My bird-like wrist bones are being twisted as he shoves my arm up behind my back. I was so close, inches away from getting out, getting away. But now, here I am, my body being forced to accommodate his sadistic torque. In my brain, I see red flares shooting off like fireworks, a visual representation of the pain I am in. I picture my bones splintering, shrapnel in my body. He twists more. And suddenly, there is a terrible high-pitched alarm sound expanding within the tiny space we’re confined in…I realize it’s coming out of me.
A hand is clapped over my mouth, my nose, and I’m being dragged backward. His body overwhelms mine-it feels like I’m going to be absorbed into him, as he holds my body against his. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. I have lost all agency. They’re going to kill me. Oh no, oh no, they’re going to kill me. This is it finally. Will they just get rid of my body? Lay me in a field somewhere? No shortage of land to hide a dead body. Or will they give me back to my parents? I don’t want my parents to see me like this, with my shorts still off. Oh god, they’ll know what I did, they’ll know. And my mom will be so mad at my “piggishness.” (This is what she calls anything deemed improper from bathroom talk to not sitting with my legs crossed. I am more than sure what I’ve been doing with my uncle and his friend falls under that category of things to be ashamed of.)
But I can’t even worry about that…
My body is starting to give into the lack of oxygen. Fire and ice in my nerves. Not even scared, can’t think. Just all over slump.
He drops my little body into a chair and his friend holds me down into it, even though I’m in no condition to try to escape like I did a few minutes ago. Was it only a few minutes ago? Feels like 3 tragic lifetimes. He ties my wrists and ankles to the chair with baling twine that he pulls from a big bucket. My right arm joints feel tender from being twisted behind my back, but I don’t protest. Instead, I’m just trying to take in all the oxygen I can. It feels cool and blue when I suck it in…it soothes my throat, my lungs. I am in love with it. I don’t want to part with it, even to ask them to loosen the scratchy twine on my sore wrist.
“So, you think you want to tell your mom about what’s been going on, huh, Roxanne?” he says in his weaselly tone. Always that goddamn weaselly, wheedling tone. Fuck, I hate it. I shake my head no. It’s the only part of me that I can move freely. “I don’t believe you…the way you tried running out of here. In such a hurry, you didn’t even put your shorts back on.” I just let my head hang, looking at the dirty floor in his trailer. An ant carries a crumb towards his bed. I want to grind it into the floor with the toe of my shoe just to feel powerful, but I can’t free myself from the wooden chair. “Well, ya can’t tell your family, if you don’t have any family left.” I immediately feel a current of terror run through me. It hit my guts like too cold water from our well. I lift my head up to look at him, to confirm that he means what I think he means. He’s made these threats before, so I know that he may just be trying to scare me. But I also know what this man is capable of.
“Greg, watch her. I gotta go load my gun. Feel free to teach her a lesson in the meantime about what happens to bad little girls who tell secrets.”
No, no, no. I yelp negotiations to my uncle as he puts his pants and boots on. Promises frantically falling out of my mouth, words of honey. I’ll be good. I’ll be good! I’ll do whatever you want. Please don’t leave. I’ll never tell anyone. Please. PLEASE.
He dismisses me with silence, heading out to the milkhouse, presumably to get his gun. And his friend? His friend undoes his belt.
I am bloated with desperation. I beg his friend to stop the madness already set in motion. Please, please help me. Please, help. Please. His friend, unmoved, unzips his pants. It is clear he has no desire to help, only hurt me. I start screaming for help, for my mom, for anything other than reality at this point, trying to pull my wrists out from under the baling twine. The twine is tied so tight that the friction is making my skin turn a violent shade of red that is hot to the touch. I think of my best friend and I giving each other Indian Rug Burn on back of the bus…but only for a minute, then I hear his pants thudding to the floor. The weight of pocket change, that he will throw at me later as he drives away, helping gravity. And then he’s there, in front of me…His strong farmhand grip is latched on my ponytail. “I am going to help you, missy, help you learn a lesson about running your mouth.” I am so close to the edge of something breaking within me, all I can do is make these little hiccupping noises-a cross between shallow breaths and tears.
He is not gentle. I keep gagging. My lips and cheeks feel stretched out and the muscles feel fatigued. My eyes keep watering. My nose is running. I am trying to listen for gunshots, but I can’t hear anything but this terrible transaction that just seems to go on forever. Between the assault and the terror of what my uncle might be doing, I am no longer able to endure any of it. And so, finally, my mind does it, it completely breaks. I am not in my body. I am not anywhere. I am in a black hole that is not recording this reality…floating, body-less…for I don’t know how long.
A thunderbolt of reality finally grounds me when my uncle blows back in to the trailer, slamming the door to his trailer against his wall. Fuck. His friend has already pulled his pants up and is sitting in the other chair. There’s a weird taste of ammonia in my mouth, in my throat…it tastes like what the bucket of water my mom uses to wash the floor smells like. My hands are in numb little fists, till tied to the arms of the chair. I am disoriented and unsure of how long the other guy has been finished…and I can’t get my brain to work. I need to find the words, any words, to ask my uncle if my family is dead and if he is going to kill me next. Instead, my teeth chatter. And I cower and tremble in the wooden chair…unsure if he’s going to shoot me or possibly worse, keep me alive, with no hope of ever getting away from this fucking torture. There are still tears and snot on my face because I can’t wipe them away. You can smell the tang of fear in my sweat.
And then my uncle laughs at me. “Gotcha. I didn’t shoot your family. But next time might be different if you threaten to tell your mama on me again. Understand?” His friend smirks, “I’m pretty sure I reinforced that lesson, Chris. She’s getting pretty good at swallowing.” My uncle grins at his friend, then says to me, “Your mama doesn’t give a shit what happens to you anyway-she doesn’t even like you. I’m the only one around here who finds you special enough to love-so think about that next time you think you’re going to get me in fucking trouble.” As they untie me from the chair, my stomach churns, roiling with rage…it bubbles up into my chest. I try to keep it from reaching my eyes. I want to kill these fuckers. I want to stab them in their fucking eyeballs. I want to cut off their dicks and shove them down their throat-hear them gurgle and choke on them. I want to cut off their fingers one by one and feed them to his dogs, as they’re forced to watch. But I refuse to let them see my terrible rage. I just want to get out of this trailer, so instead of my spiteful hatred, I show contrition. He’s right, I am getting pretty good at swallowing.
For the past few days, I keep dreaming this night after night. This same dream. It didn’t happen in this order or all on the same day-but all of these things happened to me. Multiple times. It’s why I didn’t tell anyone till after I was in my 20s and my uncle was dead…because my dreams don’t lie about him: he truly was that scary and adept at psychological torture in real life. I spent my whole youth waiting to either be killed or see my family killed.
And I realize, I am a grown woman now—but despite all the work, I’m still so much smaller on the inside…I don’t really know how to help that child like a mother would. I am not good at comforting. I am not patient or particularly kind. Oddly enough, I only know how to comfort her like my uncle would…by telling her no one is going to hurt us ever again, because we’re unlikely to meet someone else as scary & rage filled as me…and if anyone ever tries to hurt us, they’re dead, they’re fucking dead.
Did you hear the one about the little girl that swallowed her rage? She grew into a volcano. And all the heat from the screams stuck in her throat would make even Vesuvius proud.
Watch out.
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