Black Tickets (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Jayne Anne Phillips
- First Published: 1979
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: The 1970's
- Setting: A slummy neighborhood of Philadelphia and the city jail
- Principal Characters: The narrator, Jamaica Delila, Raymond, Neinmann
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
- Subjects: Prisoners, Prostitution or prostitutes, Rape, Corruption, Drug trafficking or dealing
- Locales: Philadelphia, PA
The Story
The unnamed first-person narrator/protagonist tells this story in bits and pieces from a jail cell. The central fact of the story is his obsession with his recent girlfriend, Jamaica Delila, toward whom he has ambivalent feelings. He thinks she might have “set me up . . . to do lock-up in this cadillac of castles,” and he fantasizes about beating her. Even as he imagines her falling, however, he cannot help dwelling on the way her hair spreads out and her uplifted hands glow in the light. He dwells even longer on memories of their lovemaking in the bathtub, the...
[The entire page is 1327 words long]

