Browse Topics

A Little Love

A Dog Named Hopi

I tried to tell myself that he only wanted to rape me. I thought of all the women down through the ages who had been raped and silently asked for their help. I asked their spirits to hover over us and lighten the dark corners of this man’s mind.

Out Of The Ashes: Violence And Its Aftermath

An Interview With Judith Herman

Once you’ve seen, up close, the evil human beings are capable of, you’re not going to see the world, other people, or even yourself the same way again. Those of us who’ve never had such an experience might imagine how brave or cowardly we would be in extreme situations, but people who’ve been exposed to those situations know what they did and didn’t do. And, almost inevitably, they failed to live up to some expectation they had of themselves.

The Girl Everything Was Done To

She’d been abducted by a man she described as “dark, maybe a foreigner,” and held at an abandoned farmhouse in a remote section of woods, fairly close to where I lived. She had been raped by this dark stranger.

Protection

It took a long time, but, by the following summer, I could get in and out of my car without hyperventilating. I could walk calmly down main streets in the daytime, although I still avoided parking lots and alleys, and rarely went out alone at night.

The First Time

A Donny Osmond doll, an abortion, a clear-cut

The Blue Devils Of Blue River Avenue

Whether I was at the Sambeauxs’ or the Millers’ or the Carrs’, or just out in the street with my little buddies, it was always the same. They were like hothouse tomatoes pushing hard for what they thought was the light. We would hide in a bush, or cluster in the treehouse, or lean back among the interstices of the towering, ragged, catwalk hedge, and the topic would invariably arise, spelled out in red letters above our heads: S-E-X.

Poof

Jayne, my hairdresser, has just had her eyebrows tattooed. Two black scabs arch across her forehead. “I don’t dare frown,” she says, “or they might bleed. But, oh, when the scabs fall off, my eyebrows will be deep gold, to match my new hair. And even when I go swimming, I won’t lose my face.”

Three Spheres

I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper and finally infect the wounds.