It turned out that the extremely powerful
bourgeoisie and by far the greater part of the peasantry around the capital,
from the rich farmers to the white trash, was of variegated European
extraction, united by the frail bond of a language which, although often
imperfectly understood, was still held in common while the slum dwellers
presented an extraordinary racial diversity but were all distinguishable by the
colour black, for that pigmintation, to some degree, was common to them all.
[…]
She had a slippery, ingratiating quality
which was meant to disarm but somehow offended me and she loquaciously set sail
on a rattling stream of nothings while the girl in the drawing room continued
to play the piano exquisitely and the music echoed down a corridor into the
room…She had a waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed
through her veins but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less
red. Her mouth was barely touched
with palest pink though it had exactly the proportions of the three cherries
the artmaster piles in an inverted traingle to illustrate the classic mouth and
there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks.
—from Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
His wife had died. So he was visiting the
dead wife's relatives in
—from "Cathedral," by
Raymond Carter
The giant awoke, got high on drugs, masturbated,
and then went into town to forage for a human-flesh breakfast. He stopped at an intersection where his
eye was caught by the puffy orange Day-Glo parka of a postmenopausal crossing
guard. He knelt down and plucked up the screaming crossing guard in his fingers
and dropped her into a gunnysack slung across his back.
[…]
Those were my first visceral tattos. I’ve had many since. A tip to the guys out
there—visceral tattoos really tuirn on female medical technicians and
nurses. I’ve had numerous hot
relationships start because a med-tech or a nurse saw one of my X-rays and went
nuts over all the tattoos. They
know that any wimp can go out and get “Winona Forever” stenciled on
his arm—but it takes real balls to have yourself put under general anesthesis,
sliced open, have a vital organ etched with radioactive isotope ink, and then
get sewn up again every time you want to commemorate that special lady.
Next, I want to
have the words Desert Storm—Thunder and Lightning tattooed on my
left frontal cortex. But I
don’t know where I’m going to go for that one. Brain tattooing is illegal even in
[…]
Rocco’s
father had been a medical cheese sculptor—he sculpted cheese centerpieces
for medical conventions. It was a profession
that required not only fine craftsmanship and an encyclopedic knowledge of
cheeses, but a comprehensive understanding of human anatomy. One needed to know
which cheeses by dint of their hues and textures would allow the sculptor to
render an organ with maximum fidelity.
Mavarti with dill, for instance, is particularly suitable for sculpting
uterine lining. Mozzarella has just
the right slickness and convoluted folds for the brain.”
[…]
When I arrive at the Jack LaLanne Health Spa,
there is no sign that a clandestine meeting of ultra-right-wing intellectuals
and psychics is taking place in its sauna.
Yelping aerobics classes, the echo of racquetballs, sweaty florid-faced
hausfraus in garish leotards slumped at juice machines, men with hairy jiggling
breasts and gelatinous rolls of stretch-marked belly fat grimly tramping on
treadmills and Stairmasters—nothing out of the ordinary. I undress in the
locker room, walk down a short hallway, come to a door marked SAUNA and open
it. Through the thick steam, the
first face I recognize is that of Dr. Claude Lorphelin, a gynecologist,
surrealist poet, and neo-fascist pamphleteer who lives in the post 16th
Arrondissement of the
—Mark
Leyner, Et Tu, Babe
Once in a while take evening trips past the
old unsold house you grew up in, that haunted rural crossroads two hours from
where you now live. It is like Halloween: the raked, moon-lit lawn, the
mammoth, tumid trees, arms and fingers raised into the starless wipe of sky like
burns, cracks, map rivers. . .Look up through the
windshield. In the November sky a wedge of wrens moves
south, the lines of their formation, the very sides and vertices mysteriously
choreographed, shifting, flowing, crossing like a skater's legs... Walk through
wooded areas; there is a life there you have forgotten. The smells and sounds
seem sudden, unchanged, exact, the paper crunch of the leaves, the mouldering
sachet of the mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence posts splintered,
trusting and precarious in their solid grasp of arms, the asters splindly, dry,
white, havishammed (Havishammed!) by frost.
—from "How to Talk to Your
Mother," by Lorrie Moore
In the first go-round he'd drawn a bull he
knew and got a good scald on him. He'd been in a slump for weeks, wire
stretched right, but things were turning back his way. He'd come off that
animal in a flying dismount, sparked a little clapping that quickly died; the
watchers knew as well as he that if he burst into blames and sang an operatic
aria after the whistle it would make no damn difference.
He drew o.k. bulls and rode them in the next
rounds, scores in the high seventies, fixed his eyes on the outside shoulder of
the welly bull that tried to drop him, then at the short-go draw he pulled
Kisses, rank and salty, big as a boxcar of coal. On that one all you could do
was your best and hope for a little sweet luck; if you got the luck he was
money.
[…]
He traveled against curdled sky. In the last
sixty miles the snow began again. He climbed out of
The light was falling out of the day when he
reached the pass, the blunt mountains lost in snow, the greasy hairpin turns
ahead. He drove slowly and steadily in a low gear; he had not forgotten how to
drive a winter mountain. But the wind was up again, rocking and slapping the
car, blotting out all but whipping snow and he was sweating with the anxiety of
keeping to the road, dizzy with altitude. Twelve more miles, sliding and
buffeted, before he reached Ten Sleep where streetlights glowed in revolving
circles like Van Gogh's sun.There had not been electricity when he left the
place. In thgose days there were seventeen black, lightless miles between the
town and the ranch, and now the long arch of years compressed into that
distance. His headlights picked up a sign: 20 MILES TO DOWN UNDER
—Annie Proulx,