It has dried, but some of it chips away on the tip of my finger. My hand is shaking as I reach down to touch the words. Please God, please, don’t let it be blood. The very essence of me writhes as if I am an open wound and someone has poured salt over me like one of those snails the kid next door used to torture. On its lid are red words, the letters look as if someone dipped a finger in blood words that look as if someone dipped a finger in blood before tracing them. The box is pure white, shiny and smooth like the inlay of an oyster shell.

The zookeeper has indeed left me something a box, rectangular in shape, it reaches my knees. It’s been so long since light and not darkness has been my companion that it takes a moment for my eyes to catch up. Isaac flicks the switch that turns on the bulb above the door. You can stalk a woman’s body, but this animal was stalking my mind. The man who chanted Pink Zippo might have been a stalker, but he had nothing, nothing on the zookeeper. I didn’t want anyone who had worth to be near me. So I took revenge on myself for allowing it to happen. I took the revenge I would never get in my flesh and blood life.īut it wasn’t enough. I was carving his skin like Lisbeth Salander did to Nils Bjurman. Pouring gasoline over him and burning him alive. While Isaac was feeding me, and pulling me out of dreams that made me thrash and scream, I was cutting up my rapist, throwing him into Lake Washington. I didn’t know how to live with my survival, and I didn’t know how to kill myself. But in that moment, when you’ve been violated, your soul darkened for no reason other than someone’s sadistic cruelty, you’re only thinking about your survival. Maybe another woman will be raped because I could have done more. From the moment he started to the moment he finished, he chanted one thing over and over. I hear it when I sleep, whispering in my ear and I wake up screaming. To God, to the air, to himself, or perhaps to some person who abandoned him.

Even when they pressed me for more details. Just angry moms who wanted something from me-recognition maybe.īut there was something I never told the police about the day I was raped. None with the tone of a rapist, or a sadist, or a kidnapper. I’d had those before: letters, e-mails, Facebook messages that went from high praise to intense anger when I didn’t respond. They used words like “intent” and “stalker”. With blithe nonchalance, they told me that he had probably been watching me for a while and possibly followed me into the woods. The police said it was an isolated incident. There was never another report of a rape in those woods, or any woods in Washington.

Mud vein by tarryn fisher