in a hydraulic press. The men were the thick, blunted sort whose lives had deposited them in the plant the way a sluggish stream accumulates debris.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I attended an English day school a few miles from home, and there I played rackets and fives, and got excellent marks, and was on perfect terms with schoolmates and teachers alike. The only definite sexual events that I can remember as having occurred before my thirteenth birthday (that is, before I first saw my little Annabel) were: a solemn, decorous and purely theoretical talk about pubertal surprises in the rose garden of the school with an American kid, the son of a then celebrated motion-picture actress whom he seldom saw in the three-dimensional world; and some interesting reactions on the part of my organism to certain photographs, pearl and umbra, with infinitely soft partings, in Pichon’s sumptuous La Beauté Humaine that I had filched from under a mountain of marble-bound Graphics in the hotel library. Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycée in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult. 3Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita). Let me therefore primly limit myself, in describing Annabel, to saying she was a lovely child a few months my junior. Her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, and as stuffy as she. They had rented a villa not far from Hotel Mirana. Bald brown Mr. Leigh and fat, powdered Mrs. Leigh (born Vanessa van Ness). How I loathed them! At first, Annabel and I talked of peripheral affairs. She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers. Our brains were turned the way those of intelligent European preadolescents were in our day and set, and I doubt if much individual genius should be assigned to our interest in the plurality of inhabited worlds, competitive tennis, infinity, solipsism and so on. The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. She wanted to be a nurse in some famished Asiatic country; I wanted to be a famous spy.