Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (31 page)

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Authors: Joyce Carol Oates

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She would have to flee in the other direction, to get to the Education Office—but if she did, she would have to pass by the men at the urinal, whose loud excited voices were terrible to hear.

“Ma’am! Howdy.”

She turned. She felt a touch on her shoulder. Another touch, a lover’s caress. A face loomed beside hers, pitying, with a look of sorrow, but revulsion too, disgust, for the woman had insulted his manhood with her condescension; with her ridiculous female vanity, that had taken root in grief; between his fingers the little razor was gripped tight, drawn against Vivianne’s throat, beneath her chin, a quick slash, the blink of an eye, the intake of a breath, mercy—for here was the angel of mercy, clad in blue.

They would discover Vivianne Greary missing, amid the confusion of an unexpected lockdown. They would discover Vivianne Greary fallen and lifeless on the wooden ramp behind the entrance to the Education Office, at the very end of the ramp, bled out.

N
ext time. Next time will be different.”

Cal Healy was driving, erratically. He was chagrined, excited, talking rapidly and obsessively of the “fucking-stupid” mistakes they’d made. He did not spare Vivianne, as he did not spare himself. To the left, the Hudson River looked like molten lead. There was no beauty to the wide choppy river, that reflected a sunless sky. Vivianne had given up listening to her companion’s ranting words. They’d both been reprimanded by the Education Office coordinator; they’d had to copy the men’s names from the sheet of paper the men had signed, onto the formal roster-sheet; it had taken them what seemed like a very long time. Vivianne’s head pounded with pain. Her eyes stung with tears like acid, or blood. She was exhausted, wounded, like one who has been stricken, her throat slashed. She was finished, she’d bled out. She heard herself say:

“Next time. Yes.”

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which, often in slightly different versions, these stories were originally published.

“Black Dahlia & White Rose” in the anthology
L.A. Noire.

“I.D.” in
The New Yorker;
anthologized in
The Best American Short Stories 2011.

“Deceit” in
Conjunctions.

“Run Kiss Daddy” in the anthology
New Jersey Noir.

“Hey Dad” in
Ellery Queen.

“The Good Samaritan” in
Harper’s.

“A Brutal Murder in a Public Place” in
McSweeney’s.

“Roma!” in
Conjunctions.

“Spotted Hyenas: A Romance” on The Atlantic online.

“San Quentin” in
Playboy.

“Anniversary” in
Boulevard
.

About the Author

J
OYCE
C
AROL
O
ATES
is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, our government’s highest civilian honor for the arts. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers
We Were the Mulvaneys
,
Blonde
, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Falls
, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award. She is the 2010 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Joyce Carol Oates lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Also by Joyce Carol Oates

Story Collections

By the North Gate
(1963)

Upon Sweeping Flood and
Other Stories
(1966)

The Wheel of Love
(1970)

Marriages and Infidelities
(1972)

The Goddess and Other Women
(1974)

The Poisoned Kiss
(1975)

Crossing the Border
(1976)

Night-Side
(1977)

A Sentimental Education
(1980)

Last Days
(1984)

Raven’s Wing
(1986)

The Assignation
(1988)

Heat and Other Stories
(1991)

Where Is Here?
(1992)

Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories
(1993)

Haunted: Tales of the
Grotesque
(1994)

Will You Always Love Me?
(1996)

The Collector of Hearts: New
Tales of the Grotesque
(1998)

Faithless: Tales of
Transgression
(2001)

High Lonesome: New and
Selected Stories 1966–2006
(2006)

Wild Nights!
(2008)

Dear Husband,
(2009)

Sourland
(2010)

The Corn Maiden
(2011)

Credits

Cover design by Alison Forner

Cover photographs © by Heide Benser/Corbis (top) and © by Tom Marks/Corbis (bottom)

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

BLACK DAHLIA & WHITE ROSE
. Copyright © 2012 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-219569-2

Epub Edition SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062195715

12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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