Torture Wife Quotes

I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them, "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup.

My wife and I were present at this congress. Sabina told me, "Richard, stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face." I said to her, "If I do so, you lose your husband." She replied, "I don't wish to have a coward as a husband.

Can we get back to work now?" Haley asked, sounding innocent, but Zoe didn't miss the woman's lips twitching or the humor sparkling in her eyes. Something told her that this woman truly enjoyed torturing her husband. "For god sake's, my little grasshopper, you love the Yankees more than I do! What the hell is going on?" He turned accusing eyes on Zoe. "How dare you brainwash my wife?" he hissed. "A re you going to leave so that we can get some work done?" Haley demanded, turning her attention to the computer. "No," he said stubbornly, folding his arms over his chest, glaring at them. "Buttercream frosting," Haley said softly, never taking her eyes away from her computer screen. Jason licked his lips as he looked his pregnant wife over hungrily. "Tonight?" he croaked out. "If you're good," Haley said, with a small shrug. "But you have to leave-" "Bye," Jason said quickly, cutting her off and rushing out of the trailer just as fast as he came.

This was my one brush with love. Was it love? It felt awful enough. I spent another two years crawling around in the skin of it, smoking too much and growing too thin and having stray thoughts of jumping from my balcony like a tortured heroine in a Russian novel.

I'm sick and tired of having a forest and a torture chamber in my house... I want to have a nice quiet flat with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!

The myth of 'You have to be a tortured artist' is a myth," says Lin. "You can have a happy, healthy life and still go to all these crazy dark places in your writing, and then go play with your child and hug your wife.

Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.

Having recently been grazed in the arm by my loving wife, I can definitely attest that having a knife slowly, torturously burrowed into your guts is about a hundred times worse.

He, unfortunately for himself, had been beautifully brought up. His teacher had educated him as the child is educated in the womb, where it lives the history of man from fish to mammal--and, like the child in the womb, he had been protected with love meanwhile. The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living--without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty, and the commoner forms of selfishness. Jealousy seemed to him the most ignoble of vices. He was sadly unfitted for hating his best friend or torturing his wife. He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things.

Monsieur, if a wife's nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery. Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable. Then, monsieur, I would resist as far as my strength permitted; when that strength failed I should be sure of a refuge. Death would certainly screen me both from bad laws and their consequences.

There is no “universal moral urge” and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, infanticide, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self-mutilation, foot binding, preemptive war, torture of prisoners, circumcision, female genital mutilation, racism, sexism, punitive amputation, castration and incest are perfectly “moral” in certain cultures. Is god confused?

Build your house on granite. By granite I mean your nature that you are torturing to death, the love in your child's body, your wife's dream of love, your own dream of life when you were sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Throw out your politicians and diplomats! Take your destiny into your own hands and build your life on rock. Forget about your neighbor and look inside yourself! Your neighbor, too, will be grateful. Tell you're fellow workers all over the world that you're no longer willing to work for death but only for life. Instead of flocking to executions and shouting hurrah, hurrah, make a law for the protection of human life and its blessings. Such a law will be part of the granite foundation your house rests on. Protect your small children's love against the assaults of lascivious, frustrated men and women. Stop the mouth of the malignant old maid; expose her publicly or send her to a reform school instead of young people who are longing for love. Don;t try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation if you have a chance to become a boss. Throw away your swallowtails and top hat, and stop applying for a license to embrace your woman. Join forces with your kind in all countries; they are like you, for better or worse. Let your child grow up as nature (or 'God') intended. Don't try to improve on nature. Learn to understand it and protect it. Go to the library instead of the prize fight, go to foreign countries rather than to Coney Island. And first and foremost, think straight, trust the quiet inner voice inside you that tells you what to do. You hold your life in your hands, don't entrust it to anyone else, least of all to your chosen leaders. BE YOURSELF! Any number of great men have told you that.

And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he'd had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.

All she remembered was that Caligula had planned to torture his wife to find out why he was so devoted to her. What was David’s excuse, she wondered.

...There is nothing Jake wouldn´t do for his wife, and even less he wouldn´t do for the syndicate.” Including kill me and torture my sister. The thought of damning someone else to the hell I was living in made me want to light my own hair on fire and take a bath in gasoline.

I’m horny as a motherfucker, hard and itching to get my sadistic groove on. As I stroke myself, my mind starts coming up with all sorts of fantastic ways I can torture my beautiful wife as I look around the room for more everyday items that will work in that regard.

Hear this now. Nothing, not even death, will keep me from loving you. Though this body may wither and become a dry shell, my spirit will pursue you until the end of time. We will never be apart.” He covered her mouth with his and tasted her blood. Trailing tender kisses across her cheek and jawline, he nestled against her neck. “Eternally yours,” he whispered. She clutched his head and offered her throat. “Together forever,” she responded. Broderick hesitated, her erratic pulse beating against his tongue. “Give me peace,” she whispered in a tortured breath. “Do this for me.” “I will love you forever, Davina.” His fangs pierced her cool skin and Broderick drank the life from his wife, granting her wish…and tormenting his already damned soul.

He and his brilliant mind had created torture machines which would inevitably murder his wife and dozens more. And if the Council could control minds, it could control everything.

Deeds of heroism are wrought here more than those of romance, when, defying torture, and braving death itself, the fugitive voluntarily threads his way back to the terrors and perils of that dark land, that he may bring out his sister, or mother, or wife.

If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitous man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may-no matter how generous and good his nature- one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.

نصيحة : لكي تعذب زوجتك اجعلها تشعر دائما أنها مدينة لك بشئ ما

If people marry on the assumption that love must always overcome obstacles, they will either become unfaithful or they will make things difficult. The better you know someone, the better you can torture him: man and wife become each other's devils.

Ah well, Liang was her husband and she would never have another. Even had she been young and beautiful she would not have run from man to man as women did nowadays. But she was neither young nor beautiful and she was grateful for Liang. It was honorable to be his wife, and if he had a peevish temper at home, he might have been worse. He had never beaten her, and she had learned, after all these years, how to torture him.

Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape—often accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered— was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is simply untrue.

Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is a story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad, she doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even know that’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right.

Charlie, baby, it was awful. I’m talking bugs on the floor and water torture and a big dude looking for his prison wife.

I had urged Bill to wear his trench coat. The day was unusually warm, and Bill didn’t think he needed it. Now he was glad he’d worn it—a small wifely victory on a torturous day.

Then, if the Earth-wife be fruitful, she will bear them children by hundreds and by thousands; and then calamity will come and teach them by torture to invent.

for her being a ‘bad wife.’ Over the

It is you who are the basket cases. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn’t even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. Your self torture.

People also talk of a criminal consciousness All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures.

How to Sleep at Night Try to think of nothing. That's the secret. Try to think of nothing. Do not think of work not done, or of promises unkept, calls to return, or agendas you have failed to prepare for meetings yet unheld. Think of nothing. Do not think of words said and unsaid, or minor scandals and major investigations, of humiliations endured, insults suffered, or retorts that did not spring to mind in time. Think of nothing. Do not think of your wife, of lonely children and their reproachful demands, or the smile of the pretty woman whose handshake lingered just a shade too long in your palm. Think of nothing. Do not think of newspaper headlines, of the insistent transience of the shortwave radio, or the seductive stridency of the TV microphones thrust so thrillingly into your face. Think of nothing. Do not think of the waif on the foreign sidewalk, her large eyes open in supplication, her ragged shift stained by dirt and dust, stretching her despairing hand towards you in hope No, do not think of the solitary tear, the broken limb, the rubble-strewn home, the choking scream; never think of piled up bodies, blazing flames, shattered lives, or sundered souls. Do not think of the triumph of the torturer, the wails of the hungry, the screams of the mutilated, or the indifferent smirk of the sleek. Think of nothing. then you will be able to sleep.

Economic insecurity strangles the physical and cultural growth of its victims. Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic insufficiency. When a Negro man is inadequately paid, his wife must work to provide the simple necessities for the children. When a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection; often they are poorly cared for by others or by none—left to roam the streets unsupervised. It is not the Negro alone who is wronged by a disrupted society; many white families are in similar straits. The Negro mother leaves home to care for—and be a substitute mother for—white children, while the white mother works. In this strange irony lies the promise of future correction.

If you in fact had no gold, then your situation was hopeless. You would be beaten, burned, tortured, and steamed to the point of death or until they finally came to believe you. But if you had gold, you could determine the extent of your torture, the limits of your endurance, and your own fate. Psychologically, this situation was, incidentally, not easier but more difficult, because if you made an error you would always be ridden by a guilty conscience. Of course, anyone who had already mastered the rules of the institution would yield and give up his gold—that was easier. But it was a mistake to give it up too readily. They would refuse to believe you had coughed it all up, and they would continue to hold you. But you'd be wrong, too, to wait too long before yielding: you'd end up kicking the bucket or they'd paste a term on you out of meanness. One of the Tatar draymen endured all the tortures: he had no gold! They imprisoned his wife, too, and tortured her, but the Tatar stuck to his story: no gold! Then they arrested his daughter: the Tatar couldn't take it any more. He coughed up 100,000 rubles. At this point they let his family go, but slapped a prison term on him.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks … Or Eric Gill’s copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes’s lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan … Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen.

All quiet at the Tilden. Except for the obese wife of a wealthy industrialist, the furtive face of a raw food quack and the memory of a silk-shirted hoodlum tossing a bill on the carpet for you to crawl and fetch. All quiet except for the tortured face of a grey-eyed, ash-blonde lovely with a showgirl’s body and a conscience heavier than a carload of sins. Mouth, a slash of red; eyes that pleaded for pity, understanding. And lips that told nothing…

People also talk of a “criminal consciousness.” All my life in this world of human beings I have been tortured by such a consciousness, but it has been my faithful companion, like a wife in poverty, and together, just the two of us, we have indulged in our forlorn pleasures. This, perhaps, has been one of the attitudes in which I have gone on living. People also commonly speak of the “wound of a guilty conscience.” In my case, the wound appeared of itself when I was an infant, and with the passage of time, far from healing it has grown only the deeper, until now it has reached the bone. The agonies I have suffered night after night have made for a hell composed of an infinite diversity of tortures, but—though this is a very strange way to put it—the wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection.

You might look back at the Zionist movement—there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren’t under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren’t nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us. The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight. It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.

There are so many hammocks to catch you if you fall, so many laws to keep you from experience. All these cities I have been in the last few weeks make me fully understand the cozy, stifling state in which most people pass through life. I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride. All you do is get to breathe and copulate and finally die. I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks. People will walk by and say, "Look at that drooling idiot. What a basket case." I will turn and say to them "It is you who are the basket case. For every moment you hated your job, cursed your wife and sold yourself to a dream that you didn't even conceive. For the times your soul screamed yes and you said no. For all of that. For your self-torture, I see the glowing eyes of the sun! The air talks to me! I am at all times!" And maybe, the passers by will drop a coin into my cup.

Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his "love" of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his "belief" was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing. But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death.

Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

So much for Caligula as emperor; we must now tell of his career as a monster.... He lived in habitual incest with all his sisters, and at a large banquet he placed each of them in turn below him, while his wife reclined above. Many men of honourable rank were first disfigured with the marks of branding-irons and then condemned to the mines, to work at building roads, or to be thrown to the wild beasts; or else he shut them up in cages on all fours, like animals, or had them sawn asunder. Not all these punishments were for serious offences, but merely for criticising one of his shows, or for never having sworn by his genius. Having asked a man who had been recalled from an exile of long standing, how in the world he spent his time there, the man replied by way of flattery: "I constantly prayed the gods for what has come to pass, that Tiberius might die and you become emperor." Thereupon Caligula, thinking that his exiles were likewise praying for his death, sent emissaries from island to island to butcher them all. Wishing to have one of the senators torn to pieces, he induced some of the members to assail him suddenly, on his entrance into the House, with the charge of being a public enemy, to stab him with their styles, and turn him over to the rest to be mangled; and his cruelty was not sated until he saw the man's limbs, members, and bowels dragged through the streets and heaped up before him. He used to say that there was nothing in his own character which he admired and approved more highly than what he called his ἀδιατρεψία, that is to say, his shameless impudence. He seldom had anyone put to death except by numerous slight wounds, his constant order, which soon became well-known, being: "Strike so that he may feel that he is dying." When a different man than he had intended had been killed, through a mistake in the names, he said that the victim too had deserved the same fate. He even used openly to deplore the state of his times, because they had been marked by no public disasters, saying that the rule of Augustus had been made famous by the Varus massacre, and that of Tiberius by the collapse of the amphitheatre at Fidenae,​ while his own was threatened with oblivion because of its prosperity; and every now and then he wished for the destruction of his armies, for famine, pestilence, fires, or a great earthquake. While he was lunching or revelling capital examinations by torture were often made in his presence, and a soldier who was adept at decapitation cut off the heads of those who were brought from prison. At a public banquet in Rome he immediately handed a slave over to the executioners for stealing a strip of silver from the couches, with orders that his hands be cut off and hung from his neck upon his breast, and that he then be led about among the guests.

In the center of the room Elizabeth stood stock still, clasping and unclasping her hands, watching the handle turn, unable to breathe with the tension. The door swung open, admitting a blast of frigid air and a tall, broad-shouldered man who glanced at Elizabeth in the firelight and said, “Henry, it wasn’t necess-“ Ian broke off, the door still open, staring at what he momentarily thought was a hallucination, a trick of the flames dancing in the fireplace, and then he realized the vision was real: Elizabeth was standing perfectly still, looking at him. And lying at her feet was a young Labrador retriever. Trying to buy time, Ian turned around and carefully closed the door as if latching it with precision were the most paramount thing in his life, while he tried to decide whether she’d looked happy or not to see him. In the long lonely nights without her, he’d rehearsed dozens of speeches to her-from stinging lectures to gentle discussions. Now, when the time was finally here, he could not remember one damn word of any of them. Left with no other choice, he took the only neutral course available. Turning back to the room, Ian looked at the Labrador. “Who’s this?” he asked, walking forward and crouching down to pet the dog, because he didn’t know what the hell to say to his wife. Elizabeth swallowed her disappointment as he ignored her and stroked the Labrador’s glossy black head. “I-I call her Shadow.” The sound of her voice was so sweet, Ian almost pulled her down into his arms. Instead, he glanced at her, thinking it encouraging she’d named her dog after his. “Nice name.” Elizabeth bit her lip, trying to hide her sudden wayward smile. “Original, too.” The smile hit Ian like a blow to the head, snapping him out of his untimely and unsuitable preoccupation with the dog. Straightening, he backed up a step and leaned his hip against the table, his weight braced on his opposite leg. Elizabeth instantly noticed the altering of his expression and watched nervously as he crossed his arms over his chest, watching her, his face inscrutable. “You-you look well,” she said, thinking he looked unbearably handsome. “I’m perfectly fine,” he assured her, his gaze level. “Remarkably well, actually, for a man who hasn’t seen the sun shine in more than three months, or been able to sleep without drinking a bottle of brandy.” His tone was so frank and unemotional that Elizabeth didn’t immediately grasp what he was saying. When she did, tears of joy and relief sprang to her eyes as he continued: “I’ve been working very hard. Unfortunately, I rarely get anything accomplished, and when I do, it’s generally wrong. All things considered, I would say that I’m doing very well-for a man who’s been more than half dead for three months.” Ian saw the tears shimmering in her magnificent eyes, and one of them traced unheeded down her smooth cheek. With a raw ache in his voice he said, “If you would take one step forward, darling, you could cry in my arms. And while you do, I’ll tell you how sorry I am for everything I’ve done-“ Unable to wait, Ian caught her, pulling her tightly against him. “And when I’m finished,” he whispered hoarsely as she wrapped her arms around him and wept brokenly, “you can help me find a way to forgive myself.” Tortured by her tears, he clasped her tighter and rubbed his jaw against her temple, his voice a ravaged whisper: “I’m sorry,” he told her. He cupped her face between his palms, tipping it up and gazing into her eyes, his thumbs moving over her wet cheeks. “I’m sorry.” Slowly, he bent his head, covering her mouth with his. “I’m so damned sorry.

For days and days he had lived only by the aid of enormous quantities of oxygen. Yesterday alone he had consumed forty containers, at six francs apiece—that mounted up, the gentlemen could reckon the cost themselves; and his wife, in whose arms he had died, was left wholly penniless. Joachim expressed disapproval of the expenditure. Why delay by these torturing and costly artificial expedients a death absolutely certain to supervene? One could not blame the man for blindly consuming the precious gas they urged upon him. But those in charge should have behaved with more reason, they should have let him go his way, in God’s name, quite aside from the circumstances, more so when taking them into consideration. The living, after all, had their rights—and so on.

With every single horse I own, I often lay the reins on his neck and let him move forward to find his own natural balance and gait. I've seen far too many overbearing riders constantly manage and adjust the horse to force its obedience. Every little toss of the head or momentary hesitation is corrected. A variety of torturous bits, spurs, and straps are employed to make it submit. Some horses endure such treatment, but far more are ruined by it. Always let a horse be a horse." He paused. "Do you take my meaning?" "Aye, milord." "Was an analogy really necessary, Westcliff?" Kingston asked. "You could have simply said, 'Please be kind to my headstrong daughter and don't break her spirit.'" "Force of habit," the earl said. "None of my sons pay attention unless it's horses.

He smiled and pulled the ugly white fichu from her neck. She blinked and looked down at the simple, square neckline of her bodice as if she'd never seen it. Perhaps she hadn't. Perhaps she dressed in the dark like a nun. "What are you doing?" He sighed. "I confess, I find your naïveté perplexing. How have you arrived at the advanced age of six and twenty without having anyone attempt seduction upon yourself? I'm of two minds on the matter: One, utter astonishment at my sex and their deaf disregard for your siren call. Two, glee at the thought that your innocence might signal that you are indeed innocent. Why this should excite me so, I don't know- virginity has never before been a particular whim of mine. I think perhaps it's the setting. Who knows how many virgins were deflowered here by my lusty ancestors? Or," he said as he deftly unpinned and tossed aside her apron, "maybe it's simply you." "I don't..." Her words trailed off and then, interestingly, she blushed a deep rose. Well. That question settled, then. His little maiden was really a maiden. "What?" "I think it's you," he confided, pulling the strings tying her hideous mobcap beneath her chin. She made a wild grab for it, but he was faster, snatching the bloody thing off- finally, and with a great deal of satisfaction. She might've deprived him of a wife that it'd taken him half a year and a rather large sum of money to entangle, but by God, he'd taken off her awful cap. And underneath... "Oh, Séraphine," he breathed, enchanted, for her hair was as black as coal, as black as night, as black as his own soul, save for one white streak just over her left eye. But she'd twisted and braided and tortured the strands, binding them tight to her head, and his fingers itched to let them free. "Don't!" she said, as if she knew what he wanted, her hands flying up to cover her hair. He batted them aside, laughing, pulling a pin here, a pin there, dropping them carelessly to the carpet as she squealed like a little girl and backed away from him, trying frantically to ward off his fingers. He might've taken pity on her had he not just spent an hour on a freezing moor, wondering if he was going to find her dead, neck broken, at the bottom of a hill. Her hair came down all at once, a tumbling mass, tousled and heavy and nearly down to her waist. "Wonderful," he murmured, taking it in both hands and lifting it.

What is it about autism that makes two rational, educated adults torture themselves in this way? Playing the blame game is not healthy and helps no one. Autism does that. It grabs you and, if you’re not careful, it drags you down with it. Despite all the progress made, I’ve felt its pull lately. But we must not let it get the better of us. I propose a new version of the blame game. In this version we ask, ‘Where did he get those beautiful eyes from? That smile? That gorgeous hair and stunning face? Who’s responsible for his amazing reading ability and astonishing memory? Where did those dancing skills come from? And the musical ability?’ Trouble is, my wife would win that version too! Nonetheless, these are the questions we should be asking because, ultimately, they are his defining features, not autism.

You, my dear, do not know how to have fun." "I do, too!" "You do not. You are as bad as Lucien. And do you know something? I think it's time someone showed you how to have fun. Namely, me. You can worry all you like about our situation tomorrow, but tonight ... tonight I'm going to make you laugh so hard that you'll forget all about how afraid of me you are." "I am not afraid of you!" "You are." And with that, he pushed his chair back, stalked around the table, and in a single easy movement, swept her right out of her chair and into his arms. "Gareth!  Put me down!" He only laughed, easily carrying her toward the bed. "Gareth, I am a grown woman!" "You are a grown woman who behaves in a manner far too old for her years," he countered, still striding toward the bed. "As the wife of a Den member, that just will not do." "Gareth, I don't want — I mean, I'm not ready for that!" "That? Who said anything about that?"  He tossed her lightly onto the bed. "Oh, no, my dear Juliet. I'm not going to do that —" She tried to scoot away. "Then what are you going to do?" "Why, I'm going to wipe that sadness out of your eyes if only for tonight. I'm going to make you forget your troubles, forget your fears, forget everything but me. And you know how I'm going to do that, O dearest wife?"  He grabbed a fistful of her petticoats as she tried to escape. "I'm going to tickle you until you giggle ... until you laugh ... until you're hooting so loudly that all of London hears you!" He fell upon the bed like a swooping hawk, and Juliet let out a helpless shriek as his fingers found her ribs and began tickling her madly. "Stop!  We just ate!  You'll make me sick!" "What's this? Your husband makes you sick?" "No, it's just that — aaaoooooo!" He tickled her harder. She flailed and giggled and cried out, embarrassed about each loud shriek but helpless to prevent them. He was laughing as hard as she. Catching one thrashing leg, he unlaced her boot and deftly removed it. She yelped as his fingers found the sensitive instep, and she kicked out reflexively. He neatly ducked just in time to avoid having his nose broken, catching her by the ankle and tickling her toes, her soles, her arch through her stockings. "Stop, Gareth!"  She was laughing so hard, tears were streaming from her eyes. "Stop it, damn it!" Thank goodness Charlotte, worn out by her earlier tantrum, was such a sound sleeper! The tickling continued. Juliet kicked and fought, her struggles tossing the heavy, ruffled petticoats and skirts of her lovely blue gown halfway up her thigh to reveal a long, slender calf sheathed in silk. She saw his gaze taking it all in, even as he made a grab for her other foot. "No!  Gareth, I shall lose my supper if you keep this up, I swear it I will — oooahhhhh!" He seized her other ankle, yanked off the remaining boot, and began torturing that foot as well, until Juliet was writhing and shrieking on the bed in a fit of laughter. The tears streamed down her cheeks, and her stomach ached with the force of her mirth. And when, at last, he let up and she lay exhausted across the bed in a twisted tangle of skirts, petticoats, and chemise, her chest heaving and her hair in a hopeless tumbled-down flood of silken mahogany beneath her head, she looked up to see him grinning down at her, his own hair hanging over his brow in tousled, seductive disarray.

. It took us both — and Mom, too, and just about everybody in town — a long time to accept the fact that he and his wife had done such evil things. Though he wasn’t evil through and through, or else why would he have saved my life? I don’t think anyone is evil beyond saving. Maybe I’m like Dad that way: naive. But better naive, I think, than calloused to the core. It dawned on me sometime later about Dr. Dahninaderke and his nightly vigils at the shortwave radio. I firmly believe he was listening to the foreign countries for news on who else in the Nazi regime had been captured and brought to justice. I believe that under his cool exterior he lived in perpetual terror, waiting for that knock on the door. He had delivered agonies, and he had suffered them, too. Would he have killed me once he had that green feather in his fist, as he and Kara had tortured and killed Jeff Hannaford over blackmail money? I honestly don’t know. Do you?

Redrum by Stewart Stafford A Winter's tale of horrors profound, The haunted hotel's dark tapestry, Supreme isolation's moonscape snowbound, A father gripped by homicidal history. He sought to write, heal, absolve sins, Overlooked the hotel’s Redrum plans, Vomiting up daymares of phantom twins, His mind possessed by unseen hands. Room Two Three Seven, malevolent, Forbidden to enter its dark hole, Where ageless ladies bathed decadent, Luring caretakers to an adulterer's role. His wife and son sensed the danger, A bloody elevator with nowhere to run, A father's warpath with axe and anger, He became the monster, the devil's son. It might horrify 42 ways from Sunday, Only his shining son grasped the fact, May as well be across the galaxy, As in a labyrinth with that maniac. He failed to kill, he froze, met his fate, The hotel consumed his spirit as its own, Purgatorial torture in damnation's bait, He smiled in the photo, eternally alone. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

fear of death.” Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure. In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts. ("Introduction")

She is pissed off all the time,” he mumbled and I remained silent, letting him ramble. “She wants chocolate ice cream, I go in search of chocolate, but the time I get back she’s pissed because she wants strawberry instead. I can’t win.” He looked me straight in the eyes and I swear his expression was one of desperation. “It wasn’t like this before. With Liam she was so sweet. But I swear the damn devil has possessed my wife and she might kill me in my sleep one night.” It was then I laughed. “What the hell is so funny?” he asked. “I sleep with one eye open and one leg hanging off the bed touching the floor at my side. This way if I have to move fast I feel I’m one step closer.” He didn’t smile. There was absolutely no humor in his words. “Weren’t you the one that said you wanted five kids?” I asked. “I changed my mind. After this one, we’re done. I want Trinity back.” Again, complete seriousness. Poor guy looked lost. And it was the best damn thing to witness. Within four months of having Liam, Trinity was pregnant again. And this time she was cranky as hell. Everyone noticed it, but she directed all that aggravation toward the man she said was to blame. And the rest of us loved to witness his hell. “Go home, Chase,” I told him and he looked as if he wanted to argue. “Stop at the store and pick up every flavor of ice cream they got,” I told him. “Tell her she’s beautiful and rub her feet.” “I do that already,” he whined. “I tell her she’s beautiful, and no other woman has ever looked as amazing as her. I tell her I love her and that she is my world, but she is like the exorcist.” “Well it’s your job to take it. Let her growl and complain and just take it,” I told him. “Because at the end of the day you just need to remember one thing.” He looked at me like I was about to give him the best piece of advice. I almost felt bad about the fact that I had nothing reassuring to say. “What?” he asked and I cracked a smile, almost talking myself out of taking the chance at being an asshole. Then I thought about the fact that had the roles been reversed he would have jumped at the chance. “You are to blame for the state she is in.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “And the rest of us guys are loving that it’s you and not us being tortured.” “You’re an asshole,” he mumbled as he turned around and walked off toward his truck. I laughed the entire drive home.

At some point I tried willing things along, mentally focusing on a rapid delivery. That didn't work. I got up to walk around-walking is supposed to help you progress-then quickly got back in the chair. “Argh!!!!!” I groaned. And other stuff. The way I saw it, my baby should have been out by now, shaking hands with his dad and passing around cigars to the nurses. But he apparently had other plans. Labor continued very slowly. Very slowly. We were in that room for eighteen hours. That was a lot of contractions. And a lot of PG versions of curse words, along with the X-rated kind. I may have invented a whole new language. Somewhere around the twelve-hour mark, Chris asked if I’d mind if he changed the music, since our songs had been playing on repeat for what surely seemed like a millennium. “Sure,” I said. He switched to the radio and found a country station. That lasted a song or two. “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I need Enya. I’m tuned in to it, and it calms me…ohhhhh!” “Okay. No problem,” he said calmly, though not quite cheerfully. I’m sure it was torture. Chris would take short breaks, walking out into the waiting room where both sides of our family were waiting to welcome their first grandchild and nephew. He’d look at his dad and give a little nod. “She’s okay,” he told everyone. Then he’d wipe a little tear away from his eye and walk back to me. Chris said later that watching me give birth was probably the most powerless feeling he’d ever had. He knew I was in pain and yet couldn’t do a whit about it. “It’s like watching your wife get stabbed and not being able to do anything to help.” But when he came into the room with me, his eyes were clear and he seemed confident and even upbeat. It was the thing he did when talking to me from the combat zone, all over again: he wasn’t about to do anything that would make me worry. I, on the other hand, made no secret of what I was feeling. An alien watermelon was ripping my insides out. And it hurt. Whoooh! Suddenly one of the contractions peaked way beyond where the others had been. Bubba had finally decided it was time to say hello to the world. I grabbed the side rail on the bed and struggled to remain conscious, if not exactly calm. Part of me was thinking, You should remember this, Taya. This is natural childbirth. This is beautiful. This is what God intended. You should enjoy this precious moment and remember it always. Another part of me was telling that part to shut the bleep up. I begged for mercy-for painkillers.

I think we all collectively have gone a little crazy. We worry about the wrong things. I have an acquaintance, Christy, whose twelve–year–old son managed to get into a very violent PG–13 movie. I don’t know how many machine–gunnings, explosions, and killings this boy wound up witnessing. As I recall, the boy had nightmares for a week afterward. That disturbed his mother—but not as much as if her son had stumbled into a different kind of movie. “At least there wasn’t any sex,” she said with dead–serious concern. “No,” I said, “probably not a single bare breast.” I didn’t add that most societies do not regard the adult female breast as being primarily an object of sexual desire. After all, it’s just a big gland that makes milk in order to feed hungry babies. “You know what I’m talking about,” she snapped. “I mean graphic sex.” We were sitting in a café drinking tea. She cut off the volume of her speech at the end of her sentence, whispering and exaggerating the consonants of S–E–X as if she needed me to read her lips—as if giving voice to this word might disturb our neighbors and brand her as a deviant. “I don’t think children should see that kind of thing,” she added. “What should children see?” I asked her. I am not arguing that we should let our children buy tickets to raunchy movies. I never let my daughters bring home steamy videos or surf the Internet for porn. But something is wrong when sex becomes a dirty word that we don’t even want our children to hear. Why must we regard almost anything sexual as tantamount to obscene? I think many of us are like Christy. We wouldn’t want our children—even our very sexual teenagers—to see certain kinds of movies, even if they happened to be erotic masterpieces, true works of art. It wouldn’t matter if a movie gave us a wonderful scene of a wife and a husband very lovingly making love with the conscious intention of engendering new life. It wouldn’t matter that sex is life, and therefore must be regarded as sacred as anything could possibly be. It wouldn’t even matter that not one of us could have come into the world but for the sexual union of our fathers and our mothers. If a movie portrayed a man and woman in the ecstatic dance of love—actually showed naked bellies and breasts, burning lips and adoring eyes and the glistening, impassioned organs of sex—most people I know would rather their children watch the vile action movie. They would rather their “innocent” sons and daughters behold the images of bloody, blasted bodies, torture, murder, and death.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps. Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air. He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: “Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.” “Patrols have gone out in strength. There’s a big battle going on. We’ll hold him.” “There’s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know. ... I can’t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I’ll die in a moment.” “Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can’t you see it’s bad for him, you heartless beasts!” The man started again: “He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.” “You keep saying ‘he.’ Who was it that got to work on you?” “Let me just get my breath. ... I’ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You don’t know out here what it’s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don’t know where you are, it’s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!” The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves. That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp. Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board. His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite. The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward.

Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” 22Jesus *said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. 23 “For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. 24When he had begun to settle them, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. 25But since he did not have the means to repay, his lord commanded him to be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and repayment to be made. 26So the slave fell to the ground and prostrated himself before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you everything.’ 27And the lord of that slave felt compassion and released him and forgave him the debt. 28But that slave went out and found one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and he seized him and began to choke him, saying, ‘Pay back what you owe.’ 29So his fellow slave fell to the ground and began to plead with him, saying, ‘Have patience with me and I will repay you.’ 30But he was unwilling and went and threw him in prison until he should pay back what was owed. 31So when his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were deeply grieved and came and reported to their lord all that had happened. 32Then summoning him, his lord *said to him, ‘You wicked slave, I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. 33Should you not also have had mercy on your fellow slave, in the same way that I had mercy on you?’ 34And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers until he should repay all that was owed him. 35My heavenly Father will also do the same to you, if each of you does not forgive his brother from your heart.

When he was twenty-four, André floated down to Saigon and returned with a wife standing upon his prow. Eugenia was the eldest child of Pierre Cazeau, the stately, arrogant owner of the Hôtel Continental, on rue Catinat. She was also deaf. Her tutors had spent the first thirteen years of her life attempting to teach her how to speak like a hearing person, as was dictated by the popular pedagogy of the time. Her tongue was pressed, her cheeks prodded, countless odd intonations were coaxed forth from her lips. Cumbersome hearing horns were thrust into her ears, spiraling upward like ibex horns. It was a torture she finally rejected for the revolutionary freedom of sign, which she taught herself from an eighteenth-century dictionary by Charles-Michel de l’Épée that she had stumbled upon accidentally on the shelf of a Saigon barbershop.1 Based on the grammatical rules of spoken language, L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System was unwieldy and overly complex: many words, instead of having a sign on their own, were composed of a combination of signs. “Satisfy” was formed by joining the signs for “make” and “enough.” “Intelligence” was formed by pairing “read” with “inside.” And “to believe” was made by combining “feel,” “know,” “say,” “not see,” plus another sign to denote its verbiage. Though his intentions may have been noble, L’Epée’s system was inoperable in reality, and so Eugenia modified and shortened the language. In her hands, “belief” was simplified into “feel no see.” Verbs, nouns, and possession were implied by context. 1 “So unlikely as to approach an impossibility,” writes Røed-Larsen of this book’s discovery, in Spesielle ParN33tikler (597). One could not quite call her beautiful, but the enforced oral purgatory of her youth had left her with an understanding of life’s inherent inclination to punish those who least deserve it. Her black humor in the face of great pain perfectly balanced her new husband’s workmanlike nature. She had jumped at the opportunity to abandon the Saigon society that had silently humiliated her, gladly accepting the trials of life on a backwater, albeit thriving, plantation. Her family’s resistance to sending their eldest child into the great unknowable cauldron of the jungle was only halfhearted—they were in fact grateful to be unburdened of the obstacle that had kept them from marrying off their two youngest (and much more desirable) daughters. André painstakingly mastered Eugenia’s language. Together, they communed via a fluttering dance of fingertips to palms, and their dinners on the Fig. 4.2. L’Épée’s Methodical Sign System From de l’Épée, C.-M. (1776), Institution des sourds et muets: par la voie des signes méthodiques, as cited in Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 61 veranda were thus rich, wordless affairs, confluences of gestures beneath the ceiling fan, the silence broken only by the clink of a soup spoon, the rustle of a servant clearing the table, or the occasional shapeless moan that accentuated certain of her sentences, a relic from her years of being forced to speak aloud.

You’ve suffered little in your life, sweetheart.” She attempted to snap back, but he cut her off with a surge forward. His gaze bored into hers. “Five years ago, I returned from a horse drive to find my father murdered, staked out and tortured to death. A slow and suffering demise, you can be sure.” His voice dropped lower. “The Apache brutally beat my mother. Her suffering lasted days before she died in my arms. But Jenny? No, my Jenny wasn’t nearly as fortunate.” He paused only long enough to draw breath. “I spent two agonizing days tracking those bloody butchers and when I finally found my wife, the sonsofbitches had raped her, scalped her, and then staked her out for the coyotes and wild boars to enjoy. And you think you’ve suffered?” His guttural laugh ended in a painful growl. “You’re whining over pigs and corn and flattened flower beds and calling it agony. I’ve no patience left for your drivel.

presume that since we were not murderers at heart, the experiences during those years did not turn us into human hunters, even after all that. It did not brutalize decent people, but it saddened them, it branded them, it wounded them - it had inflicted wounds that no medicine can ever heal. Some think that survivors may suffer from guilt. Looking back at people who survived and whose close relatives did not - there may be a feeling that "had I done this or that, at the time, my father or mother or wife or husband or child may have made it, too. I did not do the right thing at that particular time." This may torture some and, in hindsight, my trouble them as having failed their beloved ones.

In the story, Ivan Ilyich is forty-five years old, a midlevel Saint Petersburg magistrate whose life revolves mostly around petty concerns of social status. One day, he falls off a stepladder and develops a pain in his side. Instead of abating, the pain gets worse, and he becomes unable to work. Formerly an “intelligent, polished, lively and agreeable man,” he grows depressed and enfeebled. Friends and colleagues avoid him. His wife calls in a series of ever more expensive doctors. None of them can agree on a diagnosis, and the remedies they give him accomplish nothing. For Ilyich, it is all torture, and he simmers and rages at his situation. “What tormented Ivan Ilyich most,” Tolstoy writes, “was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.” Ivan Ilyich has flashes of hope that maybe things will turn around, but as he grows weaker and more emaciated he knows what is happening. He lives in mounting anguish and fear of death. But death is not a subject that his doctors, friends, or family can countenance. That is what causes him his most profound pain. “No one pitied him as he wished to be pitied,” writes Tolstoy. “At certain moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pitied. He longed to be petted and comforted. He knew he was an important functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore what he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it.” As we medical students saw it, the failure of those around Ivan Ilyich to offer comfort or to acknowledge what is happening to him was a failure of character and culture. The late-nineteenth-century Russia of Tolstoy’s story seemed harsh and almost primitive to us. Just as we believed that modern medicine could probably have cured Ivan Ilyich of whatever disease he had, so too we took for granted that honesty and kindness were basic responsibilities of a modern doctor. We were confident that in such a situation we would act compassionately. What worried us was knowledge. While we knew how to sympathize, we weren’t at all certain we would know how to properly diagnose and treat. We paid our medical tuition to learn about the inner process of the body, the intricate mechanisms of its pathologies, and the vast trove of discoveries and technologies that have accumulated to stop them. We didn’t imagine we needed to think about much else. So we put Ivan Ilyich out of our heads. Yet within a few years, when I came to experience surgical training and practice, I encountered patients forced to confront the realities of decline and mortality, and it did not take long to realize how unready I was to help them. *   *   *

Suffering, though, has always been Musk’s thing. The kids at school tortured him. His father played brutal mind games. Musk then abused himself by working inhumane hours and forever pushing his businesses to the edge. The idea of work-life balance seems meaningless in this context. For Musk, it’s just life, and his wife and kids try to fit into the show where they can. “I’m a pretty good dad,” Musk said. “I have the kids for slightly more than half the week and spend a fair bit of time with them. I also take them with me when I go out of town. Recently, we went to the Monaco Grand Prix and were hanging out with the prince and princess of Monaco. It all seemed quite normal to the kids, and they were blasé about it. They are growing up having a set of experiences that are extremely unusual, but you don’t realize experiences are unusual until you are much older. They’re just your experiences. They have good manners at meals.

The Dreamer This green glowing night I'm lying right beside you. Demons summon me in my sleep, waterbording me with tyrannical interogations: 'Who are you?' Again, 'Who are you?' asks the gangly inquisitor With the Roswell eyes and Twilight fangs. I am my parent's son, my wife's husband, my children's father. 'Wrong!'' says his chain smoking subordinate with a cleft lip, 'That is a relative answer. We demand the true answer!' 'Who are you?' Again, 'Who are you?' Exhausted, I yell, 'I am the dreamer.' The demons walk backwards, disappearing into smoke. I wake with a start. My woman sleeps beside me, oblivious to my torture. She seems more beautiful than ever. I ask myself, 'Who are you?' Again, 'Who are you?' For if I am the dreamer, you too, my dearest love, are the dream.

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died—and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence—they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories.

White light veiled the world. He did not see things, he saw into them, through them, saw the nightwalker and shadows for the insubstantial entities they were. The souls of his comrades glowed, their light dimmed only by self-imposed restraints, restraints Abelar had shed. As he fell, his body ignited with radiance, an apotheosis of light. For a moment, he felt himself motionless, suspended in space, as if he had become the light. He savored the time, thought of Elden, his innocent eyes, his trusting soul. He loved his son—forever. The moment ended. He plummeted earthward toward the nightwalker. The creature shielded its face with a forearm, cowered before Abelar. Abelar’s soul swelled. No regrets plagued him or tortured his final thoughts. His mind turned to those he loved, his wife, his father, his son. He laughed, shouted Elden’s name as he descended, and his voice boomed over the rain, over the thunder, over the darkness.

The Catholic Church’s policy of blaming women and sex for the ills of the world came to full fruition in the late Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance. At minimum, hundreds of thousands of innocent women and men were hunted down, tortured horribly, reduced to physical, social, and economic wreckage, or burnt at the stake for being “witches”. The Catholic Church, so obsessed with it’s paranoid, irrational, illogical, and superstitious fantasies, deliberately tortured and executed human beings for a period of three hundred years. All this carnage, due to the Church's fear of learning, kept Europe in the throws of abysmal ignorance for a thousand years. What has been lacking in the world since the fall of the ancient world is a logical view of the godhead. To the Greek and Roman mind the gods were utilitarian; that is they offered convenient place to appreciate human archetypes. Sin and redemption from sin had nothing to do with the gods. The classic Greek and Roman gods did not offer recompense in life nor a heavenly afterlife as reward. Rather morality was determined by your service to humanity whether it was in the form of philosophy, science, art, architecture, engineering, leadership, or conquest. In this way humanity could live up to great potential instead of wasting their energy on worship, and false promises For almost a thousand years after the fall of Rome the Catholic Church’s control of society and law guaranteed that woman’s position was degraded to that of a second class citizen, far below the ancient Roman standard. Every literary reference depicts women as inferior, unworthy of inheritance, foolish, lustful and sinful. The Church ordained wife beating and encouraged total obedience to fathers and husbands. Women generally could not own land, join a guild, nor earn money like a man. Despite all this, a series of events unfolded; the crusades, rebirth of classical ideas, the printing press, the Reformation, and the Renaissance, all of which began to move womankind forward. VALENTINES DAY CARDS The Lupercalia festival of the New Year became an orgiastic carnival. A lottery ceremony ensued where men chose their sexual partners by choosing small bits of paper naming each woman present. Later the Christians, trying to incorporate and tame this sexual festival substituted the mythical saint Valentine; and ‘the cards of lust’ evolved into the valentine cards we exchange today.

His father, Frank, was an Auror just like Professor Moody. He and his wife were tortured for information about Voldemort’s whereabouts after he lost his powers, as you heard.

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones.” Although Pat scoffed at the idea that he possessed a merry heart, this is precisely what his multitude of friends has come to know and love about him. When someone asked his wife, Cassandra King, what it was like to live with such a tortured soul, she replied that Pat was one of the most good-natured people she’d ever known. His psychologist Marion O’Neill told me that Pat possessed “an underlying positive-ness about life,” and she went on to say, “That’s what has kept him alive.

The POUM leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid, a church in the Calle Atocha. Nin was separated from his comrades and driven to Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June. Despite the tortures he was subjected to by Orlov and his men, Nin refused to confess to the falsified accusations of passing artillery targets to the enemy. He was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to Constancia de la Mora, the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death. A grotesque example of Stalinist play-acting then took place. A group of German volunteers from the International Brigades in uniforms without insignia, pretending to be members of the Gestapo, charged into the house to make it look as if they had come to Nin’s rescue. ‘Evidence’ of their presence was then planted, including German documents, Falangist badges and nationalist banknotes. Nin, after being killed by Orlov’s men, was buried in the vicinity. When graffiti appeared on walls demanding ‘Where is Nin?’ communists would scribble underneath ‘In Salamanca or in Berlin’. The official Party line, published in Mundo Obrero, claimed that Nin had been liberated by Falangists and was in Burgos.

Prologue “Pain!. Oh, Father of the Dark, how it hurts! My muscles, my bones – every millimeter of my body. Damn locusts! They’re skinning me alive. Do I have any skin left? It seems like it will never end. How many years have passed since I’ve been buried here? One, two, ten? Or maybe, a hundred? Time itself has melded into total dusky looming. A bloody and merciless one. All my thoughts have been mixed up since I’ve been immured in this stone coffin. Without any possibility of escape. Without any chance for freedom. I feel endless agony under the teeny weeny teeth of ghostly beasts. And their small daggers shred my immortal flesh. Time after time, they’re driving me to madness. But I’ll find a way out, or my name is not Rave Eridanus Castro-Firel. And then, I swear, I’ll kill everyone who has taken part in torturing me. Ulfricus, you traitor ass. I hope your soul has never found sanctuary and is being tormented somewhere in the abyss of the Twilight, while I’m decaying here, in immortality. I hope you’re answering for every minute I’ve spent here, in this tomb. Even for every second. And if not, I promise I’ll kill all your relatives. Every person you love. Your wife, your children, your parents, your grandchildren. And your dam cat,...” The man’s interior monologue was interrupted by a restrained growl. “Oh, demons, how it hurts!.. But wait. Someone will surely wander across this damn field again. Someone whom I’ll kill without coming out of the ground. I’ll exhaust the last drop of magic. And, one day, I’ll be able to get out of this trap. Oh, no, who am I kidding? Nobody has appeared here so far. Even animals avoid coming to my field. I don’t sense any living being whose energy I could suck dry and use to appease the burning, even a little... They all sense me. They don’t understand, but they sense that death is there under their feet. Oh, Father of the Dark, I’ll be decomposing here forever! Damn Ulfricus, Banshee take your soul into the Twilight and love it to death.” The internal voice stopped again, and the man stopped short, listening attentively to the sounds of the outer world. “Oh, that just can’t be... Now for the first time since so long ago! A woman. A girl. A very young one. I can almost hear her heart beating... I feel the energy concealed in her blood. Come closer, dear. I don’t have to get out of here to play with you. So sweet... I can practically feel your odor. A strange, unusual smell of blood. What’s wrong with you? You’re a necromancer, for sure. Almost my soulmate. Well, even this won’t save you. Come closer, dear... Yes, this way. Oh Dark! what magic you eradiate! But not black, certainly not. I couldn’t care less. Any energy will suit me...” At this point, somewhere on the surface, somewhere nearby, a woman began singing. The accursed man, chained in the living grave, lay down, having suddenly forgotten the respiratory reflex, which still had not been exterminated through hundreds of years spent under the ground. Without air, without life. “What a pretty voice. A very, very pretty voice. I haven’t heard human voices for so long...” The man’s broad chest rose again. Then, a sequence of dark thoughts continued: “A girl with a ringing voice and strange magic... You’ve come here to the Ash Field in vain. You’re so enigmatic and courageous. You’re alive. But not for long.

I’ll do everything I can for her, but we’re not going to be a couple. Send him away, Vanni. Send the doctor away.” “What if I’m involved with him?” “This isn’t Matt we’re talking about,” Paul said. “I’m not going to bow out quietly. I’ll do whatever I have to do. I’ll fight for you.” “And if we made love all weekend? Me and Cameron?” “I don’t care. I don’t care about anything but that you have to know the truth. I’m in love with you. I’ve always been in love with you—and being in love with my best friend’s wife was torture.” “What

The two wars that I have participated in were not horribly fascinating like the devil-protected, fiery gates at all. Rather, war is unspeakably disgusting. War is seeing poorly trained American boys committing atrocities—savagely cutting the ears off of injured enemy soldiers. It is stopping them and then wondering about being shot in the back. War is a young husband with his privates blown away and begging you for a grenade and you are tempted to give him one. War is the elderly, half-crazed peasant suffering from “interrogation wounds” lying in the mud beside his dead wife who had been sexually assaulted because he would not tell secrets that he probably did not possess. War is to see an American Marine cut in two by machine gun bullets; seeing him writhing in the dirt, trying to pull his own intestines out of the black, gritty sand and shove them back into the cavity that was his abdomen while pleading with his eyes for you to come out in front of the lines and help him; war is seeing that tortured silent plea just after seeing two of his buddies try, but be killed immediately by sinister, hissing sniper fire from nowhere. War is a young man, your own brother (say), with half his face shot away, while he is choking and drowning in his own vomit as it pulsates out of his throat. This is war. To veil it with the word, “hell,” is a manipulative lie, like calling it “heaven.” Face it; be able to discuss it for what it is—horrible death over and over—so that we are truly motivated to stop it.

I suppose those mist-shrouded mountains could easily stir the imagination,” she murmured, but felt the rousing of a keen curiosity she had never been able to conquer. “Tis certain that many people fear such places, fear what might lurk in such a dark forest or in those clouded hills. But, this time, ’twas some foolish tale they heard in that village we stopped at for the night.” “Ye heard it, too?” “Nay. The men told it to me. Some tale about a creature from those hills, one who disguised himself as a mon. A mon who ne’er showed himself when the sun rose, only ventured out at night. A mon with eyes like a wolf and teeth like one, as weel. A mon so strong it took near a dozen villagers to subdue him, many of them suffering grievous injuries. A mon who could bewitch any lass into offering him her chastity.” The scorn in Nan’s voice made it very clear that she did not believe the tale at all. Bridget was pleased that that scorn did not stop the woman from repeating the tale, however. “Why did they feel the need to attack him, to subdue him? And, what did they do with him after they captured him?” “They caught him sinfully fornicating with another mon’s wife. They dragged him before the priest. Tis then that they realized what they had—a devil, a demon, one of Hell’s foul creatures. The priest had the mon tortured, but that mon didnae confess his sins or repent them. They said his wounds healed as if by magic. The priest then declared him a demon, or a witch. I am nay quite sure. They garroted him, burned him, and scattered his bones far and wide o’er the moors so that he couldnae come back to life.” “How cruel. He may have been innocent.” “I certainly doubt he was all they claim he was, but he wasnae innocent. If there was a mon executed, it was probably for the sins of fornication and adultery. He showed the villagers that their women lacked morals.” Bridget

It's amazing what human beings get accustomed to—how quickly the bizarre, the absurd and the perverse can become routine. People have become accustomed to torture, or so I've read, bonded with their tormentors, the wielders of pliers and electricity. It happens gradually. Maybe one day you get high with another couple and there's a certain amount of joking and talk, and the next thing you know, the guy's making out with your wife and you're kind

Blue Eyes, you will be a fine wife in time,” he said gravely. “No, I won’t.” Her gaze flew to his, brimming with misery and tears. “Oh, Hunter, what’s the matter with me?” Studying her small face, Hunter realized two things: he didn’t want her to be like anyone else, and, right or wrong, he had to bring this torturous waiting to an end, for both their sakes. For once, his father had given poor advice. “Blue Eyes…” Hunter sighed and interlaced his fingers, bending his knuckles backward, stalling because he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “Can you say words so this Comanche can see into you?” “I’m afraid.” “Ah, yes, afraid.” He studied her beaded moccasins. “Because I am Comanche?” She squeezed her eyes closed. “It isn’t that, not anymore. That’s just an excuse!” Cautiously Hunter asked, “Then what makes your heart sad?” She bit her bottom lip and tipped her head back to stare at the smoke hole. After several seconds she sniffed and said, “You’re a man.” She looked so forlorn that Hunter had to bite back a smile. He started to speak, then thought better of it. Clearing his throat, he shifted his attention from her quivering mouth to her nervous hands, wishing he knew how to ease her fears. Being patient hadn’t worked. She closed her eyes again and made a strangled sound, whirling away from him. “Marry Bright Star. It’s only fair. I can’t expect you to wait forever for me to--” She made another angry swipe at her cheeks and took a jagged breath. “She’s very lovely. You wouldn’t be normal if you didn’t want her. And it’s clear she wants you. Why should you be tied to me?” He pushed to his feet and slowly approached her from behind. She jerked when he grasped her shoulders. “I have no wish to marry Bright Star. You are the wife I want. One wife, for always.

The wise ones called council. We cannot remain passive. The whites must be driven out. Now is the right time, while they are at war amongst themselves. Their soldiers are away. They’re defenseless. The People must strike.” Red Buffalo’s sobbing quieted. “But Hunter, that is exactly what you feared might happen. What about survival through peace?” “It’s too late for that.” A heavy ache centered itself in Hunter’s chest. “I am a dreamer, Red Buffalo. The land is like a single bone between a pair of starving dogs. There is enough for only one. Peace will never come, never. You were right all along, and I was too blind to see it.” “But your woman! She’s a tosi. You speak of driving them out. What of her?” Hunter started to speak, couldn’t. He took another deep breath and tried again, his voice strained. “I will protect her as best I can. The others have agreed not to attack her wooden walls. A messenger has already left to tell some other bands of today’s attack and our decision to make war. He will also pass the word about my tosi woman.” “You aren’t going to get her? She’s your wife. Her place is beside you.” “A man cannot own a woman, cousin. He can only…” Hunter’s words trailed off. A picture of Loretta’s face flashed in his mind. “He can only love her. The blood of the tosi tivo will flow bridle high. To force her to stay with us while we slaughter her people would be torture. Before this is over, my name will be a curse upon her lips.

You aren’t going to get her? She’s your wife. Her place is beside you.” “A man cannot own a woman, cousin. He can only…” Hunter’s words trailed off. A picture of Loretta’s face flashed in his mind. “He can only love her. The blood of the tosi tivo will flow bridle high. To force her to stay with us while we slaughter her people would be torture. Before this is over, my name will be a curse upon her lips.” Red Buffalo drew away and lifted his ravaged face skyward. “So you have lost her. I’m sorry, Hunter. It’s my fault.” “Not yours alone. This would have come to pass no matter what. Red Buffalo, I have to make sure my woman makes it safely to her wooden walls. Only a few men can be spared to ride with me. Warrior needs to be here these next few days, with his children. I must trail the tosi tivo, make certain they do not harm her and her Aye-mee. If things go wrong, we may have to attack. I need your strong arm. Can you set your hate for her aside and ride beside me?” Red Buffalo wiped his cheeks dry with the heels of his hands. “You want me beside you? After all I’ve done?” Hunter clamped a hand around his cousin’s arm. “I’m afraid to go without you. Her life depends on us.” Red Buffalo straightened his shoulders. “Then I am with you.” Hunter nodded. “Once again my brother, yes?” Red Buffalo pushed to his feet. “Yes--your brother.” He clasped Hunter’s hand and met his gaze, fresh tears spilling down his face. “About my hate…” His mouth quivered. “I will not only set it aside, I will bury it. If I must, I will die for her.” Hunter blinked away tears of his own. “I have lost too many already, cousin. Do nothing boisa to prove your loyalty to me. Protect her, yes. But guard your back while you’re at it.

Those who became God’s boss, achieved success and those who became wife’s boss, suffered torture and died!

As far as I could tell his problems with his wife were pretty typical, they’d run out of things to say to one another. And the things they did think up to say were pretty unkind and shit. Their life and marriage sounded as if it consisted of him gradually removing their most impressive moments and then rearranging them in a mutually one-sided fashion so that every moment with her was torture.

It was far from clear what had caused this rage, whether it was an eruption of epileptic violence (such as one may see, on rare occasions, with very severe temporal-lobe seizures), or whether it was, in the simplistic terms of his admission note, simply 'a psychosis', or whether it represented some final, desperate call for help, from a tortured soul who was mute and had no direct way of expressing his predicament, his needs.

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

My wife and I were present at this congress. Sabina told me, Richard, stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ! They are spitting in His face.' I said to her, 'if I do so, you lose your husband. She replied, 'I don't wish to have a coward as a husband.' Then I arose and spoke to this congress, praising not the murderers of Christians, but Jesus Christ, stating that our loyalty is due first to Him. The speeches at this congress were broadcast and the whole country could hear proclaimed from the rostrum of the Communist Parliament the message of Christ! Afterwards I had to pay for this, but it was worthwhile.

the apostasy case of Pastor Youssef Nadarkhani received widespread media attention, placing the spotlight on Iran’s abuse of apostates. The father of two and onetime evangelical house church pastor was arrested in late 2009, found guilty of apostasy, and sentenced to death. The pastor was kept in solitary confinement, routinely tortured, and pressured to renounce Christ and convert to Islam. He staunchly refused. At one point, his wife was also arrested and charged with apostasy and sentenced to life in prison, but she was later released.39 While Nadarkhani’s experiences were not new or unusual in Iran, news of his plight made it to the mainstream media in the West, prompting heavy criticism of Iran’s Islamist regime. In response, Iranian authorities changed the whole story in an attempt to make it more palatable to Western sensibilities—they said Nadarkhani was not being executed for apostasy,

Consider Pakistan alone. In February 2012, a Muslim mob attacked a sixty-year-old Christian woman named Seema Bibi because, six months after converting to Islam, she reconverted back to Christianity. Angry Muslims “tortured Seema, shaved her head, garlanded her with shoes and paraded her through the village streets.” Afterwards, she received more threats of “dire consequences” from Islamic clerics, prompting her and her family to flee the region.35 Similarly, in July 2012, it was reported that a Christian couple, Imran James and Nazia Masih, have been on the run since they reconverted to Christianity, after embracing Islam back in 2006. Upon learning that the couple had returned to Christianity, neighboring Muslims attacked and persecuted them. One of the husband’s best friends abducted and tortured him and beat his wife. “[One] should have the freedom to choose the religion one wishes to follow,” lamented the husband.36

He licked his lips, ignoring the shivers that made his body vibrate or the pain lancing through his body. “D’you know, I’ve been here before?” He lifted his chin, words getting slower. “Another man snatched me away, locked me up, and tortured me for weeks.” He swallowed, vision swimming. “I deserved it, of course. I killed his wife.” A chuckle rumbled in his chest but didn’t quite make it to his lips. “I keep him in my bed nowadays, because it turns out we’re both monsters and torture turns us on.” He smiled, but that gesture fell away when a series of hacking coughs rattled his bones. “A-Ask me his name.” Narrow Face stepped behind him, out of view. “Dude, do I give a fuck about who you’re screwing?” Jay’s face twisted into a disgusted grimace. “I want that name and if—” “Daniel Nieto.” His eyesight was all fucked-up now, but Stavros still made out the sudden stillness that permeated the room. The slight widening of Jay’s eyes, too. Oh, that was satisfying to watch. “Turns out m-monsters can love too, and he loves me as much as I love him. He will c-come for me and he will kill for me. I can’t begin to tell you just how badly you’ve fucked up.” He started laughing, even though it hurt, even though his eyes were crossing and his hands had gone numb. His throat was on fire, his chest the same, but he laughed through all of the pain.

The longer it is, the longer you’re tortured. Maybe that’s the fate of a novelist’s wife.

Cannon Films […] already had a Vietnam script for its own kicking around. Impressed by Norris in a way they had not been by Van Damme, Golan and Globus signed him up to a five-film contract and greenlit both of the war pictures, to be released as Missing in Action and Missing in Action 2. The first was set during the conflict itself, with Norris’s character, American POW Jim Braddock, tormented by his Vietnamese captors. One torture scene called for Braddock to be hung upside down from a tree, a sack placed over his head, and a ravenous rat placed inside it. After a violent tussle, it would end with the reveal that Braddock has bitten the creature to death, rather than vice versa. “They were getting ready to do this scene, and I see all these mountain rats in cages,” remembers Norris. “I say, ‘Where’s the fake rat?’ No one says anything. So I say to the director, ‘How are you going to do this scene?’ And he says, ‘I haven´t really thought about it that much.’” Norris faced a choice: cancel the scene or have an actual rat killed and placed inside his mouth (the American Humane Association had clearly not been invited on set). But he didn’t see it as a choice at all. He ordered the animal killed, bit into its bulbous, furry corpse, and was hoisted up for the scene, shaking to simulate a struggle while fake blood poured down the rope. “The blood is coming down into my mouth, mixed with the saliva of the rat. I’m shaking all over, and finally I’m about to throw up,” Norris says, shuddering. “All I can taste is this rat in my mouth and I’m thinking I’ve got the bubonic plague from doing this with a mountain rat. But the scene was good.” Norris’s wife, Dianne, refused to kiss him for a week.

Cannon Films […] already had a Vietnam script for its own kicking around. Impressed by Norris in a way they had not been by Van Damme, Golan and Globus signed him up to a five-film contract and greenlit both of the war pictures, to be released as Missing in Action and Missing in Action 2. The first was set during the conflict itself, with Norris’s character, American POW Jim Braddock, tormented by his Vietnamese captors. One torture scene called for Braddock to be hung upside down from a tree, a sack placed over his head, and a ravenous rat placed inside it. After a violent tussle, it would end with the reveal that Braddock has bitten the creature to death, rather than vice versa. “They were getting ready to do this scene, and I see all these mountain rats in cages,” remembers Norris. “I say, ‘Where’s the fake rat?’ No one says anything. So I say to the director, ‘How are you going to do this scene?’ And he says, ‘I haven´t really thought about it that much.’” Norris faced a choice: cancel the scene or have an actual rat killed and placed inside his mouth (the American Humane Association had clearly not been invited on set). But he didn’t see it as a choice at all. He ordered the animal killed, bit into its bulbous, furry corpse, and was hoisted up for the scene, shaking to simulate a struggle while fake blood poured down the rope. “The blood is coming down into my mouth, mixed with the saliva of the rat. I’m shaking all over, and finally I’m about to throw up,” Norris says, shuddering. “All I can taste is this rat in my mouth and I’m thinking I’ve got the bubonic plague from doing this with a mountain rat. But the scene was good.” Norris’s wife, Dianne, refused to kiss him for a week.

When Gary Becker, an American economist, in his celebrated `Treatise of Family’ imagined a household as a primary site of production of goods and sustenance in the form of child care, meals, and shelter, besides a range of commodities such as health, happiness, self-esteem, security, sexual pleasure, and so on, he disregarded the fact that a family is also a site of reproducing inequalities and sustaining patriarchal values. Becker proposed the theory of a rational `economic man’ who makes choices based on his self-interest, but he has not contemplated the dire situations of exploitation, blackmail, and extortion within marriages in South Asian patriarchal, hierarchical societies where self-interest would turn into insatiable greediness to create an antagonistic situation where an `economic man’, driven by irrational voracity, ends up torturing and murdering `his wife’, and destroying his own family when his arbitrary demands remain unfulfilled

Really. You read romance novels?” I bite into my first hard shell taco and moan. “What trope?” Trope. Another mental pat and I smile to myself when her eyes get soft. “Um.” She brushes a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mostly the usual stuff. Uh, cowboy romance and…sports romance.” What’s this now? Sports romance? I sit up straighter in my chair. “That’s a thing?” “Yes.” “What kind of sports are you reading about?” She ignores me for a couple beats, choosing that moment to bite into her taco—on purpose, probably!—chewing thoughtfully and not answering the question. Swallows. Takes another bite. I swear to god she’s doing that to torture me. “Baseball.” “Like, baseball baseball? College or what?” “No, professional baseball.” “You’re reading a romance about baseball players?” “I mean—the guy is a baseball player. The girl works as the nanny.” The nanny? What the hell kind of book is this? “He hooks up with the nanny?! Is he married? Where’s the wife?

My nipples are big and sensitive and I had to lean my head back as he tortured me sweetly with his warm mouth.

The state of Saudi Arabia is first and foremost a medieval-style monarchy—a tyrant-king, multi-wife, family-murdering, crush-the-peasants, rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer, off-with-her-head monarchy. Power is concentrated wholly within the ruling family. Political dissent is routinely punished by torture and execution.

Only devotion prevailed against the terror. Love might and must yield in flesh, but never in spirit. The mother rocked her tortured child and was afraid of nothing but to be separated from it. Husband nursed wife in secret and in secret gave a kiss to the lips that would infect him. Whole families locked and bolted themselves inside their homes and defended the privilege of dying together.

What’s there that’s so great? Internet? Television? Department stores? Fast food?” Richard leaned forward and began counting on his fingers. “Medicine, clean water, sanitation, midwifery, roads, transport, everything that pulled this world out of the dark ages and took the nasty, brutish, and short out of life.” He rabbit-eared his fingers. “You think that ‘going back to nature’ is going to make your life more enjoyable? You’re a fantasist, Ed, and a selfish one. What about your kids and your wife? You think they’d be all right? You think you could really support them and protect them? You probably couldn’t even keep a cactus alive, let alone feed your family from a vegetable patch.” “And what’s that supposed to mean?” I said. “I’m saying society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother, or both. Pain, filth, famine, and war were everywhere, and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or thrown in a dungeon to rot. People didn’t live in some blissful utopia where everyone had an allotment and looked after one another. We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time. The last two hundred years have seen us grow, understand, build systems and infrastructures that keep us healthy and happy. We can dive to the bottom of the ocean, fly around the world, go to the moon, Mars, beyond. And all you want to do is go live in a cave. We’re not supposed to live in the fucking dirt, Ed. We’re not.

My wife and son were sure to endure pain as a result of my departure. Since I was a prominent and outspoken member of the congregation, my departure from the LDS church might include a ‘disciplinary council’. A disciplinary council is a panel of fifteen men, most of whom I know personally, given the responsibility of judging what, if any, action should be taken to protect the church and help me see ‘the error of my ways’. This process, if required, was going to be torture.

Rather than a state of equal brotherhood and sisterhood, Kim had introduced an elaborate social order in which the eleven million ordinary North Korean citizens were classified according to their perceived political reliability. The songbun system, as it was known, ruthlessly reorganized the entire social system of North Korea into a communistic pseudofeudal system, with every individual put through eight separate background checks, their family history taken into account as far back as their grandparents and second cousins. Your final rating, or songbun, put you in one of fifty-one grades, divided into three broad categories, from top to bottom: the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class. The hostile class included vast swathes of society, from the politically suspect (“people from families of wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners; pro-Japan and pro-U.S. people; reactionary bureaucrats; defectors from the South; Buddhists, Catholics, expelled public officials”) to kiaesaeng (the Korean equivalent of geishas) and mudang (rural shamans). Although North Koreans weren’t informed of their new classification, it quickly became clear to most people what class they had been assigned. North Koreans of the hostile class were banned from living in Pyongyang or in the most fertile areas of the countryside, and they were excluded from any good jobs. There was virtually no upward mobility—once hostile, forever hostile—but plenty downward. If you were found to be doing anything that was illegal or frowned upon by the regime, you and your family’s songbun would suffer. Personal files were kept locked away in local offices, and were backed up in the offices of the Ministry for the Protection of State Security and in a blast-resistant vault in the mountains of Yanggang province. There was no way to tamper with your status, and no way to escape it. The most cunning part of it all was that Kim Il-Sung came up with a way for his subjects to enforce their own oppression by organizing the people into inminban (“people’s groups”), cooperatives of twenty or so families per neighborhood whose duty it was to keep tabs on one another and to inform on any potentially criminal or subversive behavior. These were complemented by kyuch’aldae, mobile police units on constant lookout for infringers, who had the authority to burst into your home or office at any time of day or night. Offenses included using more than your allocated quota of electricity, wearing blue jeans, wearing clothes bearing Roman writing (a “capitalist indulgence”) and allowing your hair to grow longer than the authorized length. Worse still, Kim decreed that any one person’s guilt also made that person’s family, three generations of it, guilty of the same crime. Opposing the regime meant risking your grandparents, your wife, your children—no matter how young—being imprisoned and tortured with you. Historically, Koreans had been subject to a caste system similar to India’s and equally as rigid. In the early years of the DPRK, the North Korean people felt this was just a modernized revitalization of that traditional social structure. By the time they realized something was awfully wrong, that a pyramid had been built, and that at the top of it, on the very narrow peak, sat Kim Il-Sung, alone, perched on the people’s broken backs, on their murdered families and friends, on their destroyed lives—by the time they paused and dared to contemplate that their liberator, their savior, was betraying them—in fact, had always betrayed them—it was already much, much too late.

In order to understand our Lord's words about, taking vengeance on the children, you must notice that four generations are mentioned.   a)The first, an evil inclination or effect produced within us solely by the sensitive nature, is called the first movement first produced. b)The second generation is that in which this movement is partly contributed to by the reason as well as by the sensitive nature: this is also termed the first work or act secondarily produced. c)The third, consent, is when the reason is entirely at one with the sensitive nature in favor of the sin and is on the watch for an opportunity to commit it, or at least wishes to commit it if possible. d)The fourth generation is when the couple gloat over the misdeed of which they should repent.   Therefore God declares that he will visit with the zeal of justice the iniquities of the parents (meaning the sensitive nature and the reason) unto the third and fourth generation: he does not lay such stress upon the other two, for the first is no sin and the second is venial and easily forgiven. He makes express mention of the third and fourth because they are mortal sins for which men will be asked to pay with severe torments in the infernal prison. They can never make this repayment which will be required of them forever. This is typified by the king who would take an account of his servants and commanded that one who owed him much should be sold, and his wife and children and all that he had, and he was finally put in prison and delivered to the torturers,[84] who forgive nothing, but ever ask for what can never be paid. For the soul wished to always sin, though it could not live forever, and when it was asked to pay, its goodwill could no longer avail; as the proverb says: 'He who will not when he may, when he wills, he shall have nothing '   From the two explanations of this letter, you will deduce two fundamental rules for recollection: the first is that you must always keep watch and control over the distractions of your mind; the second, that you must at once follow the warnings of your conscience and act promptly on them, at least in your heart.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. The conversation moved swiftly to the latest edition of “Have I Got News for You.” “Oh, Mummy, it was hilarious,” laughed William. “They had a photo of Mrs. Parker Bowles and a horse’s head and asked what the difference was. The answer was that there isn’t any!” Diana absolutely exploded with laughter. We talked about which was the hottest photo to get. “Charles and Camilla is still the really big one,” I said, “followed by you and a new man, and now, of course, William with his first girlfriend.” He groaned. So did Diana. Our “big ones” are the most intimate parts of their personal lives. It was a weird moment. I am the enemy, really, but we were getting on well and sort of developing a better understanding of each other as we went along. Lunch was turning out to be basically a series of front-page exclusive stories--none of which I was allowed to publish, although I did joke that “I would save it for my book”--a statement that caused Diana to fix me with a stare, and demand to know if I was carrying a tape recorder. “No,” I replied, truthfully. “Are you?” We both laughed, neither quite knowing what the answer really was. The lunch was one of the most exhilarating, fascinating, and exasperating two hours of my life. I was allowed to ask Diana literally anything I liked, which surprised me, given William’s presence. But he was clearly in the loop on most of her bizarre world and, in particular, the various men who came into it from time to time. The News of the World had, during my editorship, broken the Will Carling, Oliver Hoare, and James Hewitt scoops, so I had a special interest in those. So, unsurprisingly, did Diana. She was still raging about Julia Carling: “She’s milking it for all she’s worth, that woman. Honestly. I haven’t seen Will since June ’95. He’s not the man in black you lot keep going on about. I’m not saying who that is, and you will never guess, but it’s not Will.” William interjected: “I keep a photo of Julia Carling on my dartboard at Eton.” That was torture. That was three fantastic scoops in thirty seconds. Diana urged me to tell William the story of what we did to Hewitt in the Mirror after he spilled the beans in the ghastly Anna Pasternak book. I dutifully recounted how we hired a white horse, dressed a Mirror reporter in full armor, and charged Hewitt’s home to confront him on allegations of treason with regard to his sleeping with the wife of a future king--an offense still punishable by death. Diana exploded again. “It was hysterical. I have never laughed so much.” She clearly had no time for Hewitt, despite her “I adored him” TV confessional.

For a man like Preacher to see his little wife struggle and have pain was obviously torture. He was much more comfortable in the role of protector. Mel knew immediately that he wasn’t going to be much help. When