William Faulkner, SANCTUARY – WordPress.com - literature save 2

owl and pitcher and a row of towels; in the corner behind it sat a slop jar dressed also in
fluted rose-colored paper.
Beneath the bed the dogs made no sound. Temple moved slightly; the dry
complaint of mattress and springs died into the terrific silence in which they crouched.
She thought of them, woolly, shapeless; savage, petulant, spoiled, the flatulent monotony
of their sheltered lives snatched up without warning by an incomprehensible moment of
terror and fear of bodily annihilation at the very hands which symbolised by ordinary the
licensed tranquillity of their lives.
The house was full of sounds. Indistinguishable, remote, they came to her with a
quality of awakening, resurgence, as though the house itself had been asleep, rousing
itself with dark; she heard something which might have been a burst of laughter in a shrill
woman voice. Steamy odors from the tray drifted across her face. She turned her head
and looked at it, at the covered and uncovered dishes of thick china. In the midst of them
sat the glass of pale gin, a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. She rose on her elbow,
catching up the slipping gown. She lifted the covers upon a thick steak, potatoes, green
peas; rolls; an anonymous pinkish mass which some sense-elimination, perhaps-identified
as a sweet. She drew the slipping gown up again, thinking about them eating down at
school in a bright uproar of voices and clattering forks; of her father and brothers at the
supper table at home; thinking about the borrowed gown and Miss Reba saying that they
would go shopping tomorrow. And I've just got two dollars, she thought.
When she looked at the food she found that she was not hungry at all, didn't even
want to look at it. She lifted the glass and gulped it empty, her face wry, and set it down
and turned her face hurriedly from the tray, fumbling for the cigarettes. When she went to
strike the match she looked at the tray again and took up a strip of potato gingerly in her
fingers and ate it. She ate another, the unlighted cigarette in her other hand. Then she put
the cigarette down and took up the knife and fork and began to eat, pausing from time to
time to draw the gown up onto her shoulder.
When she finished eating she lit the cigarette. She heard the bell again, then
another in a slightly different key. Across a shrill rush of a woman's voice a door banged.
Two people mounted the stairs and passed the door; she heard Miss Reba's voice
booming from somewhere and listened to her toiling slowly up the stairs. Temple
watched the door until it opened and Miss Reba stood in it, the tankard in her hand. She
now wore a bulging house dress and a widow's bonnet with a veil. She entered on the
flowered felt slippers. Beneath the bed the two dogs made a stifled concerted sound of
utter despair.
The dress, unfastened in the back, hung lumpily about Miss Reba's shoulders. One
ringed hand lay on her breast, the other held the tankard high. Her open mouth, studded
with gold-fillings gaped upon the harsh labor of her breathing.
"Oh God oh God," she said. The dogs surged out from beneath the bed and hurled
themselves toward the door in a mad scrabble. As they rushed past her she turned and
flung the tankard at them. It struck the door jamb, splashing up the wall, and rebounded
with a forlorn clatter. She drew her breath whistling, clutching her breast. She came to the
bed and looked down at Temple through the veil. "We was happy as two doves," she
wailed, choking, her rings smoldering in hot glints within her billowing breast. "Then he
had to go and die on me." She drew her breath whistling, her mouth gaped, shaping the