At The Grocery Store Alone, I Think About Becoming A Dead Girl

I think about becoming a dead girl, not because I want to be one, but because of how possible it is for me, out in public, to become one. I’ve read the news, the stories, watched the true crime documentaries and listened to the podcasts. In Youtube videos, a beautiful woman applies makeup while detailing another’s gruesome murder. I walk through the aisles of the store, filling my cart and avoiding eye contact with men I don’t know, wondering how many of their mouths have watered at the thought of wringing my neck.

They're dark, yes, these thoughts, but they are not unreasonable. I think about Eliza four weeks ago, Molly four years, both running before discovered dead in ditches. I don’t run, can’t run, wouldn’t stand a chance if I had to. They could, and it wasn’t enough.

I am 10 when Natalee Holloway disappears from her high school senior spring break trip to Aruba. She is never found. I was born the year that JonBenét was killed. The identity of her killer is still unknown. Hannah Wilson and I attend college at the same time when she is bludgeoned to death by a man she doesn’t know in her college town of Bloomington, Indiana. Strands of hair lead detectives to her killer. Lauren Spierer, also a student at the University of Indiana, has been missing for 11 years. Every night I wonder her whereabouts, her presumed death and how it happened. 26 years after she disappeared, the defense in Kristen Smart’s murder trial rests their case. Jassy Correia never made it home from the club, her body, a short-lived secret in his trunk. I know the names of these women well, as though I knew them in the past. I remember their faces, which while different, are a lot like faces of women I know and women I love and have loved. These are women who left their homes and never returned, their bodies found in forest preserves or under bridges, others, never recovered or unearthed only in bones. I think about the names of all the women I haven’t heard of, the news and the public uninterested in their stories because of their lack of proximity to whiteness. It is no secret that we
know them less, if at all, and it is no secret as to why. I learn their names too. I scour the wikipedia pages of these women missing and killed, absorbing the unfathomable details of their last minutes, trying to imagine the fear that must have swallowed their final moments. I am not the only woman who does this. The women in my life love to know, too. Why we terrorize ourselves with the morbid stories of their brutal ends is a mystery. Is it the sheer reality that it could happen to us? Is it preparation for the worst that could come?

I watch Dateline and 20/20 weekly to hear the stories I am already more than familiar with. I think about what it would sound like to have Keith Morrison narrate my untimely death, what pictures would flash on the screen during the interviews, what adjectives they would use to describe the person I was and am no longer. I wonder if these women ever imagined their own posthumous weekend special. I wonder if they ever imagined, in their worst nightmares, that their lives would be reduced to the ways in which they died, their memory stained with undue violence. In her book, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin writes about our culture’s obsession with women dead and dying. She puts into words what I fear most and what I have always known to be true: Our world loves women deceased more than they do alive. I see it everywhere, more than ever before after reading. I see it in the films that perform best at the box office, the binge-watched shows, the novels we read, the stories we tell and the stories we write. “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

One Sunday, I decide to treat myself to a trip to the expensive market in town. As I peruse the artisan cheese section, sort through an array of fresh baked goods, an employee approaches me. He wants to know if he can take me out. I am cordial and kind, but uninterested. He doesn’t accept my polite declination, instead insists he gets his phone to put my number in it. As soon as he jogs off, I set down my findings and fast-walk through the automatic doors to my car. As I pull out of the parking lot and drive away, I see that he has followed me out of the store.

I love horror films about evil forms that aren’t human: ghosts, the occult, demons and devils. In horror movies, the monsters are unreasonable and torturous things that wreak impossible havoc. In these worlds, the terror is terrifying, but impossible. It is relief, escapism, to be scared by something so far from what is actually scary, so real and pervasive and insidious. It is solace to be scared by something other than men.

I don’t carry pepper spray because I doubt my ability to use it correctly at the right moment. I don’t carry a gun but I dream about it. It’s a seductive thought to imagine, being armed and ready for anything and all at any time. But then I remember the damage that hands can do, how quickly they can do it, and how misfired and imperfect it is to believe that a gun could solve an issue that stretches beyond simple and sudden violence. I am a woman painfully aware of the fantasies that end with our death. I also know it does not end there. I know that the unmoving body is not the only consequence to this kind of arousal. I want to be like Lara Croft, swift and vigilant, and fucking sexy, too. Equipped and alert, and capable of my own defense. I want to be like her, but I am reminded that the threats that exist in this world are not the same as those that exist in hers. I have been romantically involved with men that would have killed me with enough time or the right chance. I have crossed paths with many that by sheer statistics, would kill me if the opportunity were to arise.

It isn’t just grocery stores, of course. It’s anywhere outside of the house and in it. It’s any moment alone in public and not. It’s the walk to my car at night but also in broad daylight. It’s the body I have, and the body I don’t, and the body I had when I could just barely call myself a woman and before. I insist on kindness but I also know of its consequences. I want to smile but am aware that what it offers is not the only thing that some will want to take. I say all men instead of some because I can’t distinguish some from others and am afraid to try. I know women smothered to death by the husbands they swore themselves too. I love my husband, but recognize that my certainty, my security is the same that many others proclaimed. Most women are killed at the hands of lovers, family, acquaintances. It is no secret that threat belongs to more than strangers.

My husband doesn’t understand why I want him to join me on errands. Even when he tries to understand, he will never understand. Maybe it is because he is one of The Good Ones, or maybe it is just the fact that the world is different to and for him. Even in my worst dress, I feel like a target. Maybe it’s paranoia or maybe it’s the impact of knowledge on consciousness that allows paranoia to thrive. I am afraid of the world ending and I am afraid of my world ending. I am afraid of dying in the midst of the mundane. I am afraid of dying in general, which does not help the matter. I wonder if I’ll ever be old enough to be unaffected, if age even has an impact at all on this kind of injustice. What good is a body if impossible to keep safe?

At the grocery store, I think about becoming a dead girl. On the walk to work, I think about becoming a dead girl. On the walks I don’t go on, at the pharmacy where a man follows me through the store, at the pharmacy when no one follows me, when someone follows me and I have no idea, when I’m in the bathroom, in bed terrified from what I watched or read earlier that night, at the crosswalks waiting for the light to change, watching the ring camera, as my students tell me about the man they saw watching them through their window, every man who walks too close is a potential theft and I sometimes I dream about killing myself before someone else has the chance to.

A year before Eliza was murdered, on that run before work, her killer had been investigated for rape. The police dropped the case.

-Danielle Shorr

Danielle (she/her) is professor of disability rhetoric and creative writing with an affinity for wiener dogs. A finalist for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Non-fiction and nominee for The Pushcart Prize in Creative Non-Fiction and Best of the Net 2022, her work has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Driftwood Press, The Florida Review, The New Orleans Review and others. @danielleshorr