Posts tagged Sexual assult
Amends

“The violence I had orchestrated left my insides lacking…”

The violence I had orchestrated.

I had orchestrated violence.

Had I orchestrated violence?

I was prepping for a podcast, scanning through my essay collection, Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, when I passed by this sentence. I used to love it. When I read it, I could envision myself as a conductor keeping in time the crumbling of my early womanhood. I’d visualize the rotation of shot glasses, kegs, faceless men, loose pills, and strobe lights blinking in the basement bangers all circling around me like a halo. By putting myself on the conductor’s podium I could pick and choose what parts of my experiences I illuminated to others.

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Last Call

Tall ships lined up like regal ducks in the Delaware outside the floor to ceiling windows of the Rusty Scupper. The lights from Penns Landing illuminated their bulky masts, casting cross-shaped shadows upon the concrete. It was nearly midnight. Two parties hung on for last call: a middle-aged couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and two handsome guys who’d been downing gin and tonics for nearly two hours. Exhausted after a long shift, I looked forward to washing the smoke and liquor off my body and crawling into my bed a few blocks away.

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Dear Scarlett

Dear Scarlett,

I want to tell you not to go to the bar that night. I want to say, “Just stay in with a good book.” But I know you. If I tell you, you'll only be more determined to do it. So get dolled up, go to the bar, listen to the band, and dance your heart out. But listen. Listen when your best friend tells you to stay away from him (they work together and there have been rumors).

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Don't

It’s a filthy place, the inside of his mind, but I’ve forced myself to wade through the sewage of his thoughts.

He followed me for a block, waiting until we were somewhere with less traffic.

I am cerebral person, I have to think about things, rationalize them, untangle them, for a long time after they happen. Even if it’s torture. Even if it’s pointless.

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A Waitress' Tale

It never happened at Isaly’s ice cream joint, the first place I waitressed.  

Well, waitressing is probably not the right word for what I did. It was more like order-taking, burger-flipping, shake-making, and plopping-on-the-counter-for-the-customer work. That demanding all-in-one food industry post that so many have as their first or second or forever job. 

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Health Class Didn't Teach Me About Rape

It was over a year later that I realized what had happened. It may sound strange to you that I didn’t know it had. Wouldn’t you know if that kind of thing had happened to you? I wasn’t unconscious or inebriated. I remembered that evening, those moments in that room, but I didn’t realize it had happened. Because it wasn’t the kind of thing I was taught about in health class. Instead, I was taught about herpes and genital warts and obesity.

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Seventeen

Train station toilets and hospital rooms, especially bed seven, smell the same. Like chlorine and baking soda and coercion and cold. I’m seventeen and I wear my school uniform. No - she wears her school uniform, three layers of khaki and stockings. He wears a suit and carries an umbrella. 

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Choices

On an August day in 1988 I walked home from my summer job at the Farish Street YMCA. I was fifteen and a freshman in the Lanier High School band. Dressed in shorts and a t-shirt I moved along the sidewalk of Monument Street quick and unresponsive to the honking horns and catcalls from the fluid noon traffic. A man in torn blue jeans walked towards me with a brown bag in hand.  He brought the bag to his lips then howled when he returned it to his side. He looked at me then said,” GOOD STUFF!”

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