WEDNESDAY
In the sallow half-light of a distant lamp, I count the shadows and thumb the blade and tremble. They are coming. Tonight, tomorrow night. To rape me, to strangle me, to drag me from my bed. To carry me off, murmuring against a sweaty gag, a calloused hand. To throw me into a van parked in my driveway.
I can see it idling, red tail lights through a plume of exhaust. I can hear the uneven rumble of the engine, the gastric growl of it, ready to fill its pitch black belly with all of me. I can feel the texture of the drive, the impatient grasping hands, the weight of bodies, of reeking breath, the soulless excitement twitching through each of them. I know my helpless terror as the van speeds onto the highway and drives and drives and drives until we are somewhere so far away from any comfort that at best, I cling to the lightest shades of despair. Then there are the surface streets, winding, labyrinthine; the crunch and hiccup of gravel and ruts beneath the tires. The van stops.
This is where it will happen. All of it. Every horrible thing that monsters imagine and little girls never ever hear about in fairytales. We have driven too far too speedily for what comes next to be anything but slow. And every dream I’ve had—to find a decent guy, to brunch with friends, to be successful, secure, to go out dancing, to have children, to watch them learn and grow and love—everything will be replaced with one dream. Death—soon, please.
I can’t imagine what they’ll do. There are no spoilers for the sadistic ingenuity of a broken mind. Everything will be new and horrible and my body—the last thing I have—will be a trauma for the poor person who finds it.
I am afraid. And the last time I see on the clock before I fade into sleep is 3:42 AM.
THURSDAY
I am a mess today, my rat’s nest hair, dirty, clinging to my temples where the sweat has dried stiff. Showering is out of the question. I will not be naked and deafened to the sound of my front door by the hiss. I will not close my eyes to avoid the sting of shampoo.
There is a small naïve part of me that believes I will be less appealing if I am haggard and dirty. Then I remember that filth doesn’t mind where it goes. It covers its own and it covers clean. We just notice the clean parts more. We mourn them more, agonize over them more. Jon Benet Ramsey was like that, wasn’t she?—porcelain, perfect, fresh out of the plastic wrap. We would have noticed a speck of filth clinging to her. We would have protected her against the sulking bad man, the stranger with yellow teeth and grasping hands. But, of course, she died anyway.
Maybe it’s better to be disregardable before it happens, to be fly paper and crumpled soda cans. No one ever goes on prime time to weep for a homeless sex worker who was gutted while angling for a fix. They get no hashtags, no thoughts and prayers. Maybe that sort of ignobility would be easier for my sister, for my parents. Maybe they’d think their daughter ghosted them and just doesn’t care and they’d never want to know the details of my death.
It’s coming. And I’m sitting on the floor with one of my little knives, eating dry cereal out of the box, watching the front door. I wonder if I’ll actually manage to do anything useful with this knife. Will I just make them more vicious? Will they use it on me—my knife that I bought with my money taking my blood? The wound, I’m sure, will feel awful. One of many small things to endure before nauseating, feverish, dismantling. The kind of pain that humans aren’t built for. But I have felt pain, haven’t I? I’ve sprained ankles. I’ve gotten cavities drilled and felt that cold, slippery, electric jolt. From the trained and tender hands of a medical professional. Trying his best not to hurt me.
Oh god. What could they do? What secrets of suffering don’t I know? What will it be like to learn everything all at once and never know for certain if there’s more?
I hear footsteps, heavy boots. There is a shadow in the window of my porch.
The letterbox opens and there is no more retreat beyond the wall glued to my back. I am nearly silent, whimpering, waiting for a pair of eyes to appear in the slot in my door, a knowing glance, an obvious and palpable wickedness.
“She’s alone. This’ll be easy.” I can almost hear the grating, sludgy voice. Like sandpaper, like motor oil and broken glass and cum.
A clutch of letters push through the slot, bent and straining, more junk mail to join the stack in front of the door. When it’s over, I know I was never ready to fight. My knife is beside me on the ground, mingling like some child’s prize with the pile of scattered cereal. I’m clutching me, as if I could hold myself down and stay put. What’s worse, I know I was never ready to flee either. I will not be the clever heroine who slips from the back window and escapes. I will freeze. And it will be easy. For them.
FRIDAY
My dreams are back, creeping in through the pills that are supposed to stop them and make me feel like I’m dead instead of dying. I remember one voice in particular—young, reedy. It whines past my screams like that of a brat tween tagging along at some godless carnival.
“I wanna turn! You said I could do some next!”
The voice pouts and all around are hung the hazards of my choir girl imagination. A drill, mundane, for flesh. Hacksaws and needles and splintered wood. Things to twist and to wrench. To burn.
I read last night that fire doesn’t kill sensation, doesn’t burn it away like it should. Did you know that? It enhances it. It invites the body to feel more. Pain does things to your body when it’s bad enough, when the benefit of pain combats the physiological cost. Endorphins pump, blood pressure changes, shock sets in. But of course for every systemic failure, there is a chemical that makes things raw again. Epinephrine, atropine, smelling salts. Antibiotics. Isopropyl.
A wasp’s sting has chemicals in it that send your pain receptors into overdrive. Did you know that? The state will save a condemned man’s life before executing him. Did you know that? Pleasant happy people, mindless bugs, nature and nurture—they all find ways to draw out suffering. And I wonder, if I know all this, how could they not? When they come, they will not come skittish like a stinging wasp or civilizing like a death row warden, they will come to make surreal those fringes of words like excruciating and inhuman.
You know, there was a part of the dream that I could actually feel, through some Disneyfied filter of my limited experience. There were dozens of them, gathered around me, wormy tongues lashing against awestruck lips. I struggled against the fists gripping me. I pleaded, bartered, tried to make myself human for them—a mother, a sister, a daughter, an adolescent crush. They were all so dead inside. And one of them said:
“Grab her wrist, now, hold that hand steady.”
I watched my hand, remembering the feeling of warm mittens, of interlacing fingers that made me giddy and made a human distance feel insubstantial. I thought of an engagement ring, of holding chords on a guitar, of my mother’s hair and the way it curled around my fingers when they were small. Those fingers had grown into these. And the voice was impassive as it continued:
“Should I start with the thumb or the pinky?”
They were measured in their debate. Thumb or pinky, thumb or pinky. This was important to them. What was unimportant was me, the person.
I wonder now if they have lost touch with their own feelings of pain or fear or anything else beyond perverse delight and boredom. Is there lust in their hips or just infliction? Do they cackle at jokes and feel any joy at all? Is there another emotion they feel—something foreign and abstract—that I will never know because I am not like them?
Maybe that is the why of the pain. To test these same questions and to wonder. They seem to relish the sounds I make, the faces, the times that I vomit or convulse. There is an energy then like townie barflies relishing the home team’s goal on TV. My shrieks and my sobs, their vicarious participation in actual human feeling.
Or maybe there is no why and no point to wondering and they are simply monsters. Fucked. Wrong. Hollow.
My face was snot and wet and muscles I never knew I had.
They chose pinky.
Finger nail. Then the rest. Peeled, not cut, if that’s what you were thinking. And the whiner did get his turn, if it’s a tidy story you’re after. I won’t say what he did, because you don’t deserve every fucked detail. I sure as hell didn’t.
SATURDAY
Hello. It’s evening. Weekend. They waited until now. They probably have jobs and normal lives, accountants and contractors and software engineers. They probably wink at you or smile as you’re walking your dog, assessing weak parts and soft parts and parts that need love. You never imagine their smile covered in someone else’s blood, their teeth leaving impressions in your breasts. Normal guy. Normal girl—a friend. Someone safe. The girl is easier than taking the time to convince you that he’s harmless and likes cats and is thinking about trying crochet.
They won’t need the girl with me because I’m too fucking terrified to follow anyone. They’ll use force and that’ll be that. Into the van. Next stop: hell.
My sister visited today. Charlotte. Charlie since she was sixteen. She saw my wounds, the little cuts and gouges and she seemed worried. I still hadn’t showered and my place is a wreck, so I suppose it’s natural for her to assume that I’m losing it. That I’m cutting myself, I guess.
We used to go out on Saturday nights, or we did a few times. Maybe not enough. She is a fun drunk. Wild. Bad taste in men. Or maybe the shitty men just take an interest in her and she lets them. She got coddled a lot as a child, then ignored. She performs now—crass jokes, loud clothes. The world is a camera with its lense pointed at her.
She finally got around to asking me if my wounds were self-inflicted. She whispered the last bit like it might be too jarring for me if I knew the question I was supposed to answer. I told her no. Which is the truth. But the truth of the truth doesn’t quite make sense. Something is cutting me and stabbing me while I sleep.
See?
I won’t say much about my dream last night. It was worse than everything else I’ve seen and felt. More vile. More brutal. This morning I woke up and realized I had wet the bed. Before I changed, I looked up a diagram of where nerves are in the human body and how close they are to the skin and if any three of them really were close enough together to braid. I don’t want to be like this. I don’t want to know the things I know, but I know they are coming and I know they are coming soon.
Charlie asked me if I was suicidal. I told her yes. Which is the truth. But I’m not depressed and I won’t kill myself because I’m scared of that and I’m suicidal because I’m scared of them. I just don’t wanna feel what they’ll make me feel.
She told me not to do anything. She asked with a ‘please’ and the kind of tears she’d use on our mom when crying was the best tool she had. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. “I promise.”
We’ll see if I’m here.
SUNDAY
Last night I didn’t dream at all and I woke wondering if by some miracle I had slept through my death. I woke bleeding. I woke prickled and dashed and I realized that I wasn’t dead yet. The whole day is full of nothing. Ambling dread, shivers, weeping, waiting. Then night comes.
I think it might have been the mailman again, the slinking headlights, the footsteps.
But the letterbox doesn’t stir. And the shadow of someone lingers there, swaying. The door knob rattles and I do what I knew I would always do—nothing. I don’t scream, I cower and I slide demurely into the place where it happens. Their place. The grit of it and the slippery clinging grime. The human smells—sweat and pus and black cuticles, spoiled fat and blood and burning hair. The hopeless remoteness—too rusted and too overgrown to ever be found by anyone good. A place beyond heroes and angels and chances. The place where they coil my life inch by inch and scream by scream.
The shadows gather, bristling and jittery in every window and I do one smart thing. I look for my phone and the letterbox creaks, and there are eyes I have seen and seen.
I was so fucking wrong about everything.
My phone is nowhere because she took it. I didn’t know. Frantic, pawing. She took the knives—all but one I hide inside my pillow, so I find it. She rings the doorbell, smiling, cooing my name. It was always her, wasn’t it? The normal girl—a friend. Someone safe. She kept her promise. Charlie came back. With them.
I clutch myself, hold tight. I will not go.
I will not fucking go.
Note:
So, I found these in a bedside table after the rent went unpaid a while. Five notes, Wednesday through Sunday, though I’ve honestly got no clue which Wednesday through Sunday. I can’t say I knew much about her. Her name is Genevieve Allen on the lease. She was quiet, I guess? I tried to track down the sister, Charlotte, but no luck there either.
Obviously, the girl could use some serious help.