All the Good People I've Left Behind

by Joyce Carol Oates

Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1979

227 pages

Excerpt

From "Blood-Swollen Landscape"

Approaching him was a person he hated: he wished dead.

In and out of his eyesight floated that thought. Die. Be dead. It was weightless, it couldn't be stopped. Couldn't be unsaid. It was a wish that sprang to life somehow in his vision, in his eyes; as soon as he saw that man the thought wished itself to completion and. . . .

And so he was a murderer in his heart.

Martin was coming out of the Science Building, hurrying, upset about some news he had just received, news of a friend's wife, and so his control was shaky, he really was not himself—Martin Hershfield, 26, an Instructor in the Physics Department of this comfortable little college—and perhaps not to blame. He happened to glance up and saw, approaching him, one of his enemies: also a young man of 26, with a bony, grim, tense face, wearing a suit that looked cheaper than Martin's, bought off the rack probably at the Norban's Discount Store at the shopping mall. He and Martin were moving like missiles in a head-on collision course. Would they collide? No. Martin stared at him and a thought flashed into his head that terrified him: He wished that young man dead.

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