The Witch

by Miriam Mandel Levi

The only other person I knew who feared darkness as I did, was my grandfather. He grew up in a village in Lithuania where ghosts, draped in prayer shawls, prayed upside down in the synagogue and invited unsuspecting boys to join their minyan, while others in the study hall rattled the windows on winter nights.

For me, nights brought the witch. She would tap on my window pane with her long, curled nail, her tattered black cape flapping in the moonlight. Where her eyes should have been were black-holed sockets. Her teeth, she had three, were pointed and razor sharp. I trembled under my ruffled yellow bedspread. As her silhouette loomed larger and larger, I would leap from my bed and sprint headlong through the darkness to my parents’ room. There I crawled between their sleeping forms on the wire-veined electric blanket, safe. Too soon though, my father would awake. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he would say, “There’s no such thing as witches,” and he would carry me back to my room.

My grandfather braved the darkness every night on his way home from cheder. “We started out in a pack, lit up with lanterns,” he told me, in Yiddish- accented English. The autumn sun lit the sky amber, and my grandfather and I walked side by side, crunching leaves with our boots. “One by one, though, my friends dropped off to their houses, until I was left alone.” Then he whispered, “I ran past the cemetery as fast as my legs would carry me, so the demons wouldn’t get me.” He pulled me to his thick wool coat, as if to reassure me, or perhaps himself.  

“Were there witches?” I asked.

“No witches,” he replied, “Poles.”

After World War One, Ulkenik fell under Polish control. The Poles rode through the village on horses, shooting in the air and robbing its inhabitants. They caught young Jewish boys and put them to work, cutting and hauling wood in the bush, from which they never returned. “They killed Jews on the streets … for nothing,” my grandfather said, his lips curling in revulsion.  I tugged his gloved hand with my mitt and he turned to me.

“But those bad people aren’t in Ottawa, right?”

“Right,” he said, and the warm breath of his words met the warm breath of mine in a white cloud.

  I spent many weekends playing with cousins in my grandparents’ basement amidst several frightening relics. There were musty old books, a broken gramophone, and an out-of-tune upright piano with several broken keys. But the scariest item was a painting. In the painting was a large pile of rubble, as if moments earlier the buildings which stood in that place had collapsed. In the midst of the wreckage stood a woman in a tattered dress, holding a cinder block over her head. Years later, I discovered that the painting was a depiction of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. As a child, though, all I saw was a woman’s desperation, for she had lost all she had. She told me, in a parched, cracked voice, that any life could turn to rubble like hers, and I thought of how much I stood to lose. She was the only reminder in my everyday life of the six million about whom I learned at Hillel Academy.

Every spring on Holocaust Remembrance Day the pupils of Hillel Academy gathered in the basement of the school and sat cross-legged on the cold cement floor. A white canvas screen, perched on spindly tripod legs, stood in the far corner. Silent black and white movies, with jumpy, snowy footage, flashed across the screen, recalling a world of evil and devastation that somehow spared our families and us. Nazis in impeccable uniforms taunted Jews; Jewish families huddled together with battered suitcases; children with big yellow stars and frightened faces stared out at us. We sat, hands in our laps, in uncomprehending silence. Then we filed back to our classrooms for the spelling bee and hot spaghetti lunch. None of my teachers explained what hardships the people in the movie had faced. No one reassured me that whatever happened to them would not happen to me one day.

          I tried to make sense of it. They had old, gray clothes. I had a fluffy white muff to keep my hands warm in winter. They were hungry. I had pancakes with maple syrup. They had nothing. I had tickets to the Ice Capades. Nobody I knew got sick or died or was murdered. Nobody I knew was angry or sad. I only knew one mean person and that was my principal, Mr. Heilman, who even at his most vexed would not likely have killed me.

When I was nine, though, someone I knew was singled out by the witch’s long, curled nail, for misfortune.

Uncle Hymie, my father’s uncle, had his left forearm amputated. When he came for dinner one evening, on a rare visit from London, I saw how the shirt sleeve, where his arm should have been, was pressed flat, its cuff fastened with a safety pin.

“What happened to his arm?” I asked my mother in the kitchen.

“An accident,” she answered, placing a row of salad plates along the counter.

“What kind of accident?” I asked in a loud whisper.

She didn’t answer.

“What does his arm look like?”

“Like yours, but without the part from the elbow down.” She placed a lettuce leaf and piece of fish on each plate.

“Where is his arm?”

“What arm?”

“The missing arm,” I said too loudly.

“Sshh,” she said swiveling to hand me two plates. “Can you put these on the table?”

 As I sat across from Uncle Hymie at dinner, I imagined the empty space beneath his shirt, his knobby elbow, and the missing arm strewn somewhere in a field where I might come across it one day while picking dandelions. At that prospect, I bolted upstairs to my room, sat on the floor next to the door, hugged my knees, and pressed my ear to the wood. “Miriam,” my mother called, “Will you be coming down to join us?”

Uncle Hymie, the black and white Holocaust Jews, the woman in the rubble, and the witch peopled my darkness. Each of them told me, in a different way, that I wasn’t safe. Not really.

          If I were a child today, someone might have explained to me just how Uncle Hymie came to lose his arm, and reassure me that he managed just fine without it. I doubt I’d be exposed to Holocaust movies in primary school. But, if I had asked a question about the woman in the rubble, I would have learned that bad things happened during the war and that she was brave and resilient and that, remarkably, so was I. My parents would have been counseled to acknowledge my fear and talk about it because when fears are not addressed, they grow out of all proportion. My fear of the dark might have even merited a diagnosis, nyctophobia. I would have liked that word.

          I don’t blame anyone. It was commonplace for parents in the Sixties to believe that they could shield their children from misfortune. The world was a safer place. Ottawa, in particular, was a provincial city with virtually no violent crime. Nobody had to “street proof” me to be wary of strangers. Strangers carried my bike home when I got a flat tire and returned my lost balls from their yards. If there was upheaval in the world at large—war, revolution—I didn’t know it. Terrorist attacks and natural disasters didn’t flash across my T.V. screen. My safety depended on Elmer the Elephant, who told me to look both ways before I crossed the street, “Use your eyes, use your ears, and then you use your feet.”

          As an adolescent, I pretended to be brave. With my heart in my mouth, I went down to the basement alone to get the laundry, then took the steps three at a time on my way back up. I watched movie thrillers squinting between my index and middle finger. But my fears would not relent. In fact, the more time passed, the more I felt time was running out, that at some point God would catch on that, in doling out misfortune, He had overlooked me. Then, realizing his omission, he’d send me packing to the darkest, dankest place He could find.

He hasn't yet. Over the past twenty-four years, I've mothered three children with all the hair-raising experiences involved in parenting. I have lived in Israel, with war and terrorism. I’ve lain in bed wondering where, on this dark night, my sons in the I.D.F. are patrolling. Surely, my red badge of courage is long overdue. And yet, after all these years, I’m still scared. I can’t shake the thought that at any turn, I might come across Uncle Hymie’s arm in a field.

There is, perhaps, one difference between the scared of then and the scared of now. Today, my fear makes me hold things dear: reading side by side in bed with my husband, our heads touching on the shared pillow; hearing my eighty-two year old father’s enthusiastic voice on the phone when I call Canada, “Sheila, quick, pick up the phone, it’s Mir;” dancing wildly in the living room with my daughter to “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, spinning and gyrating and laughing; coming across an unforgettable sentence in a book: “the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones.”; the chirping of the swallows in the trees at sunset; a bowl of French onion soup.

On a recent trip to Prague, I bought a hand-painted wood marionette. Of the hundreds of marionettes hanging from the ceiling and walls of the workshop—kings, queens, jesters, maidens, goblins, and wizards—I chose a witch. When I brought her home and hung her in the living room, my children protested, “She’s ugly … she’s creepy." With her sunken black eyes, jagged chin, and bony sharp-nailed fingers, she is indeed.

The witch watches from her post on the wall. Sometimes I meet her glare head on and a chill runs up my spine, but most of the time, I pay her little heed. I know she’s wreaking havoc out there.

 For many years I had hoped the witch tapping at the window would take flight. Instead, I’ve let her in. We've struck an uneasy alliance.

Miriam Mandel Levi's essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction's anthology, Same Time Next Week, Brain Child, Literary Mama, Under the Sun, Poetica, Sleet and Tablet. She lives in Israel.

Eddie and Me

by Rick Kempa

What we had in common were our differences from everybody else: he was the heaviest kid in our school, and I was the smallest. In a high school of over 1,600 boys, these distinctions mattered. Our lot was to bear their taunts and nicknames. Thanks to a cruel gym teacher, I became known as "Peanut," a name especially galling because it suggested not only my size but the root of all my troubles at that time, my prepubescence. Eddie, too, shuffled back and forth between classes with his head down, dodging nicknames.

One year ahead of me, he was initially my older brother's friend, with whom I hung around by invitation only when they needed more bodies for the hockey games that were played in his backyard. (To lure friends over, his father and he had sculpted a miniature ice rink, piling up dirt embankments in the fall and diligently flooding it all winter long.) In Eddie's eyes, I was of the same low rank as his younger brother Joey, a sixth grader. In fact, I was inferior to Joey because I couldn't skate. Thus I was always the goalie, my mission not only to keep the puck from entering the makeshift goal, but from smacking their back door. A fearful sight it was, to see Eddie advance like a mountain in motion and then loom above me, poised to strike! But I had three things going for me: agility, a goalie stick big enough to guard my groin, and a fierce, almost suicidal hunger for respect. I lived for the sound of being cussed out when I stopped a breakaway.

Winter was not half over when the hockey season abruptly thawed out. For my brother and the rest of the gang, Eddie's thirty‑by‑thirty‑foot rink, with its no‑slap-shot rule and his smiling mom always in the window overlooking us, suddenly became claustrophobic, and they began instead to hang out in someone's garage. I was not invited, and neither was Eddie.

No greater misery exists than to come home from the school halls full of laughter, shouts, and promises of phone calls and to have nothing better to do than watch cartoons. For two sad weeks Eddie skated slow circles in his backyard, a hockey stick dangling from a gloved hand. Then he called. He asked first for my older brother, knowing full well he was out, and then he informed me curtly that if I wanted to come over and shoot the puck around for a while, I could. And so out of sheer need our friendship was born.

Our routine that winter involved two games, pinochle and chess. Always we played at his house, huddled over a card table in his unfinished basement. His mother would unfailingly appear with milk and cookies. A transistor radio, its antenna pointed towards the one square shaft of light, would be tuned to top forties. In time we were comfortable enough with each other to croon along with the songs that held no literal meaning for either of us: "Honey, Sugar Sugar. You got me lovin’ you.”

Pinochle was Eddie's forte, chess mine, and so alternating the games meant switching roles of champ and underdog. Eddie kept a record of the pinochle results, arranging the data in as many ways as he could think of: won‑lost record and percentages, total points scored, average points per game. These tabulations were posted on one of the basement beams, open to the world, had the world cared to see. I kept the chess records in my diary, along with blow‑by‑blow accounts of the games.

 When the weather broke, we added a third game to the repertoire, one‑on‑one basketball on Eddie's backyard court. In this we used our physical traits to full advantage. I would run like mad, side to side, back and forth, until Eddie dizzied and I could break for the hoop. Eddie's main move, infuriatingly unstoppable, was to back in towards the basket, guarding the ball with his body and fending me off with his elbows, until he got to a certain familiar crack in the driveway, whereupon he would whirl and unleash a hook shot. Swish!

And so my first year in high school swung from worst to best. Having an upperclassman for a friend raised my status immeasurably, at least in my own eyes. The heckling probably didn't diminish any—it may have in fact intensified, to celebrate the sight of the two of us, Biggest and Smallest, together—but I was newly deaf to it. As for what our coupling did for Eddie, what I lacked in terms of status I made up for with raw devotion. I was like a cute pet. His mother could've saved herself a sack of sugar that winter. Had she fed us bread and water instead of cookies, I wouldn't have gone anywhere.

When the locker next to Eddie's became vacant and Eddie helped arrange for me to move into it, our happiness was complete. As often as our schedules would allow, sometimes for just a few seconds, we would meet there. At last we could add our own spirited voices to the babble of sound! We belonged.

But although we rubbed elbows all day long, we would not make after‑school plans in the hall; we had a more delicious way to do that. We lived just two blocks apart, but took separate busses. I would race home to drop my books and change my clothes. Then, just as I was getting my sneakers laced, without fail every day the telephone would ring and Eddie would nonchalantly ask, would I like to come over for a game? Oh the sweet shrill sound of that phone! The respectful gaze of the younger brother!

The following year, Eddie was the first of any in his class to learn to drive, which restored to him the status of the backyard hockey days. This was especially so because he drove a car befitting his size, his uncle's Monte Carlo. He steadfastly refused my brother's overtures to be the chauffer for the Friday night dances, but he was soon recruited for the week night "open gyms," those three‑hour‑long orgies of pick‑up basketball. You'd think Eddie would not bear up well in such a scene, but he did fine. Sure he was slow, but he was a master at positioning, a true force beneath the boards, and even without cracks in the floor to guide him, a deadeye.

His only problem came when, playing with guys who did not know him, he would end up on a "skins" team, the ones who were supposed to play without shirts. Eddie would flat‑out refuse to take his off, pretending not to hear the other's orders, turning his back on their snide remarks. Finally he'd bark, "You know who I am. Let's play.”

With his fleshiness and my persistent hairlessness, the locker room continued to be a place of shame for us both and so we conspired to avoid it. At night's end, when the gym moderator would herd us all off the floor, Eddie and I would dawdle at the water fountain or stare into the trophy case, until we were sure that the other boys were safely in the shower. We'd then hurry to our lockers where, back to modest back, we'd shed our gym suits for street clothes.

---

The rate of change in high school is phenomenal. Weeks are like years, while each school year, punctuated by the infinity of summer, is a lifetime. And in each new life, the allegiances shift as easily and quickly as in an evening of pickup basketball.

In my third year, Eddie's fourth, the luster was gone from our after‑school routine. We still enacted it a couple of times a week, when I wasn't involved in one of the after‑school clubs I'd joined. (He knew my schedule; the phone still rang on cue.) But pinochle and chess were definitely "uncool," and our one‑on‑one basketball games were serious affairs, in which winning, or as we said it, "owning" the other, began to matter too much.

The truth was Eddie was "uncool" too. For me, all kinds of welcome changes had occurred. I had worked my way into a clique that specialized in all‑night poker games. I got a driver's license and ventured out on a date or two. But the best development by far was physical: I had begun to grow, an inch at a time, and had finally sprouted body hair. Eddie, meanwhile, seemed to stay the same, a big relic from an earlier, darker age.

There came a day when, to his phone invitation, "Whattya say to a game of one‑on‑one?" I answered, too proudly, "No thanks, I'm going over to some other guy's house." In the few seconds of stunned silence, his breath came fast and wheezy. Finally he muttered "no problem" and hung up. From then on his calls were studiously irregular, and his voice, when he did call, had a fierce don't‑care‑if‑you‑do tone to it.

In fact, Eddie was doing his own desperate best to belong, ventur­ing out with my brother and me to the Friday night dances, where he'd plant himself stoutly at the fringe and pretend it wasn't agony to be there. We would drop in on him between our forays out to the parking lot to swill more apple wine. But as our alcohol‑levels climbed, our visits grew more in­frequent and less genuine. It became possible to forget that he was there.

Dropping him off at his house at the end of one such night, we indulged in one of those mindless fits of cruelty that can come so naturally to young people. As Eddie was walking up the driveway in the glare of our headlight beams, his shadow looming against the garage door suddenly struck us as funny. My brother began to flash the brights on and off. He revved the engine, inched up close behind Eddie, so that the shadow was immense, and we began to chant, mimicking, I suppose, his mother, "Eddieeee! Eddieeeeee!" He fled inside.

The enormity of our crime dawned on me at once. The look on his face had been more like terror than anger, as if we might hit the gas and run him down. All night on the slow drift back to sobriety, that look was fixed on me. Sometimes it shifted to one of reproach—how could you do this on my own turf?—then back to the blind fear of the hunted animal. These were not mere dream images; he was lying wide‑awake in his own bed, I knew, and these were his eyes. I wanted to race back over that very minute and beg forgiveness. The next day I did go over, but a long leaden sleep had blunted my urgency, and I did not beg. His mother did not smile, and Eddie would not see me. Not then, not ever again.

---

There is one more scene. It is near the end of my third year, Eddie's last. I am up in the balcony of the gymnasium with four hundred other boys. Down on the gym floor, a game of dodge ball is in progress.

As with all forms of war, the rules of dodge ball are few and basic: two teams of thirty or so boys, four soccer balls, each team trying to decimate the other, either by smacking opponents with a ball or by catching a ball and thus eliminating the thrower. There's a safety zone for each team at opposite ends of the gym, a line which the other team may not cross, and so, seen from above, the action is more wavelike, ebb and flow, than it is chaotic.

The contest proceeds with the usual quick attrition until on one team there remains four of the best and strongest, while on the other team just one, and lo and behold it's Eddie.

It looks bad for him. Each of the four guys has a ball, and Eddie is backed into a corner of his safety zone. The crowd is laughing, yelling out fat-boy jokes, itching for a quick, fierce kill. My ears are burn­ing, my lunch flip‑flopping inside me. I'm afraid of the hurt that is occurring, that is going to get worse.

The four unleash their throws all at once, and as if he has an eye for each ball, Eddie twists and turns, like a ballerina in slow motion, and eludes them all. He manages to capture one ball, while the other three bounce back to his attackers. Again they synchronize their throws, again he writhes away, and again captures a ball.

Up in the balcony, the tide is turning, the insults snuffed out by a growing sentiment for the underdog. Twice more his attackers throw, and now Eddie has all four balls, and, with two of them under each arm, he is advancing.

The four are running backwards to their safety zone. They don't have to retreat; instead they could surround him, like wolves around a lone bull, and simply wait. In order to attack, he'd have to put down one, maybe two balls; he'd have to turn his back on half of them.

But a host from on high is pounding its feet in unison, screaming in a rising frenzy, "Go! Go! Go!" It's not one against four, it's four hundred and one. Against such odds, teamwork means nothing. Each of the four is running for his life.

And Eddie is advancing. His bigness is not fat, it's power. The four are not wolves, they're jackals scattering before a lion.

When they can retreat no further, Eddie puts down two of the balls. He paces back and forth along the edge of the safety line. He singles out one of the four, glowers at him until the kid is half dead with fear, then finishes him off with a scorch­ing blow to the back. The multitude is delirious. He does the same with the second guy, but this time one of the survivors catches the ball on the rebound, and like any cornered beast will do, he charges. Eddie scurries backwards, drops the ball he's hold­ing, and faces the kid head on, palms open. The throw gets him right in the belly and he smothers it. The kid is out. Eddie then reverses himself, bears down on the last guy, who is squat­ing above one of the other balls. Smack! The impact is heard even above our shrieks (for I am shouting now too). The kid is sent sprawling, and Eddie is alone on the floor.

And now amidst our bedlam a new chant is taken up. Soon the gym is rocking with "Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!”—a no‑nonsense cry of adulation this time. In his person, every boy's fantasy has come true, has been exceeded even. The anonymity that was his life before now is no longer. He could be student body president. And I'm clapping and stomping with the rest, but not chanting, because I'm too choked up. And I'm wondering, Eddie, does this destroy the echo of that other chant?

He does not wave or even look at us. He walks to the sidelines, to the back-slaps and high‑fives of his teammates and to the locker room, where, finally, he too can shower with pride.

Rick Kempa lives in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he teaches writing and philosophy at Western Wyoming College. His most recent books are the anthology Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon from Lithic Press, which he edited with Peter Anderson, and a poetry collection Ten Thousand Voices, published by Littoral Press in Richmond, CA. Visit his website to learn more about his work.

Shirley?

by Chelsey Clammer

My first sponsor was a four-foot-two black woman who used to be a police officer. I do not remember her name. She would sit in meetings and knit sweaters for her grandchildren, pink and yellow cotton yarn twisting around her knobby knuckles. She asked one day if the theme of the meeting could be forgiveness. Her reasoning, she said, was because “I need y'all to forgive me because I forgot to take my medication this morning.” Immediately upon her confession about her mental instability I wanted her to be my sponsor. I could connect with that.

I want to say her name was Shirley. This was two years ago in Chicago, where I first got sober. I was in those meetings because I was trying to stick to my sobriety, trying to make it a permanent thing in my life.

I was fresh out of the psych ward where I spent the days sitting in group therapy and learning about my “hot thoughts.” The lot of us patients sat around in a circle, our common element that we were a bunch of suicidal people trying to understand what made us tick. What was making me tick was that I was drinking too much and was always wallowing in the thoughts of my dad who died of alcohol poisoning. I didn't want to say this in any of the psych ward group therapy sessions because then I would have to talk about my own drinking habits.

One day, though, a social worker called me into her office because she wanted to “assess” me.

“How much do you drink?” The social worker asked. She had a plump, chalky face and crisp blonde highlights. Gray streaks showed through. She looked tired, bored as she assessed my drinking habits.

“Oh just a few beers every other night,” I lied.

“That's almost a lot.”

Fuck, I thought. Even my lie sounded like too much. If only she knew how much I really drank—two bottles of wine a night, along with some start-the-night-right shots of whiskey—then she would probably throw my ass into rehab.

“Most people only drink a few times a week. But if you're drinking, let's say four times a week, then there is a chance you might have a problem with alcohol.”

Hell yeah I do, I wanted to say. I drank every night, and it wasn't only beer. I had my nightly habit of wine and whiskey, my 3pm starting time with happy hour Margaritas, and my morning hangover cure of a Bloody Mary. But I kept quiet in her psych ward office, stared at the yellow walls stuffed with our bodies.

She turned on her computer and went to an Alcoholics Anonymous page.

“Let's get you set up to go to a meeting when you are released.”

“I'm an atheist,” I said flatly. I knew that AA was all about god and spirituality, and I wanted none of it. I possibly had a desire to stop drinking, but only because I wanted to stop being hung-over. But I still wanted to drink, could not even fathom what my life would be like without it.

“It's okay,” she said, as if my atheism were a flaw. “There are AA meetings for atheists, too.” She made a couple of clicks on the computer, and printed a list of meetings I could go to. “Here, keep this and go to a meeting when you are released.”

“Sure. Thanks,” I said and pushed out of the chair. I returned to the group therapy room and stuffed the list into the trashcan before anyone could see it. I did not want to be an alcoholic like my father. I believed it was a despicable thing to be, and no matter how much I knew I should stop drinking, how much I knew the drinking was ruining my life, I would not admit this. I did not want to be like him.

But I am like him.

When I was released from the psych ward a week later, I did, in fact, get my ass to an AA meeting. The hangovers became too much for me to handle, as well as the morning depression caused by them and the way I could not stop thinking about my dead, alcoholic father. At my first AA meeting, I met Shirley, or whatever her name was. Her squat little body sat across from mine, and I peered into her face after her “I forgot to take my medication this morning” confession. She didn't say anything else during that meeting, but I walked up to her afterward and asked if she wanted to be my sponsor. I thought that's what alcoholics do. They go to meetings and they get a sponsor.

“Well sure, honey!” she said in her sprightly little grandmotherly voice and gave me a hug. I could see the top of her head, see the gray wiry streaks that were sticking up above a mass of black hair that was slowly turning gray as well. She had glasses that swallowed her face, thick lenses amplifying the wrinkles around her eyes.

After the meeting we went across the street to a Mediterranean restaurant. I did not have anything to eat as I was trying to lose weight, because I did not know what else to do with my time. I used to consume my time with drinking, with the obsession over the drink. Without that in my life, I turned to trying to control my body, to obsess over my physical form. Shirley had a pita sandwich. In between bites in which tahini and bits of falafel dripped down her brown chin, she asked me to tell her about my life.

I didn't know where to start, what to say about my life. Most of the time I described myself by saying I worked at such-and-such place, or that I was a runner and interested in writing. I couldn't tell if she wanted to know about my drinking habits or just what kind of a person I was. I decided to not talk about myself.

“My dad was an alcoholic,” I said. “He used to get drunk and threaten suicide.”

“What?!?” she said. As she was an old woman, I couldn't tell if she said this because she couldn't believe it or because she couldn't hear me.

“Well, he died from alcohol poisoning six years ago, and now I'm starting to accept the fact that I'm like him, that I'm an alcoholic, too.”

“That's good, honey.”

She finished eating quickly enough so I didn't have to spill my soul to her that day.

We never met again.

But we did exchange phone numbers, and I would call her in the mornings on my way to work. We would say the serenity prayer over the phone together while I sat on the train. It felt awkward, but also a little comforting. With so much loneliness I was feeling now that I had lost my drinking buddies, it was good to have someone who would sit and talk with me, even if we were just saying a prayer together, saying the same memorized words at the same time. It was not a conversation, but a belief in the fact that you do not have to be alone, that even when two people are so vastly different you can find your connections—like being an alcoholic—and go forward with it.

I do not know what type of drinker Shirley was. But what I did come to understand was that she hadn't given up on life. She had come to accept that her life had become unmanageable when she was drinking, and so she turned her life over to the will of some higher power and said the serenity prayer every morning. During our Mediterranean restaurant meeting, as I kept quiet and watched her eat, Shirley did tell me a little bit about herself, a little bit about the traumatic events she had gone through—a runaway son, a horrible divorce, health problems—and was able to get sober and stay sober after all of them.

That is what I wanted.

I soon moved to Minneapolis to get out of the city in which I had so many drunk memories. I never told Shirley I moved, never spoke to her again, never said that prayer with her again.

Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women's Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in THIS, The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Sleet, The Coachella Review and Make/shift among others. She received the Nonfiction Editor's Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination. Clammer is a weekly columnist for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, as well as the assistant nonfiction editor for Eckleburg and The Dying Goose. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.

The Razored Truth: My Journey from Rape into Survival

 by Janna Vought

            I was raped.  Yes, rape, that dirty four letter word that makes people cringe with discomfort.  Yes, rape, the one crime that perpetuates itself throughout the generations, victimizing women over and over again.  Yes, rape, the ultimate act of savage domination.  Rape.  I joined the ranks of hundreds of thousands of women around the world who are swallowed into the bowels of the beast the moment another forces their way into their sacred heart, uninvited—unwanted. 

            Every two minutes a woman in the United States is raped.  My two minutes came when I was fifteen, vulnerable and naive to the reality women face: the constant presence of the threat of victimization.  One hundred and twenty seconds reshaped my destiny.  One thirtieth of an hour destroys. Two minutes—an eternity.  In those brief moments, the time it takes to brush your teeth, call a friend, savor a slice of cake, read three pages in a Stephen King book, watch the sun set over the Rocky Mountains, swim a lazy circle in a tranquil pool, my world collapsed.  Two minutes—a drop of rain in midnight pools glistening on the sidewalk after the storm—nothing.

          A number holds no meaning.  The occurrence of even one sexual assault is one too many.  Statistics do nothing more than sterilize the personal element of crime, the stories of the people suffered, a face to place with a position on a chart, a news report, or a regurgitation of fact.  Two minutes begat my journey into Hell.  

            I knew about rape.  As a teenager in the late eighties, I believed sexual assault only happened to older women who lived alone or naive little girls.  There was no sex offender registry, no understanding of preventative concepts like never allowing your drink out of your sight at parties or holding your keys out as a weapon against a possible attack.  I watched films in health class depicting a stranger lurking in the shadows, waiting as a frail and defenseless adolescent walks down the street, her nose buried in a library book, travelling from some unknown location where people loved and cherished her.  He stepped out from the bushes, or car, or whatever other camouflage prop he chose to use, offering her candy, a toy, or her picture in a magazine.  I knew the stories: don't talk to strangers, never get in a vehicle with someone you don't know, yell "fire!" if someone tries to grab you on the street, never let yourself be taken to a second location.  It was a mantra repeated endlessly to classrooms filled with adolescent girls—fear the stranger, he desires vile deeds—but I felt immune to the advances of sexual pariahs that roamed the streets.  Rapes happened in dark alleys, abandoned cars, or in bedrooms on quiet streets that hid families' secret shame, not to me.

            Never once, ever, did any health teacher or gym instructor, or even our mothers mention the danger hiding among us, the bright-eyed young misses who dreamed of finding their prince charming in the halls of their high school, unaware of the danger looming—acquaintance rape.  I, too, held onto those fantasies of love found in the lunchroom across the pizza buffet, or at the Sadie Hawkins dance, when I, the beautiful and daring girl approached the mysterious dark-eyed boy standing across the dimly lit gymnasium festooned with balloons and cascades of crepe paper and asked him to dance.  I was no different than the rest.  I engaged in the rebellious, yet typical behaviors for a young woman my age:  I thwarted the attempts of my overtly strict parents who sought to keep me chained to my innocence, I drank at parties, I skipped a class now and again to drive to a neighboring school to watch the varsity football team practice, played volleyball in the park, or stayed out past my curfew.  I bolted through my adolescence without pause, embracing each new experience with vigor.  How was I to know that a friend would exploit such innocence?  

            There is nothing unique or special about my assault.  I was not grabbed off the street, taken to a hidden location and molested.  An intruder did not break into my parents' house and rape me.  My attacker was someone I saw in the halls of my school every day.  I talked to him, laughed at his boyish pranks, cheered for him at soccer games.  I made the mistake of assuming that no harm comes from those we know—trust. 

            I learned my harsh reality at a party on Valentine's Day.  I made all the mistakes of the "classic" rape victim: I allowed myself to become separated from my group, I drank alcohol that inhibited my thinking skills and ability to react to danger in a timely fashion, I wore clothing that revealed the right amount of my blossoming form.  Phil was there.  Phil was a junior at my school, a popular soccer player whose dark shock of hair and olive eyes made him most popular among the female population.  My heart skipped as he flashed me a smile embedded in a mass of metal, braces covering his perfect teeth.  My infatuation with him permeated the marijuana-stained air.  He detected my scent: drunk, isolated, yearning for his company.  He wove his way through the sea of gyrating figures rubbing against each other to the pounding music searing through the small stereo, straight to me:  "Hi, Janna, what's up?"

          "I'm just looking for my friends.  Have you seen them?"

          "Nope.  Do you want me to help you find them?"

          "Sure," I said, a shy smile stealing across my face.  I tried to maintain my composure, but my stomach swelled with surging anxiety.  All the alcohol I had consumed clouded my mind, mixed with the intoxicating smoke wafting about the room.  My head paddled through the fog trying to grasp the situation unfolding around me.

            Phil pressed his hand against the small of my back, guiding me toward a group of boys crouched around a keg, trying to run the tap.  Next to them, a table held rows of cups filled with beer.  Phil grabbed two off of the table and handed me one.  I tilted my head back and opened my throat and let the tepid liquid flow.  I handed him the empty cup and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.  "Impressive," he said, grinning at me with his metallic smile.  He set the cups down and grabbed my hand, leading me away.

            My eyes blurred the images before me.  Vague shadows faded in and out of my gaze, each figure unrecognizable to me.  I felt a dense pressure in the back of my head.  Between the alcohol I shared with my friends in the car, and all of the cups of beer at the party, I lost track of my consumption.  I tried to form my mouth around words, but my lips suffered from paralysis.  All I could muster was a string of incoherent mumbles.  I felt Phil beside me, but my eyes could not focus on his face, his olive eyes.  I noticed the pressure of his hand on my back increasing, pressing me forward with urgency.  "Where are we going?" I asked, stumbling over feet shuffling around the floor to the latest song raging through the speakers.  No answer, or at least, none that I recognized.  His other hand gripped my shoulder, steering me towards a door at the back of the room.  As we reached the threshold, I made out the silhouette of my friend Deann on the couch, smoking a joint with a group of people. "It's Deann!" I slurred.  I tried to wave, but Phil grabbed my hand, pushing it down to my side.  He reached in front of me and opened the door.  I peered into the darkness, unable to see anything.  The hand at my back pushed me in—swallowed up in the pitch.

            The only sound in the room was the click of the lock on the doorknob and my labored breathing.  I tried to gather my thoughts, assess the situation, but I had no time.  The dark bore two hands that shoved me down onto a bed.  The combination of the alcohol and second hand marijuana smoke rendered me defenseless, my synapses firing a split second too late.  As if in a dream, I hovered outside of my body, watching the horror unfold.  He shoved my pants down around my calves, pulling at the hose I wore underneath.  He fell on top of my motionless frame, a suffocating pressure on my chest.  I tried to scream, but my voice fled the scene, escaping into the night for self preservation.  He covered my mouth with his, flicking his tongue in and out as a viper samples the air for its prey.  He tasted like beer and cigarettes.  I gagged from the wretched combination.  With a heave and thrust, pain exploded from within, a fire burning so hot and deep it robbed me of my breath.  No sound escaped me, the only noise coming from the black was a low guttural moan—the devil inside me.

            When he finished, he pushed himself off the bed, releasing my constricted lungs.  I took a deep breath; I searched for virgin air.  He switched on the overhead light in the room and exposed my devastation.  "Get up," he said, a smug smile on his face, his eyes cold and dead.  I rose off the bed and pulled on my clothes, humiliated as he stood and watched me.  As I buttoned up my shirt, the one selected with such care earlier in the night, he swung open the door and beckoned to one of his friends standing outside the door.  He walked in, glancing at me and then the rumpled bed, a small red stain among the floral print revealed Phil's conquest, "All right!  You popped her!" his friend Scotty whooped, slapping Phil on the back.  Phil looked at me with indifference, rubbish now worn and used, and walked out the door.  Nothing special or unique, just an average rape.

            Rape fleshes itself with the souls entombed within.  It feeds off their vulnerability, guilt, fear—disgrace.  It pulsates with energy spent hiding truths and concealing names.  My rape was a fully functioning entity.  It had a belly engorged with my life, a hearty meal that it ingested that night.  Its arms reached forth from the darkness to encircle me in a stifled embrace.  Its head burst with my memories.  It followed me.  It taunted me.  It tucked me into bed every night.  I gave it life, supplied it breath with each tortured exhalation.  I kept it beside me at all times.  I never left home without it.  It was the only thing that understood my pain—my sole companion.

Janna Vought is an MFA graduate student at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri.  She attends school online from her home in Colorado Springs, Colorado where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and two dogs.  Her nonfiction has appeared in Imperfect Parent Magazine.  She also has poetry featured in The Rusty Nail and The Eagle Literary Journal, and fiction published in Ideagems Tough Lit V and Tough Lit VI.