She. – A Short Story

This is the first short story from my upcoming anthology, Naked Shingles. Be sure to give the author’s notes at the end of the story a read

Other sample stories from the anthology, Rapture and The Space That Isn’t There, are available to read for free here.

WARNING: This story contains graphic sexual content, triggers for sexual assault/rape.

She.

She is born.

She has her first birthday. Cake smash.

She’s five years old, starting Kindergarten. On the third day of class, a boy pinches her arm. On the fourth day, he pinches it again. Fifth day, pinch. Sixth, pinch. Seventh, eighth, nineteenth, thirty-fourth, ninety-sixth…

She complains.

“It just means he likes you, sweetheart.”

She’s twelve years old. Middle school. Puberty. She’s crushing on the boy in the third row of Math class. He tells his friends she’s ugly. She cries.

She tells her dad.

“That’s just how boys are.”

Sweet sixteen. The boy from Math class is older now. Mature. Popular. He smiles at her. She smiles back. He stops at her locker and hands her a note. Party tonight. Be there.

She’s there. The boy smiles again. Says hello. Touches her hand.

Her stomach flips.

He takes her outside, under the stars. Where it’s quiet. Where they can talk.

They talk.

He leans in, she leans back. Her stomach flips again and she stops. Their lips meet. Clumsy. Sloppy. Beautiful. He pulls back and smiles again. He leads her back inside. Up the stairs.

He closes the door behind him and sits on the edge of the bed, beautiful and perfect. He calls to her. She goes to him, eager. Excited. Wanted.

He kisses her again, gently. Sweetly. Her stomach does backflips. Her hands tremble. She touches his face. He cradles hers, his thumb in front of her ear, his hand caressing her neck, fingers trailing through the back of her long hair. He squeezes. Just a little. Her heart skips. He kisses her harder. He breathes harder. She leans back.

His hand moves to her shoulder. Slowly. Slides to her chest. Slowly. His fingers find her breast. Slowly, his hand squeezes. She moves her hand to his, covering it. Squeezes. Eager. Excited. Wanted.

He pulls his leg over her lap, rests it between her knees. They lie there, quiet. Breathing, kissing, touching, exploring. New. Mature. Grown up.

His hand moves from her breast, fingers trailing softly down her side, then back up. Under her shirt. Her heart skips again, but different this time. Worried. She moves her hand to his and holds it. He pushes back. She resists. Kisses him harder. Can’t this just be enough?

She forgets about his leg until she feels it again. Moving between her knees, forcing a split. His leg bends, he pulls his knee forward. Pushes it into her. She gasps. Distracted.

Forgets his hand, which moves like lightning over her bare skin. His fingers crawl under her bra. He rubs his knee against her. Her body reacts. Natural. Instinct. Uninvited pleasure. Her voice betrays her will. A moan.

Encouraged, his lips kiss her harder. His hand squeezes her harder. His knee rubs her harder.

No.

She pushes back harder.

He moves his knee down, pushes it against her thigh. She tries to sit up. He holds her down. She tries to roll over. He slides on top of her. She starts to scream.

He covers her mouth.

“Shhhhh…”

She moves a hand to his chest. Pushes. He grabs her wrist with his other hand, holds it down. He moves his mouth to her neck. Nibbles her ear.

She starts to cry. She tries to push him away, angry. Heartbroken. Betrayed.

She feels him against her, a lump of denim grinding into her skirt. She screams through his hand. Her teeth find flesh. She bites.

He recoils, clutching his hand, releasing hers. Eyes closed and clenched from tears and rage, her arms flail. She punches. Slaps. Anything.

He grabs her arms, pushes them back down. Takes a pillow. Covers her face.

No! Please! Please, no!

He rolls to his side, pressing her arms against the bed with his body, the pillow to her face. His hand fumbles. She hears the tinkle of metal against metal, then the pop of a button fly opening.

Why? What did I do wrong?

He leans into her harder, the full weight of his body crushing against her face and arms. She hears denim drop to the floor. Her heart races.

Oh, god. This is my fault.

She thinks of her mother as she feels his hand move up her thigh. Thinks of her father as his fingers find her waist. Thinks of middle school when he pulls off her skirt. Kindergarten, when he penetrates her. She feels it, pushing into her like a piston through concrete. Dull and hot, shredding her apart piece by piece. Each thrust rips, each pull tears, her own blood lubricating the violation.

She screams into the pillow. Unheard.

Oh god, mom. Dad? Mommy? I’m sorry!

He heaves into her faster, now. Smoother. He glides. She cries.

He grunts heavy into her ear. She feels his spit on her neck, smells his sweat through the pillow. His body tenses. He groans, collapsing beside her.

He’s done.

She rolls away from him, off the bed. Hits the floor. She scrambles for her clothes, eyes pouring. Spit and snot and mucus drain from her face. She pulls her underwear and skirt on at the same time, her panties bunching up beneath. She feels the blood pooling into them. She doesn’t care.

She hears his voice, looks at the bed. He doesn’t smile. His eyes flash from angry to desperate.

“I’m sorry!”

His arms reach out. She sees him for the first time. Naked from the waist down, limp. Absurd. Disgusting.

She grabs her shoes from the floor, turns to the door.

“Wait!”

She cries, runs down the stairs. Passes curious faces. Oh god. Out the front door. They know. Into the night.

She walks home, still crying. Still feeling him. Inside.

The rage builds, then the shame. She thinks about her mother.

“It just means he likes you, sweetheart.”

********

She’s twenty-three years old. Entry-level. Making her way.

Her boss leers. She ignores it. He flirts. She flirts back. Job security.

Her co-workers tell jokes. She laughs. Outwardly.

She meets a nice guy, for once. They click. Date night.

She’s twenty-four years old. Engaged. Planning. The rest of their lives.

“I do.”

She’s twenty-six. Pregnant. Excited. Not like last time.

She’s twenty-nine years old. Likes being called Mommy. She has a house, a car, a husband. The dream.

She wakes up.

He’s heaving on top of her, fast. Quick. He sees her eyes open. He smiles.

“Good morning.”

She’s sixteen again. She looks at her husband, sees the boy from Math class.

“I wanted to wake you up sweetly.”

I didn’t ask you to.

She forces a smile. Not his fault. He doesn’t know.

He pushes deeper. She winces. Tries to hide it.

“I love you.”

He collapses into her, dead weight on her chest. She wraps her arms around his back. Runs her nails softly over his skin. Love you, too.

She turns thirty. He comes home later every night, wearing a different perfume each time. Until one night, it’s the same as the last night. And the next.

They fight. Over money, over time, over attention. They make up. Angry sex. Violent. Exciting. He gets rougher. Leaves bruises. He gets angrier. Leaves scars. She tries harder.

He’s met someone else. They fight. They separate. They fight. Divorce. Custody fight. He remarries. Their daughter stays with mommy.

He moves on.

She’s thirty-one. He calls sometimes, says he’s sorry. Says the right things. She listens, eager. Excited. Wanted.

She’s thirty-two. He comes over, drunk. Hate fucks her. Hard. She doesn’t know why she likes it.

Am I broken?

He goes. She cries. And waits for him to call again.

She wonders why he won’t just leave, why he won’t stay gone. She wonders why she still waits for him, still welcomes his touch. She wonders why he hates her so much. Why he hurts her so much. Why he’s so cruel.

It must just mean he loves me.

********

Their daughter has a birthday.

She’s five years old, starting Kindergarten.

On the third day of class, a boy pinches her arm. She complains.

“It just means he likes you, sweetheart.”

That’s just how boys are.

********

Author’s Notes

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women will be raped at some point in their lives. One in five. That’s a staggering statistic, but the horrifying truth is that the actual statistic is probably much worse. There are reasons most rapes go unreported and remain hidden. Many reasons, actually. This story is about one.

It wasn’t originally. When I first wrote She., there was a lot more to the story. I cut most of it.

Why? A couple of reasons. First, while I wanted the voice of the story to have a certain sharp, sort of detached rhythm with truncated grammar, I found that there were large sections where I really wasn’t doing that. It was in these sections that I was filling in as the omniscient narrator, telling you everything the character was thinking. It didn’t work, neither tonally with the voice I was going for nor thematically, with what I was trying to say.

What I was doing was mansplaining everything, which was the first thing one of my early sensitivity readers pointed out. I fought against it, but she was right. So I started cutting – the only problem was that I was cutting out all of the reasoning and justifications behind the character’s actions by the end of the story, which was a problem. The original version made it very clear that none of this was her fault, not what happened to her at the party, not what happened with her husband, and certainly not how she ends up perpetuating the cycle with her own daughter at the end.

That was a core theme of the story, and I wanted to preserve it. But then something weird happened. As I cut this bit and excised that one, more and more layers of the very ambiguity I sought to avoid began piling on until, ultimately, the story began to more accurately reflect reality than anything I’d written trying to avoid it.

The truth is that when your first sexual experience is one of violation, it permanently affects your identity for the rest of your life. While psychologists have shown that it might not directly affect your thoughts and actions regarding sex itself, it does do lasting damage to your self-image. Your sense of worth, of value, of your place in any future relationship. This is why the circle of toxic masculinity remains unbroken for so many, and why rape culture seems normal.

Because it — sadly — is.

One in five women. Rape isn’t the exception anymore, if it’s ever been. Men being horrible isn’t an aberration. It’s the norm, even though it shouldn’t be. When the character reinforces the idea, “That’s just how boys are,” she’s just accepting the harsh reality of everything she’s been told and everything she’s known of men throughout her entire life. That really is how the boys she’s known are. She’s not wrong.

She hasn’t known a reality where men aren’t sexual predators – even the nice ones. (There were bits with her ex-husband I cut that made this clear, but I didn’t need to show that. The implication was enough, or even the lack of implication. If readers see her husband as a nice guy from the outside when he was anything but behind closed doors, then that’s just how reality works. These are the monsters that hide in plain sight behind a smile and a dozen roses. The world doesn’t see the dark expectations beneath their apparent kindness, their sense of entitlement underlying every public display of affection, their presumption of ownership over their wives.)

The fact that people can interpret the story in such a way as to blame the main character for perpetuating the cycle of abuse, that anyone can read this story and come away with a sense that I’m victim blaming or shaming her is frustrating, but it’s entirely accurate – because that’s how reality works. In cases of sexual assault against women, while there are obviously hard, clear lines of right and wrong, we too often choose not to acknowledge them. We let ambiguity take over. We saw that with Clarence Thomas, and we saw it again with Brett Kavanaugh. We see it every day.

Women attempting to call out their abusers are paddling a rowboat across an ocean of ambiguity, right into a maelstrom of doubts, accusations, and excuses. It’s a terrifying prospect, which is something any decent human being could see – and feel – on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s face during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

We could see her fear then, and admire her bravery. And still, it didn’t make a difference. The people who wanted Kavanaugh installed on the Supreme Court chose to believe what they wanted to believe, then justified those beliefs with the ambiguity they allowed to build up around Dr. Ford. Doubts, accusations, and excuses. The circle goes unbroken.

In the end, what was originally one of the longer stories in the anthology became the shortest. What started as a story with a very clear and distinct message became shrouded in ambiguity and open to interpretation.

And it’s all the better for it.

********

Other sample stories from the anthology, Rapture and The Space That Isn’t There, are available to read for free here.

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