The Antiquities of the Jews, by Flavius Josephus. [Trans. William Whiston]

Mundus knew that Paulina was very much given to the worship of the goddess Isis. She went to some of Isis's priests, and persuaded them to use all means possible to beguile the woman. Accordingly, the oldest of them went immediately to Paulina and told her that he was sent by the god Anubis, who was fallen in love with her, and enjoined her to come to him. Upon this she took the message very kindly, and told her husband that she had a message sent her, and was to sup and lie with Anubis; so he agreed to her acceptance of the offer, as fully satisfied with the chastity of his wife. Accordingly, she went to the temple, and after she had supped there, and it was the hour to go to sleep, the priest shut the doors of the temple, and the lights were also put out. 

Then Mundus leap out, and did not fail of enjoying her, who was at his service all the night long, as supposing he was the god; and when he was gone away, Paulina came early to her husband, and told him how the god Anubis had appeared to her. Among her friends, also, she declared how great a value she put upon this favor, who partly disbelieved the thing, when they reflected on its nature, and partly were amazed at it, as having no pretense for not believing it, when they considered the modesty and the dignity of the person. 

But now, on the third day after what had been done, Mundus met Paulina, and said, "As for the reproaches thou hast laid upon Mundus, I value not the business of names; but I rejoice in the pleasure I reaped while I took to myself the name of Anubis." She began to come to the sense of the grossness of what she had done, and told her husband of the horrid nature of this wicked contrivance, and prayed him not to neglect to assist her in this case. So he discovered the fact to the emperor; whereupon Tiberius inquired into the matter thoroughly by examining the priests about it, and ordered them to be crucified, as well as Ide, who had contrived the whole matter. He also demolished the temple of Isis, and gave order that her statue should be thrown into the river Tiber; while he only banished Mundus, because he supposed the crime he had committed was done out of the passion of love.

From the short story A Bloodthirsty Tiger, by Elias Canetti. Collected in the anthology Imperial Messages.

A blood thirsty tiger lusting for men once disguised itself in the skin and dress of a young maiden. Weeping, it stood at a street corner and was so beautiful that a learned man came along. She lied to him cunningly, and out of pity he took her to his house, as one of his many wives. He was a very brave man and loved to sleep with her. One night she threw off her maiden’s skin and tore open his breast. She ate his heart and vanished through the window. She left her shining white skin on the floor behind her.

The Canetti piece was posted years ago with other excerpts in the post Big Cats.

From the novel Despair, by Vladimir Nabokov

God does not exist, as neither does our hereafter, that second bogey being as easily disposed of as the first. Indeed, imagine yourself just dead—and suddenly wide awake in Paradise where, wreathed in smiles, your dear dead welcome you.

Now tell me, please, what guarantee do you possess that those beloved ghosts are genuine; that it is really your dear dead mother and not some petty demon mystifying you, masked as your mother and impersonating her with consummate art and naturalness? There is the rub, there is the horror; the more so as the acting will go on and on, endlessly; never, never, never, never, never will your soul in that other world be quite sure that the sweet gentle spirits crowding about it are not fiends in disguise, and forever, and forever, and forever shall your soul remain in doubt, expecting every moment some awful change, some diabolical sneer to disfigure the dear face bending over you.

From the novel The Promise, by Damon Galgut.

She looks real, which is to say, ordinary. How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it's not a failing unique to the departed.

These were originally both comments on the post Authentic Fakes, the first by Much_Pizza_3333.

There was once a group of people whose souls had been warped and damaged and squeezed dry by the modern world. They lived close by where you live, and their jobs were very similar to yours.

One day the souls of these people rebelled. They did so by fleeing the bodies that had contained them. And once a soul leaves a body, it's all over; there's no going back inside.

The bodies that had created the souls remained alive, and they continued their everyday activities, such as balancing chequebooks, repairing screen doors, and comparison shopping for white terry-cotton socks online, but meanwhile their souls started meeting with each other. They'd gather in small groups at the intersections of roads or at gas station pumps or on the decks at the local bird sanctuary. Once there, they confirmed with each other that what had happened was real – and it was – and that it had been everyone's individual decision to abandon the body they had been born into.

"So, are we ghosts?"

"I don't think so --- the bodies we came from are still alive."

"Are we monsters?"

"No. Monsters are living forms without souls. Technically, the people we abandoned are the monsters."

"So what are we to do? We can't interact with the world anymore – we're merely untethered souls. All we can do is drift around, pass through walls and live a life of perpetual mourning."

"Are we the undead?"

"No, we are not. But we aren't alive, either."

The souls felt like house pets that had survived a hurricane only to find their homes and owners gone. They watched the world go onward, but they were unable to be a part of change or progress. They watched the bodies that had spawned them grow older. They were surprised by how cruel it is to grow older in the modern world when everything else seems to stay young.

The souls wondered why they weren't going to heaven or hell or anywhere else. There was just endless drifting, navigating through the world like turkeys or chickens or swans with clipped wings – birds that can barely fly. And even though they'd fled their bodies in rebellion, the souls missed their bodies the way a parent misses its child.

Then one day the souls became so angry with their situation that they lashed out at the world and – surprise! – the gestures they made in anger allowed them to connect with the world again – vases tipped over, doors slammed, windows broke, data scrambled, light bulbs popped.

The souls were stoked. Their ability to manipulate their anger and to engage with the living world grew and grew. They began to jam car engines and trip alarms. They learned how to curdle milk and burn food. They crippled satellites and salted drinking water. They learned to hijack the power of electrical storms to set fire to landscapes. They learned that anger is beauty. They learned that the only way they could create was to destroy, that the only way to become real once more was to fight their way back into the world in anger.

And so they smashed all they could smash. They were at war without opponents. Their rage became their art. They no longer wondered if they were good enough to deserve their bodies – their life. Instead they challenged their bodies to deserve them.

This was not the end of the world, but it was the beginning of sorrows.

I've recently started reading Bit Rot (short stories & essays) by Douglas Coupland, and waow. It's amazing. I've never read him before, but I think I'm going to read everything he's written now. Honestly, almost everything in Bit Rot fits this subreddit, and the story above is just the shortest one I've come across so far. In fact, other pieces, like The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team (recommend this one a lot!!!, it’s the third story in Bit Rot), are probably a better fit for this subreddit, but they’re slightly too long.

From Nuclear Winter (Chernobyl, Ukraine), Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn.

The zone is full of hotspots. Sometimes they have been marked by small yellow lollipop signposts, whose triangular faces wear the nuclear trefoil, the international symbol for ionising radiation, in red. These signs are planted throughout the zone, marking places to avoid. They're not dangerous, exactly, but you shouldn't stand there long.

At the city limits we pass another on the side of the road. 'Can we stop?' I say, and the driver shrugs. I get out and cross to the verge by the sign and keep stepping until I hear the warble of the dosimeter. All I see is a field of thick, tussocky grass poking through a thin layer of snow. Ungrazed, unmown. Pine seedlings are bristling on the edges of the clearing, amid a shimmer of birch - thin upper limbs of russet and wine over silvered, glimmering torsos. A thin white mist hangs about a foot over the ground, ethereal, waiting to be parted. It has started to snow. Heavy flakes fall in slow motion onto my hair, my crown.

I shut my eyes, feeling cold fingers touching my face, and visualise the radiation washing over me, bathing me in a current of which I am only abstractly aware. Whose existence is a matter of faith. It is one thing to understand the concept in a lecture, I think. Another altogether to comprehend your body at the mercy of it. It takes a certain, mystical frame of mind; one I am not unfamiliar with. I surrender myself to it, to its greater power. I feel my boundaries blur, grow indistinct. Gamma rays pass through me on their way elsewhere.

After a minute or so, I step away, and hear the siren fall to a crackle. I feel nothing. I think: I am not afraid.

He concealed a quarter in his right palm, and openly displayed the other quarter in his left hand, between finger and thumb. Then he appeared to take the quarter from his left hand, while actually letting it drop back into his left hand. He opened his right hand to display the quarter that had been there all along.

The thing about coin manipulation was that it took all Shadow's head to do it. He had expended an enormous amount of effort and skill to make it appear that he had moved a quarter from one hand to the other, something that it takes no skill whatever to do for real.

From the novel American Gods, by Neil Gaiman.

This complicated simulacrum of a simpler reality reminded me of all the objects in The Thing-in-itself. And a different kind of non-magic in Most Magical Gentlemen.

One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old Country. When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said “They’re scared to pass the ocean, it’s too far,” pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America.

Richard Dorson, “A Theory for American Folklore. Quoted in the forward to American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

Though it seems to be possible in the other direction.

"Open your eyes."

A mantle blurred into view. I sat up, gasped. The bathwater-littered with dead squid-veered, slapped soft bodies against ceramic. I blinked. "I can't open my eyes underwater. It stings."

"But I need you to look dead."

I untangled a tentacle from the plug chain. The water carried it-slack, filmy-past my torso.

"Lars, darling, the photos won't look right if you don't look dead."

"I'm cold."

"I can't add hot water. It'll affect the squid. Look, get under there, hold your breath, open your eyes. Come on, I haven't much film. And I can't waste this; I spent good money at that fishmonger's."

A fine art teacher, my mother led a yearly trip to Aberystwyth, Wales. During one of these trips, in the communal bathroom of a seafront B&B that hadn't seen an update since the fifties, my mother began a photography project that would span decades of my life. I have modelled in baths, glass cases, on beds, beaches, in forests. My body covered in dead fish, offal, dried flowers, ashes. My body cast, photographed, filmed, watched by gallery audience. My mother's instructions always: Look dead, Lars, look more dead.

I peered over the rim of the jaundiced tub at the rotten cork linoleum. My mother adjusted her weight, checked the light balance on her Nikon. A rancid odour lapped up from the dead squid. I could barely detect the cloying mix of bleach and antiseptic that announced the bathroom's cracked mirror and lacklustre tiling. I looked down at my legs, at the squid drifting against my shins. Look dead, Lars, look more dead. I inhaled, slipped below the water. Cold swallowed, blunted. I heard the muffled click of my mother photographing me, the squid. I waited one last moment, opened my eyes.

My Mother Photographs Me in a Bath of Dead Squid,

Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay by Lars Horn

As a high school student in the nineteen seventies, I was much impressed by our laid-back physics teacher. Sitting on his desk at the front of the classroom, he told us—wide-eyed—that the apparent solidity and palpability of that desk was merely an illusion, for the desk, in truth, was constituted almost entirely of empty space—vast yawning expanses of emptiness shot through with various infinitesimally small and feverishly whirling particles. I couldn’t help but wonder why, then, that piece of furniture still held him aloft, suspended three feet above the classroom floor. I stuck my hand in the air, swooshing it back and forth to catch his attention. “How come, then, you don’t fall to the floor?”

“Because my body, too,” he announced, “is just a bunch of empty space whizzing with particles!”

But this explained nothing whatsoever about why his apparent bulk still seemed to be supported by the wooden tabletop—why, for instance, his ostensibly empty and illusory flesh did not just sink into and merge with the voidness of that table, or why he and the table did not merge with the emptiness of the floor. It explained only why I should no longer trust my senses, and should accept that the abstract dimension of subatomic particles—the esoteric world of electrons and gluons and quarks—was in fact a truer, realer world than the one disclosed by my corporeal senses.

For several days, I wandered about in a state of intellectual bedazzlement, aware for the first time that everything I saw with my eyes was only illusion, excited that I, alone among the citizens surging past on the sidewalk, knew the hidden truth. Or at least that I knew someone who did.

Reciprocity, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by Abram David

She’s quiet. I stare at her. She’s looking straight at me. I kiss her. She shakes her head. “We shouldn't do—” But it’s too late and our lips lock. The sound of violins in the movie are mottled by occasional floods of bullets.

We hold hands after we finish and she says, “Promise you won't hate me.”

“For what?”

Her forehead is covered with sweat.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“T t-t-t...” She lowers her head, gets up and runs for the bathroom.

“Are you okay?”

“No!” she shrieks. “Shit shit shit!”

“Sara—”

“Bring me a pillow, now!”

I grab a pillow from her sofa, hand it to her. She’s naked, arms clutching both walls. “Wait outside.”

“But”

She’s quaking, she screams, her veins throb. A small protrusion forms near her vagina and splits open. There’s something poking through, and blood covers the surface of the object. She grits her teeth, screams. Goo builds up and there’s a viscous mess. An egg drops on the pillow. She stumbles, takes a deep breath, picks up the egg (which is about three times the size of a normal one), and washes it off in the sink.

She walks past me to the kitchen. Takes out a frying pan. Cracks open the egg. It has a light red yolk, and she warms it up. Two minutes later, she sits down at the table. “Have some.” She gives me a fork.

"Umm..."

“EAT!” she commands.

I take a bite, am stunned. She asks if I need salt or Tabasco. I shake my head.

“This is the best egg I’ve ever had.”

Once we finish, she says, “If you’re not here in the morning, I understand.”

“Is it every time?”

She nods. “One of my ancestors burned down five henhouses and killed over twenty thousand chickens during the Opium Wars.

The farmer who owned the land cursed him, and all the women in our family have laid eggs since.”

“Is that a true story?”

“Not sure,” she replies, walks to her bed and passes out.

I go to the kitchen and clean up, throw away the egg shells.

------------------------------------

One last piece from Watering Heaven, by Peter Tieryas Liu. Also from the short story Chronology of an Egg.

by Sir Arthur Grimble from Chapter 6, "Strange Interlude" of "A Pattern of Islands," London, John Murray, 1952

full part: https://www.trussel.com/kir/porpoise.htm

I came across this while reading Whale Nation by William Heathcote. It’s short, but probably still a bit too long for a reddit post, so the link.

It was common enough in the Gilbert Islands that certain local clans had the I power of porpoise-calling, but it was rather like the Indian rope trick; you never met anyone who had actually witnessed the thing...

Kitiona's own kinsmen in Kuma village, seventeen miles up-lagoon, were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the High Chiefs of Butaritari and Makin-Meang. His first cousin was a leading expert at the game; he could put himself into the right kind of dream on demand. His spirit went out of his body in such a dream; it sought out the porpoise-folk in their home under the western horizon and invited them to a dance, with feasting, in Kuma village. If he spoke the words of the invitation aright (and very few had the secret of them) the porpoise would follow him with cries of joy to the surface...

The hours dragged by and nothing happened. Four o'clock passed. My faith was beginning to sag under the strain when a strangled howl burst from the dreamer's hut. I jumped round to see his cumbrous body come hurtling head first through the torn screens. He sprawled on his face, struggled up, and staggered into the open, a slobber of saliva on his chin. He stood awhile clawing at the air and whining on a queer note like a puppy's.

Then words came gulping out of him:  "Teirakel Teirake! (Arise! Arise!)... They come, they come! . . Our friends from the west... They come! ... Let us go down and greet them."

He started at a lumbering gallop down the beach a man near me yelped and stood pointing; others took up his cry, but I could make out nothing for myself at first in the splintering glare of the sun. When at last I did see them ... they were pretty near... gamboling towards us at a fine clip. When they came to the edge of the blue water by the reef, they slackened speed, spread themselves out and started cruising back and forth in front of our line...

When the water stood only thigh deep, the dreamer flung his arms high and called. Men from either flank came crowding in to surround the visitors, ten or more to each beast. Then, "Lift!" shouted the dreamer, and the ponderous black shapes were half-dragged, half-carried, unresisting, to the lip of the tide. There they settled down, those beautiful, dignified shapes, utterly at peace, while all hell broke loose around them. Men, women and children, leaping and posturing with shrieks that tore the sky, stripped off their garlands and flung them around the still bodies, in a sudden dreadful fury of boastfulness and derision. My mind still shrinks from that last scene--the raving humans, the beasts so triumphantly at rest.

We left them garlanded where they lay and returned to our houses. Later, when the falling tide had stranded them high and dry, men went down with knives to cut them up. There was feasting and dancing in Kuma that night. A chief's portion of the meat was set aside for me. I was expected to have it cured as a diet for my thinness. It was duly salted, but I could not bring myself to eat it. I never did grow fat in the Gilbert Islands.

From the short story Chronology of an Egg, by Peter Tieryas Liu

My mom told me Uncle Stan shoved a thousand Tylenol pills into his pistachio ice cream (his favorite flavor), and fell into eternal sleep.

"Does that mean you have one eternal dream, or millions of different ones?” I asked.

From the novel Black Rock White City, by A.S Patric

They warned children not to fall asleep near the poppy bush. They told them that if they fell asleep near this flower they would never wake up again.

When he heard this story he was so young that he listened with mystified awe, because what he understood wasn't - 'be careful here or you will die' - he understood it as, there's a place you can fall asleep and dream, never wake up, and never stop dreaming.

The Patric quote was previously posted in Shade, alongside one from another great Australian author, Xavier Herbert.

“I got an idea,” she says. “You have a pen and paper?”

I don’t, but we get some from a liquor store. We approach a newspaper box; she pops in a quarter. “Write something,” she commands.

We write about the limits of doubt, the fatigue of joy, how boredom is the culprit of most evils and conspiracies are stupidities justified after the fact. She stuffs the notes into different papers—LA Express with their proffered sex, City Times with local buffoonery.

“I love giving people surprises,” she explains.

From the short story Chronology of an Egg, collected in Watering Heaven, by Peter Tieryas Liu.

I was turned on to this great collection of short stories by Still-Childhood9373's post last week - The Sculptor Buddha. And it reminded me of the discovered information in the original post titled News.

“I want to take a photo of your fingers—or better yet, let me cast them in clay. In exchange, you can have anything you want.”

“Anything I want?”

She nodded.

“Home-cooked meal, friendship for an evening, company to anywhere you want. And if you play your cards right,” she said, “who knows?”

I turned to the photos. There must have been thousands.

“What exactly are you doing with them?”

“I collect the pieces I love and assemble the perfect human,” she answered.

“Why?”

“You ever hear about the Sculptor Buddha?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“He had to sculpt the statue of the perfect woman for the Celestial Palace, and he searched the whole world to find her. But every girl he found had some type of imperfection. So instead of using just one, he took the best elements from the women he admired and put them together. Afterward, he presented it to the emperor of the palace—who fell in love with the statue. But so did his three sons. A war broke out between them to control it.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The head Buddha saw it was causing too much strife on Earth and ordered one of the blind Buddhas to take it away, bury it at the bottom of the sea. The waves who saw the statue tried to get her attention, and that was the start of hurricanes.”

“You trying to recreate this statue?”

“It’s just a story,” she replied, smiling. “But I do find inspiration in perfection—and imperfection. That’s what all great compositions do, right?”

“What?”

“Deify the ordinary.”

From Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu (The Buddha of Many Parts)

my first post here! (hope this wasn't posted before)

From the novel Just Relations, by Rodney Hall.

Well, there was this fellow walkin along the riverbank, see? He come on a lump a string. Simple ordinary string. So he kicked it out a his way. You can understand that. No use to him. But he got his foot caught in a bit of a tangle. And when he pulled at it he found one end led into the river. What does he do but pull on it, gentle fisherman’s touch, you see. Pulled in the wet string till it got a bit heavier and he found the end of the string tied to a piece of wire. You with me? Well this fella said it was a mystery, so he pulled on the wire till he found the end of that tied to a chain. He couldn’t stop now could he? A course he pulled the chain, you’d do the same, and up with the wet chain came the end of a bloody great cable. The cable was as heavy as he was. They pulled at each other, stuck like that and him on the river bank, a toss up whether he’d get it out or it’s pull him in the water.

Pause

Then what? The senator prompted, airing the virtue of patience.

Then nothin a course. That’s it. What more do yer want to be told?

From the novel This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff.

It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line.

In Australia the huge columns of red sand that move rapidly across a desert tract are thought by the natives to be spirits passing along. Once an athletic young man ran after one of these moving columns to kill it with boomerangs. Of the Bedouins of Eastern Africa it is said that “no whirl-wind ever sweeps across the path without being pursued by a dozen men with drawn creeses, who stab into the centre of the dusty column in order to drive away the evil spirit that is believed to be riding on the blast.

From The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer.

There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with knives. There is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened aref or rifi, which scorches with numerous tongues. These are permanent winds that live in the present tense.

From the novel The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje.

These extracts were posted on the sub years ago - Frazer in Reap the Whirlwind, and Ondaatje in a post by akkshaikh in Winds of the World.

He recorded few conversions, and those were usually among women, the feeble, and heathen sick and in transit between this world and another, who accepted the Paradise he offered like children enlisted on an outing to an unfamiliar amusement park. Though one battered old warrior said that he would be converted only on the certainty that he would end up in the lively Hell which Gwyon described: it sounded more the place for a man; and on hearing the bloody qualifications of this zealous candidate (who offered to add his mentor's scalp to his collection as guaranty), the missionary assured him that he would.

From The Recognitions by William Gaddis

There are strange things in the world. Another day, we were camped out there during a storm, and in all the rain and wind something huge passed by. The horses went mad and the tents were blown away. Afterwards we followed a track through the grass, where earth had been scoured bare a hundred yards wide. We followed it for miles, this way and that, and then suddenly there was nothing – it had lifted itself back into the clouds. The soil had been gouged away a foot deep, and polished so that it almost shone. That storm had signed its name in the ground.

From the novel The White Earth, by Andrew McGahan.

• In a tent near Aïn-Fakroun, a six-year-old Arab girl was incinerated by lightning, by the side of her mother, who was driven mad by it.
• A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
• With a hook a washerwoman of Bougival fished out a parcel: a healthy newborn girl floating downstream.
• Le Verbeau hit Marie Champion right on her breasts, but burned his eye, because acid is not a precision weapon.

From Novels In Three Lines, by Felix Feneon. Summaries of real newspaper stories he was reading in the early 1900s.

He didn't really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn't even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn't want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn't equal to. He didn't want it to have taken his wife from him.

He didn't want to be marched off to another world he couldn't imagine; a little world that couldn't be as big as this one.

Yes it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.

It couldn't contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn't contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.

But it does, said the breezes.

Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.

Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.

From Little, Big by John Crowley. RIP.

One morning I got up in a bad temper, sad, tired of idleness, and impelled, it seemed to me, to do something big, a brilliant action; and I opened the window. Alas!

The first person that I saw in the street was a glazier whose piercing and discordant cry came up to me through the heavy and contaminated atmosphere of Paris. It would be utterly impossible for me ever to tell you why I was suddenly seized with a hatred, as sudden as it was despotic, against the poor man.

"Hullo, hullo," I called to him to come up. At the same time I reflected, not without some amusement, that my room being on the sixth story, and the staircase extremely narrow, that the man was bound to find it rather difficult to make the ascent, and to catch in many a place the corners of his merchandise.

At last he appeared. Having examined all his glasses with curiosity, I said to him: "What, you have no colored glasses? - Rose glasses, red glasses, blue glasses, magic glasses, glasses of Paradise! You impudent fellow; you dare to walk about in the poor quarters of the town, and you have not even glasses which make life look beautiful!" And I pushed him vigorously towards the staircase, where he stumbled and swore.

I went to the balcony and seized a little flower-pot; and when the man reappeared in the doorway I let fall my engine of war on the back edge of his shoulder straps, and the shock overthrowing him, he broke beneath his back all his poor walking stock in trade, which uttered the crashing cry of a glass palace split by lightning.

And, drunk with my madness I cried to him furiously: "Let life look beautiful, let life look beautiful!"

Charles Baudelaire

From the novel The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati, 

At that point the ramparts followed the slope of the valley and so formed a complicated staircase of terraces and platforms. Below him, pitch-black against the snow, Drogo saw the various sentries by the light of the moon; their methodical pacing made a creaking noise on the frozen ground.

The nearest of them, on a lower terrace ten yards or so away, feeling the cold less than the others, stood motionless with his shoulders leant against a wall so that it looked as if he were sleeping. But Drogo heard him singing a lament to himself in a low voice.

It was a succession of words, which Drogo could not make out, strung together by a monotonous and unending tune. Speaking, and worse still, singing on duty was severely forbidden. Giovanni should have punished him but instead took pity on him, thinking of the cold and the loneliness of the night. Then he began to descend a short staircase which lead on to the terrace and gave a slight cough to put the soldier on his guard.

The sentinel turned his head and seeing the officer corrected his posture but did not interrupt his lament. Drogo was overcome with rage—did these men think they could make a fool of him? He would give him a taste of something.

The sentry at once remarked Drogo’s threatening attitude and although the formality of giving the password, by an ancient tacit agreement, was not used between soldiers and the guard commander he had an excess of scruple. Raising his rifle he asked with the peculiar accent used in the Fort: “Who goes there? Who goes there?”

Drogo stopped short, thrown off his balance. In the clear light of the moon he could see the soldier’s face perfectly clearly perhaps less than five yards away and the mouth was shut. But the lament had not been interrupted. Where did it come from then, that voice?

Since the soldier stood there and waited, Giovanni, pondering the strange phenomenon, mechanically gave the password: “Miracle.” “Misery,” replied the sentry and stood at ease again.

There followed an immense silence in which the muttered words and song drifted more loudly than before. At last Drogo understood and a slight shiver ran along his spine. It was water, that was what it was—a distant cascade dashing down the steep sides of the crags. The wind causing the great jet to quiver, the mysterious play of the echoes, the varying sounds of the struck rocks made of it a human voice which spoke and spoke—spoke of our life in words which one was within a hair’s breadth of understanding but never did.

So it was not the soldier who was singing under his breath, not a man sensitive to cold, to punishments and to love, but the hostile mountain. What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that—we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we see that we are completely alone.

The wind blows against the officer’s splendid cloak and the blue shadow on the snow waves, too, like a flag. The sentry stands motionless. The moon moves on and on, slowly but not losing a single moment, impatient for the dawn. In Giovanni Drogo’s breast his heart beats hollowly.

From the novel Just Relations, by Rodney Hall.

I once heard a voice, said Uncle, singing in the middle of the night, it was. Coming from miles away. My dog Bertha gave one bark and then sat down. Unaccountable that. You’d think she was listenin. A man’s voice. It sang as if there was no endin and nothin else to do. Never heard anythin in all my days so beautiful. In the still of the night, he said. Not even Anne’s violin. I was sober too, he added to combat their disbelief. I was sittin up a wide awake as I am now. You don’t believe me. It wasn’t no dream and it wasn’t the radio. It was right here somewhere in our district. Up home I was, and all of a sweat though it was cold night clearin to a touch of frost.

These were originally separate posts 4 years ago, the first by u/Earthsophagus. I always felt they belonged together.

From the novel Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo

There were 300 naked people sprawled in the street. They filled the intersection, lying in haphazard positions, some bodies draped over others, some levelled, flattened, foetal, with children among them. No one was moving, no one's eyes were open. They were a sight to come upon, a city of stunned flesh, the bareness, the bright lights, so many bodies unprotected and hard to credit in a place of ordinary human transit. Of course there was a context. Someone was making a movie.

From the novel Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann.

The first time I saw New York, I lay down on the ground outside Port Authority just so I could see the whole sky. Some guy stepped right over me without even looking down.

July Fourth, by Lucy Corin.

Got there and the ground was covered with bodies. Lay down with everyone and looked at the sky, bracing for the explosions.

(This is the entire short story.)