I would have loved social media when I was in my 20s. It would have made me feel less devastatingly alone. But as a writer in my 40s I am grateful to have felt devastatingly alone, and also that I was unable to publicly post a single fucking thought I had in my 20s.
Short story idea: A single woman with dating app trauma and whose job has been eliminated by AI falls in love with one of those Waymo driverless cars because it always uses its turn signal and there are no humans in it.
Tell me if this is too many prepositional phrases, but, 16 months into the first Trump presidency I was in a bar in the shadow of the hill where my mother had been killed by a man she was trying to leave.
I’d fled this town 14 years earlier, mindless and fast, like a dog in a thunderstorm, and now I was back to reckon with it. The bar was owned by a hard-ass woman who kept a baseball bat near the register, but she wasn’t there that day. I was joined by three female friends, all freelancers and artists who’d come for cheap lunchtime margaritas and tacos.
I knew what a bar was for women. Particularly a bar in this part of Southern California, where, long before my mother was murdered by her estranged boyfriend in a drunken fight, I’d grown up trying to make myself invisible, learning to deflect unwanted attention with—I must say—a rather impressive defense maneuver that involved both fawning and flight. But on this day, feeling still like a visitor, feeling immune, the sea breeze of my homeland smelled like salt and freedom, the jukebox was playing “Slow Ride,” and the bar had only my women friends in it: two in the back room playing pool and a third beside me vaping on a stool as we chatted up the bartenders, a couple of much younger women the owner had taken under her wing.
Then these men came in. One might describe them in a police report as Caucasian males, early to mid 40s, average height and build, regular street clothes. Indistinct is what they were. The men quickly put themselves between us, halting our conversation to tell us what they thought of our hair, our faces, our bodies … IN THIS, the year of our Lord 2018! Right away I went: Nope. I looked at the empty space between their indistinct faces and said it. Out of all my friends, I was the one who had left this place, had lived somewhere else, had lived in New York Fucking City. It was on me to show them how this would go down in New York Fucking City. I waved my hand, Not interested, move along.
The young bartenders had frozen, smiles plastered on their small, blinking faces. I’d worked in restaurants for 10 years, I knew that smile and what it meant, and I also knew that it wasn’t necessary, not anymore, but I was afraid they didn’t know that yet, being in this place where it wasn’t New York Fucking City, wasn’t even (apparently) the year 2018. One of the men swiveled from me to them and said, Oh this one’s nice, I like the look of her, what’s your name… was I in a terrible movie? This dialogue was unbelievable. The characters were over-the-top corny. But of course I was in a movie. The lens went fish-eyed, the men loomed unbelievably high, the periphery closed in until it was just me and them, and behind them, the hill where my mother fought back and was killed by the very weapon she’d been holding, and so I stood up and stabbed the air with my finger as I delivered not a calm, intelligible rebuke but an incantation. I spoke in tongues. Curses flew from my mouth, along with statistics about rape and femicide, I called them murders, I said You’re why, you’re why, you’re why, and as I did this another part of me split off and opened my wallet, got out my debit card, put it on the bar, gestured to the bartender to close it out, you’re why you’re why, my friend beside me was melting into her phone screen, frozen, I’d later understand, as a memory in her body curled her shoulders inward where mine were exploding from me, had me ready to swing a barstool, grab the baseball bat, break a bottle, and that’s what I ran from.
I was chased off my seat by the men, but I ran out the door from my own rage. I saw my mother’s face in it, her flaring dark eyes, her whiptail arm, and her tender throat housing a quivering voice that he wanted to silence and sometimes, god help me, so did I.
When I got out the door I heard one of the women shout, “Spell ‘misogynist,’ honey.”
I don’t want to be an all-powerful rage witch. I don’t want to strike terror into the hearts of bad men until I am one day captured and burned for it. I want to be the bear on a box of Sleepytime tea, nightcap tilting slightly to one side as my cat and I doze happily by the fire.
Short story idea: The Sleepytime bear is actually a trained assassin hiding from his traumatic past, until one day, it arrives at the doorstep of his tree trunk. A sigh rumbles from beneath his flannel nightgown. And we know what he’s going to do. And we know what it will cost him.
jesus christ this is on fire from start to finish. and a study in writing good sentences, too.
Stunning writing, so vivid and clear. Painful, honest, funny! Thank you so much for it.❤️