text me when u get home
a piece of short fiction
*Content warning for implied violence. A short story; also here’s the terrifying song that partly inspired this piece.
You meant to walk home. To grab your groceries and go. Not to linger, moth-like, drawn to the harsh iridescence of this alley, an in-between you shouldn’t approach. You know better. You walked to the store a little later than you would’ve liked, but the sun had just only started to disappear, and your stomach was making these awful noises, so you went. You wanted to get something to eat, and maybe a bottle of cold rosé, and jog-walk home, looking straight-faced and unfuckwithable.
You failed. You stand in front of the wet mouth of this alley and watch something bleed through the evening, a callous something, unknowable, blank-eyed. A gorge opens in your chest. You want to say something. To move closer, get a better look at this bright terrible moment, to see if what you think is happening is in fact happening. You’re leaning too far. Your shoes dampen, scruffy sneakers, no longer white but brownish-cream. You cannot get yourself to move along.
You meant to take a shortcut. Another bad idea, doing that at nighttime. You know better (Everyone will say this later, over and over, even when they’re not actually saying it. They’ll say it in every head-shake, every patronizing glance, every bleary sigh). Now you cling to your paltry little paper bag, feel the wine sweating through, and you can’t move. Your hair is falling into your face, and summer is a collision course, you think, above all else, a series of bloodied roads just waiting, aching, longing for impact, for glass ribboning through skin, guts and machinery disarticulated over asphalt.
You think maybe you should’ve seen this coming. You think maybe what is happening, in this alleyway, is not so far-fetched, not so implausible or surreal or uninhabitable as a reality. After all: you’ve lost count of the lacerations the world has delivered, naturalized, as unremarkable as shedding strands of hair. You can’t taste blood anymore; a cut barely registers through this gauze of living, of woman, of girl-getting-on.
You know it all too well and nothing remains unscathed, so whatever. So here it is. On a blistering Tuesday night in the thick of June. Arriving and exiting simultaneously. An exit and an entry wound.
I was in the store, you say later, hands trembling, body slipping out of your grasp like a language you’ve suddenly lost to time and violence. I was just picking up some things for dinner and—
How to parse this, you think. How to translate such an image into a sentence. A paragraph. You disbelieve yourself even as you try. Besides: you don’t trust the people asking you these questions, their silly uniforms or their shark-like white faces. You never have, never will. The way they’re watching you doesn’t help.
Sorry, you choke out. Sorry. I just—It’s like—
I don’t know how to describe it—how to even begin—
Take your time, is what they’d murmured in response, silently studying your expression. You wondered what they thought they saw. Blankness, a room stretched thin and white and alien? Loss? How can you delineate ‘loss’ in a face, anyways? It sounds like something some overwrought poet would say: you could see the loss written all over her face. You didn’t know what loss ‘looked’ like. How to make it evident. How to hide it, either.
You meant to walk home.
You meant to buy groceries. For the trip to be quick, painless.
To return to your apartment intact, lock up, turn on your cheap alarm system, and cook up a quick pasta, and turn on some music, and sit and read your advisor’s first round of edits on your dissertation. To sip your wine, to eat your meal, to hum along to Fleetwood Mac, and, at some point, wash up, turn out the lights and brush your teeth, wash your face, crawl into bed and probably watch a horror movie. A slasher, most likely, one you’d seen a thousand times, like the original Black Christmas or the first (and best) Scream. This ritual brought you a pleasant, reliable obliteration, disassembled your anxiety and bathed it in camp, gore, trope and archetype. You loved to fall asleep to these movies, would at some point summon the energy to close your laptop and push it aside before passing out.
You meant to pass the night quietly.
Gawking is human nature, says the therapist, later. Also something about the “freeze” response. How this “normal reaction to trauma” should not be internalized as a moral failing. As a moral anything, she insists. You listen to her, and each word melts into that nothingplace underneath guilt, that open grave of well-intentioned sentiments and logically-true assertions that nonetheless bury themselves quickly and soundlessly. Guilt eats those sentiments for breakfast. Guilt smothers each temporary reassurance in total darkness, until you give up on searching for a light switch.
A support group could help, you think. Is that a thing? A support group for people like you? People who’ve…what?
No word you try on sounds correct. Witness. See. Bystand.
Worst, most decadent and self-martyring of all: survive.
No word resurrects the space you fell into on that night. In that alley. No word pins down the moth’s fluttering, half-dead wings.
You are moving closer to this moment, blocking your way home. You clutch your bag and still you walk further into the alley, past its front incisors, into the darker recesses, near what you imagine as the molars of the place. The rot and chipping and yellowing exposed as what it is, up close like this. You can’t scream. You are only half-hidden by the nighttime, and with one glance up, you could be eaten, too.
Why did you keep walking into that alley, you want to know, later. After the fact. What had hidden in your muscle and bone, to so seamlessly urge you forwards, further into this particular scene; what hidden muscle burst into movement and pushed each leg forward, but not your voice, not a yell, a sound, anything that could change the storyline?
You stay awake most nights now, as mean and shaky as a rabid dog, only falling asleep once the sun rises and fills your bedroom. You ask yourself questions all night. You’ve locked yourself into an interrogation room and there’s no exit, is the funny part—you’re doing a much better job, you think, than the police did. You’re examining every detail you have, not all of which you remember in full, and you’re demanding that your instincts atone for not being made of stronger stuff. You’re opening every door. You’re not, as everyone has suggested, leaving it alone.
Before, you’d collected stones, gems, crystals, blah blah blah. You picked things up, as silver-hungry and peckish as a crow, and you pocketed stray ephemera like enchanted dolls. You wanted to feel the meager weight of a lost, random thing in your jean pocket, or in your tote bag, on your tiny nightstand. You’d learned how to clean up and polish animal bones. You wanted to carry around these mementos and conjure up a force bigger, gutsier, than loneliness, than panic.
Now, you study this makeshift altar on your windowsill, all the useless items you’ve transformed into a desperate sort of archive, a substance to replace anxiety, to mimic love, and your throat clenches. You had so many random things in your pockets that night, just for a trip to the store down the street.
You grab a particularly sharp chunk of rock and squeeze your hand around its edges until you draw blood.
It should’ve been me, is what you said to your therapist, and to the people ‘at the scene,’ and to your mother, who cried after you said it, and to your best friend, who also cried. You could not pretend to care about their crying. You meant what you said. You’d rather that option than this one: of seeing, of hearing, of being there, inside of the dark, and still having to somehow go on living like normal. You would prefer stasis. Quiet. Nonexistence, whatever, anything, to this infinite stretch of dust and blood, this one long walk home you cannot seem to stop walking.
The dumpster. A fecund, bleak smell. The stained brick of the alley’s walls. A cold thumb pressed into your throat, exacting, wordless. Noiselessness, deafening, deadening, how the hum of cars and dogwalkers and your own ricocheting pulse dissolved, turned liquid, far-away, a soundtrack to another world, one you wouldn’t be able to fully inhabit anymore. You knew it even then, mid-rupturing.
I love you, your mother says, that night, over the phone, and why does it sound like a threat? Her tone loosens, turns sodden with need, repulses you even as you crave it.
She says, for the hundredth time: I hope you understand that this is not your fault.
Of course you understand it. That doesn’t mean you believe it.
What is loss when it is incomplete, a semicolon, or, actually, an absence of punctuation rather than a period, rather than a full stop? What is loss when it leaves you ‘alive,’ but, well, that ‘alive’ is complicated? What is ‘she,’ when ‘she’ blends with ‘freeze,’ and slowly, what you ‘are’ bleeds into, becomes indistinguishable from, what you did? Actually— what you didn’t do? When ‘she’ is what made you visible and punishable and penetrable in the first place, a shaking formation of self-conscious limbs and silences, of needs locked away and knowledge dulled? When ‘she’ predisposed you, apparently, to hands on you everywhere all the time even when you didn’t want to be touched, on your lower back in the shop, shoved over your mouth in your own bed, or squeezing your younger self’s cheeks, pulling you into a stiff hug, fingers inside of you without asking, or marking your hips and your face and your heart and your psyche, muddling with your own ability to name your desires and feelings and, most of all, fears? What is ‘she’ when you have evacuated the premises, and all that’s left is a ring in your ears, flickering?
She as in ( )
She as in —
As in the dash you keep returning to in your dissertation. Your useless, expensive dissertation, which is now the thing you throw yourself into, full-speed, barely looking up, because what else to do now. You are thinking, always, about things like punctuation, like the dash—how it became Emily Dickinson’s most beloved, burning blade. The dash her poems scald you with, how the dash refuses to process or offer death as a permanent state, how a tomb stays unlocked, how a scream stays unscreamed or at least only half-screamed, how the words start to crawl out of the mouth but never quite make it to open air, how that pulse of yours is still beating and yet—is it really—
What is she to you, now, but the dash, the blade you keep tripping over, the line that refuses to yield or end. The thing you can’t quite say aloud, in plain language, but also, the thing you can’t seem to stop saying, with every movement, every silence, every pause and grimace and jolt.
I’ve never felt as, like, gendered as I do now, is what you say to the new therapist, a month after the alley.
What you mean is: you’d stopped trying to play the part of ‘she’ months before the alley. You stopped trying to constrict your movements, amputate each longing, curtail every need. You stopped trying so much all the time, because you’d never felt like you could nail it, this part of woman, of myth. What you mean is: standing there, entombed in your own silence, your own inaction, you’d reverted to every lesson that girlhood force-fed you. You could not run from what you were even if you didn’t feel like you were it at all; the world, men, alleys, would still snake up and swallow you whole, and they’d do it because they saw you, only read you as legible, when they could call you ‘she.’
You meant to walk home.
You meant to never cross this sort of situation. To never sit in a cold, fluorescent room, and stare into a paper cup of acrid coffee, and listen to paunchy men with guns and receding hairlines and an unspoken, but visible, respect for grotesque abstractions like ‘serve and protect’ and ‘country’ ask you what you’d ‘seen’ that night, what had ‘happened.’
You meant to avoid these rooms, these men, these interactions, at all costs. You severed every prior moment of violation, of hurt, from your own history, calculated the benefits of letting those old violences be ‘real’ and decided to swallow it all down instead, because, ultimately, you could metabolize those memories and still get up in the morning. You meant to stay quiet and endure.
So, yes—you are bad at playing the girl, but maybe not as bad as you think. You’ve regurgitated every guideline, every role description, like it’s reflex. You’ve followed each rule, been a good girl when you could’ve been a furious one, kept yourself composed, and still, you end up in that room. You end up across the table from those men. You end up drinking the coffee, and trying, trying, to speak, and choking on the words.
Yes: you are trying. You do all the right things. You buy a night-light—warm, amber glow of a Himalayan salt lamp—and try to rearrange your tiny room, push your bed against the wall, wrangle your little apartment into a sanctuary, like your therapist recommended. But the warm light and the new configuration, and the new, upgraded, ridiculously overpriced security system you buy and feel bad about buying because you’re probably upholding the police state and making all of your data easily accessible, or whatever, all of this newness does nothing to soften the edges of your nighttime. You stay up. You stay staring at the ceiling or out the window. You try to deep-breathe. You try to massage your temples into clay, into a pliable, easily manipulated substance, but your chest tightens, the mouth of a gun clenched around a bullet, and it stays that way all night. You take melatonin. Valerian. Magnesium. Trazodone. You try the heavier stuff, but the heavier stuff pushes you into full-on zombie territory, drifting lifeless through the days and forgetting where you are. You try, you try, and you start sleeping on your couch—built for one person, not for sleeping—and eventually, you move to the floor, to your crumby carpet, so that you can watch the front door all night long.
Fear is one thing, and it’s more understandable than the other sensation, the uglier one. The feeling you get when you walk past alleys now. The feeling that magnetizes you, inexplicable, to nighttime walks, to smoking outside at two in the morning and not even holding your keys in your fist, not caring, not thinking about all the terrible shit that happens to women alone on street corners at night. The feeling that shoves you into every needlessly risky situation you can find. You stare down random alleys, you lean against their walls, take in the dumpster-air and try not to gag, you bring no weapons, no fighting stance, no bravery, even, just dumb desire, an itchiness in your skin, a wanting to be broken into, to be finally crushed and disposed of the way you think you might deserve. Your therapist would say that this is about your guilt, yet again, about wanting to punish yourself for surviving when the other girl didn’t. About trauma reenactment, or something. Your therapist would probably be right, but you’re still here, watching men slip through the dusk, waiting like a mangy dog. Just give me a bone.
Blood on your sweatpants and face. Hair freshly pulled, the ends wet and grey. A throbbing in your neck and collarbone. Stinging in your palms, cuts on your fingers, spit dried on your cheek. A bruise probably forming. You are not thinking, you are sitting upright, in a puddle of what smells like sewer-water, next to the dumpster, blinking hard, trying to reconfigure the scene. The urgent scent of—What is that scent, exactly? You can’t place it. The whir of cars passing by, of the city droning on, of your own uneven breaths, your own jagged pulse. You grasp at your chest, like you’re trying to catch your own heart in your hands. Your throat feels like a knot pulled free, the thudding drop of the rope after a vicious game of tug-of-war. You can’t quite catch your breath, and you try to scream, to call for help, for anyone, anything, but you can barely stand up. Even as you lurch forwards, towards the dim light of the external world, you’re swallowing your own blood, swallowing the weight of this alley, choking on its guts. You know what’s behind you, but urge yourself not to look, not to catch another glimpse of it—
Does it end, ever, is what you need to know.
At the support group, you ask this question, and no one can really give you a straight answer. Mostly they respond somewhere in the tender vicinity of not really, but. But you learn to live with it, alongside it. But you stop flinching so much. But you think about other things when you wake up in the morning, when you go to bed at night. But you get on a ton of medication. But you find brief flashes of peace, of warm unmemory, and you live on those. But you mother your wreckage and give it somewhere to sleep, just so it doesn’t wake you up every night, just so you can live without it swallowing you.
Not really, but things get better even as they don’t.
After group, one of the girls there approaches you, tentative, her gaze not immediately locking on your throat, what residue of that night lives there, puckered and red. It’s just scar tissue; she’s seen it all before, you’d guess. She looks you in the eye. Asks if you want to get coffee? She knows this can be jarring the first few times. It helps to have a friend, if you want.
You do want, sort of, even as the urge to withdraw, to shrink backwards, arrives as usual. You make eye contact with that urge, but you decide to push beyond it this time, to try and re-enter life, just once.
You say yes.
You get coffee.
You don’t tell her everything, but the way she nods, the way her thumb circles against your palm, how she speaks of her own walk home, so to speak, well, all of it gathers and sprouts like fresh moss in your chest. She orders another oat milk lavender latte and they say they’re out of oat milk, but they have cashew, is that okay, and you both laugh, at the way these moments of sheer silly privilege collide, always, constantly, everyday, with the ruins you both bring everywhere you go, that other-world, that dark bottomless gap. And you know, quietly, suddenly, that you’re not the only one in that alley. You’re not.
At the end of it, she gives you a gentle hug, squeezes your shoulder. Tosses the words at you as you start to walk down the sidewalk, like they’re uncomplicated, like you’re both any two girls in any city in any universe: text me when you get home!
I will, you call back. I will.
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