Zora Grizz

...All the dead womxn. There's so many of us. You get our stories no matter where you look: We’re dead in newspapers, on websites, on data points and in citations, on true crime podcasts, on tv shows and in movies. We’re dead in books and plays and short stories and any medium of the dealer's choice. We’re your friends who died. Your family. Your neighbors. That girl you went to school with. Your friend’s sister. We’re dead. We’re dead everywhere.

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You look at me and your eyes start to narrow, but only just. “You say ‘us’ like you’re included in that statement. But you're not dead”. 

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You say this to me. To my face. Like you don’t know.

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“...Not exactly,” I say carefully, measuring my delicate words with precision: a teaspoon of sincerity, 10 stirs counter-clockwise with a time machine, add a dash of whisper and 2 cracks of lightning.

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These are stories I can’t take back. I could tell you about all the times that my life has been clenched in a fist that wasn’t mine, its blood being squeezed out onto the floor. But then you would know the secret of me: the glowing amber coal plucked hot from the center of my chest, the yellow ribbon pulled loose from ‘round my throat, sliding sinuously to the ground but not as fast as my head.

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Maybe if the world got more stories where womxn lived, they'd stop finding it so acceptable when we died. They'd stop expecting us to die.
Maybe they'd even stop killing us, just a little bit.

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I look into the deep, shadowed, vault that I have locked tight inside my memory, where I keep all of the times I’ve died, horrifically stored and catalogued. 

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I wish I could tell you about the very first time that someone tried to kill me, but it doesn’t work that way.

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The twelve year old girl walking alone in her neighborhood doesn't quite understand the uncomfortable way the middle-aged man watched her from the shadows of his doorway. She doesn't know exactly what it means when he starts to follow her. She does know the woods though. So she goes there and loses him easily. She can lose anyone there. The woods are safe in a way she understands - they are safe for her in a way that houses are not.

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I could tell you about the last night she worked at her after-school job at a coffee shop. About the cop…the grabbing…the pinning down...the sexual assault. How this on-duty cop made a point of showing her his gun and his handcuffs, and telling her exactly what he’d do to her with them in the back of his patrol car. About how she was ready to try and fight him off with nothing but the butter knife she’d managed to smuggle out of the kitchen between stacks of folded napkins. She kept it clenched in her fist under the counter. I could tell you about the group of D&D’ers who saw her face and refused to leave the shop that night, and saved her life because of it.

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I could tell you about the venue she worked an event for, her button down white shirt, black slacks, running drinks and appetizers for people who lived in a different world from hers. About the meaty hands on her ass, a cop pulling her into him, burying his face into her neck, “Let me buy you a drink baby, it’s ok, you won’t get in trouble, I’m the cops.” I could tell you about the dark, dank, basement they had prepared without her knowledge, and the men waiting there for her, their promised prize. About her only chance to escape and how she sprinted to her car, all that running track in middle school finally paying off, locking the doors and gunning the 30 year old engine, not looking back, only forward into the path cut by the car’s headlights through the dark night. She was still only 16.

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I could tell you about the strange, sick, color yellow she saw in her 20s, when she finally started swimming back to murky consciousness after he’d slammed her head into a concrete wall so hard that they’d both thought he’d killed her. She tried to drag herself out from the gross yellow hues pushing her consciousness  down into submission. She finally managed to get her eyes open, only to find him furiously raping her. About how terrified she felt, realizing that she couldn’t move her legs to fight him off. He kept her pinned down until he’d finished. Her pupils were two different sizes at the same time. 

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I could tell you about the time when she said “no” to a different man, but for him ‘no’ wasn’t an option. He would rape her…or he would kill her right there. The next day she tried to pretend, just for herself, that it was ok - because if it wasn’t, she couldn’t make it through her shift at work, and she was the manager-on-duty that day. She couldn’t afford to get fired from the store for curling up in a ball in the middle of the sales floor, wrapping her arms around her knees and sobbing, wailing, hiccupping from the thick wet gulps that would be the only thing her lungs would emit if she gave herself even one second to feel anything true at all.

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I could tell you about the heavy, petrified, silence that filled the room like cotton when she realized she was only the prey as she packed her suitcase. Her livid fiancé towered over her, his tight, angry, eyes watching her every move. His bulky form was predatorily still, huge fists clenched, moving closer and closer to her, as she panicked that she would never make it out of that room. 
As scared as she was, her eyes went steely and her jawline squared - she stared him straight in the eye, her gaze a cold, burning, laser. She moved past him towards the door, never breaking her glare into his eyes - a challenge that she would win if he tried to stop her. His fists twitched…he looked away. But then he quickly turned and made as if to hit her. She lunged past his looming bulk, her hand reaching for the exit. She made it.

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I could tell you about the shadows moving across the yellow light under her bedroom door when he found her, and how she still can't sleep with lights shining under the door, or in the complete dark. She sleeps with Xmas lights on year round now, and that makes her happy.

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I could tell you about the sniper rifle. About the bullet aimed carefully at her head by the same law enforcement department who’d tried to kill her when she was 16. 
They missed, but only just. She made it.

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I could tell you about their coordinated effort to drug her drink so heavily that it was as if she opened her eyes and the movie reel of her life had been spliced, 2 edges taped neatly together, the 4 hour chunk that had been between them completely gone, 4 hours of her life that do not exist in her head. I could tell you about the terror…about waking up naked…about the hospital. 

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I could tell you about the favors she called in so that she could spend 5 hours standing on a rickety step ladder in the bar’s service hallway, watching its security footage of that night and all its doors, cameras, and angles, until her knees buckled - but she found the cop that did it. His hand a fast ghost near her table, his baseball cap pulled low, leaving through the entrance only law enforcement knew wasn't monitored. 

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I could tell you, and I could tell you, and I could tell you. I could tell you until the whole world flooded with my words - until there was no more room for air or life at all. I could tell you these grim tales until there was nothing left in all the universe but the thick, heavy, weight of all the murders forced onto my body, each killing me in a new way. 

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...But here I am telling you, right? So I can’t be that dead.

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Because yes…this is the story where I live.

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Maybe if the world got more stories where womxn lived, they'd stop finding it so acceptable when we died. They'd stop expecting us to die.

Maybe they'd even stop killing us, just a little bit.

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