She could have given him what he wanted, when he begged her, and he would have undone everything--he would have burned the precious thing himself. If she had only told him what she alone was able to see, what he so desperately wanted to know.
Whether his work would last. Whether he’d be immortal.
How much could it have cost her to tell?

Josephine stood up, unsteady, and looked over the edge, into the roiling water. Deep, she knew. Forty-five feet! That was herself times just over eight. And down there all the female eels were gliding along, down to the Gulf to find their mates, then the long way home to the Sargasso. She knelt and placed her empty bottle carefully on the deck. She made sure her shoes were neatly beside it. Then she put both hands on the railing . . .

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What concerned the little girls was the state of development. It was just curiosity, nothing more. It was something they needed to know. They studied the smooth chest, the pale nipples, the hairless cleft between slender hips. Each girl looked on privately at the little landscape, making her own crucial comparisons . . .

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The Chinese tied him to a tree. This did not bode well, Thom knew, yet it was a spotted lace-bark pine (Pinus bungeana), so he felt he had a friend at his back. From his tree he watched them debate the matter. He could not overlook how they sharpened their knives. He sighed and gazed at the scenery. It was a lovely spot . . .

... read a short story

When Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut appeared in 1999, it was titillatingly billed as a film about sex and jealousy starring a genuine Hollywood couple, and the element of the film to stir the greatest pre-opening excitement was generally dubbed “the orgy” . . .

... read from an essay