On a hot late-August evening on the sidewalk outside the 92nd Street Y in New York City, a group of well-wishers surrounded a slim, eccentric and somewhat frail-appearing, middle aged woman, who had just finished reading from her latest novel to a sold out house at the Y. Fellow travelers in the world of contemporary American letters would have instantly recognized the woman beneath her broad-brimmed straw hat and behind her goggle-sized eyeglasses as none other than Joyce Carol Oates, mistress of gothic chills and psychological transgressions. In due course the crowd thinned until only a small coterie of a half dozen close friends remained. A cab waited impatiently at the curb as Joyce’s small, heart-shaped mouth puckered in a final kiss.
By Jonathan Woods.
“Well it looks like suicide, and yet, knowing Adrian, it really doesn’t look like suicide. They’re trying to trace the girls involved, if girls were involved, and almost certainly they were.”
I’m hard when I choke him, hovering above his already lubed arsehole. Why not. I slide inside as I force my weight down. His eyes bulging, pleasure and pain and the steady realisation that one’s replacing the other — and there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s struggling, starts to squirm then kick out, but my weight and me inside him means he’s mine. I ejaculate and it’s over, just like that. What would they think, back in the pub, if they could see me now? 
Herbie knew about a scheme where you could breed black widow spiders for the U.S. Government and they would pay you handsomely for your contribution to the whatever-it-was effort. He thought that sounded like a legal, easy way to make money growing something at home, and he was talking about it to anyone who was interested.
He had stood on tiptoes and used his weight to push down and in, but the sticky stuff meant his cock slid all over her right buttock leaving slimy snail trails of lube and Cowper’s fluid – he’d looked it up the day before – pre-cum. ‘Fucksake,’ his girlfriend had said, looking up from the yeasty duvet. ‘It’s not like this in the movies,’ he had said. ‘What movies would that be?’ His girlfriend had replied, ‘Dumbo? Bambi?’ I was thinking more, ‘Anal Housewives 4,’ he had said, his cock now limp and embarrassed. ‘Maybe we should try a different position.’ ‘No,’ his girlfriend had said, ‘I’m not in the mood now,’ and had turned over, cocooned herself in the duvet and turned her back to him.
The young woman slowly peels the thin moustache away and lets it fall like a hair-slug onto the ground – and her beauty is revealed as if by a magic spell. ‘Do not judge a book by its cover, Chris. Do not let your lute lead you into quarrelsome ways. And try not to discriminate against public performances involving dwarves called Andy and women with false moustaches.’ ‘No-one has ever called me Chris before,’ says Christopher Christopher with a look of happy dismay. The young woman smiles and Christopher Christopher feels his heart swooning and his cheeks redden. And so he pulls out his lute and starts to sing.
We came across Derek Jarman’s wooden beach house with its strange natural, sculpture garden. Jenkins said he’d met him once, that he’d been something of a local character. I was eleven when he died, and I remember his film, Blue, being shown on television: a beautiful blank Klein-blue screen with only his commentary for explanation. My mum had turned it off saying it was ‘filth’, my stepfather adding that it was ‘a waste of a fucking licence fee’ – his words. ‘It’s channel fucking four, actually’ – my words as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, leaving them to their whisky and shouting. I lay on my bed, sinking my head back into the pillows to drown them out, and looked up at my poster of the southern oceans, and dreamt of swimming, swimming way out to sea.
Ms. Stevens had requested that nobody be notified after she checked out. Her room was full of cellophane. It was possibly from things she got at the gift shop, like the Russian dolls and the miniature car set, but that didn’t account for the rest of it. Slithers of the stuff kept attaching themselves to me, and whenever I took one piece off, another immediately replaced it, as if they were asexual organisms hellbent on reproducing no matter what the outcome or the point.
Lukas holds a lit match to Adam’s urethra as Zach ducttapes his asshole shut. The priest shaves off all his asshair and shoves a fire hose up his daughter’s snatch, then blasts her wide open. Lukas jacks off apelike on Adam’s face. The violated rugby player shoots his own mother in the mouth with a beebee gun and rapes her ass. A midget comes out of the alleyway with a sword and stabs the whore in the face while she’s sucking Adam. Lukas’s humungous balls tremble as Zach hungrily tosses his salad, then adds a white creamy dressing to it.
And so later, after going there a few times and fixing myself against the woodland floor and watching them eat and play and fight, I knew that I belonged to them. No matter where I was, I belonged to the badgers. In the bright day, when I was looking for a job now school was done with, or doing my mum’s housework, I thought of them curled up in their set underground, a crumbly, paw-dug cave, with tree roots for a ceiling and a fur and grass nest. I was there, breathing and eating and scratching. There was no lack of warmth or love. No need for a job or a boyfriend or social workers or police or truancy officers or the dole office. I had everything and I was everything.
