Conjunctions:34 American Fiction: States of the Art

Four Dark Tales

The following is one of four Joyce Carol Oates fables published in Conjunctions:34.

The Revelation

There was a man our exact age who, early one morning, some time before his usual hour of waking, opened his eyes so quickly and unguardedly that he saw the web in which he lay: a fine, gossamer structure, beautifully symmetrical, the strands translucent as though yet seeming strong, unbreakable as steel; the longitudinal strands just perceptibly thicker than the latitudinal, and fewer in number. Instinctively his eyes shut tight; for it was too early to wake from sleep, and the revelation was too early in his life; and when at last he opened his eyes, an hour later, in eagerness and dread, he saw that whatever it had been in which he’d imagined he had lain in the sweet passivity of sleep had vanished, as if it had never been.

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of the Humanities, the
National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award,
and the Jerusalem Prize. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Butcher (Knopf) as
well as the national bestsellers We Were The Mulvaneys, Blonde, The Falls, The
Gravedigger’s Daughter, and The Accursed. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished
Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.