By Samantha Tkac
1. Hop on the T and head to the job interview you’ve been excited about for weeks. When the man huffing Nicorette breath against the back of your neck snags the bucket of your slacks as you step out onto the platform, whip around so you can pound your knuckles into his gut. But the train doors—they close. And the T takes off toward the next stop. The hand that touched you and the man attached to that hand is gone. He gets away.
2. After the interview, go to the grocery store in search of something cheesy and salty. When that forty-something shuffling beside you in the dairy aisle smirks at your chest while you’re homing in on decent cheddar, don’t wait for the doors to close this time. Ask him—could you help me pick out a beer? And when he nods with that expression on his face meaning he didn’t realize you could speak, lead him into the beer fridge. When inside, throw him a quick knee to the groin and when he’s on the floor, slip a beer bottle out from one of one of the many cases emblazoned with logos of women humping/thrusting/licking machines and rockets and monsters and plunge it into his mouth. Decompress in the cool, misty air. Breathe in and out, like that meditation app taught you. Then get back to that cheese aisle, girl, because you’re hankering for something you can sizzle on a cast iron—something oozing and gooey while watching Sex and the City reruns later on. Doesn’t that sound nice?
3. Go to the happy hour that’s being hosted just for you in celebration of your big successful interview. Tell everyone that it went fine, because it did. Don’t keep itching the spot on your backside where that man’s hand made contact. And later, after a few warming drinks, after that itch has lessened a bit, don’t say yes to the free mojito offered up by a lingering young punk. When you do say yes, don’t allow your friends to nudge you with the refrain: you deserve a little fun. Don’t ask him back to your apartment. But you want a distraction, and the Buzzfeed quiz pegged you as a Samantha, after all. When you do ask him back—tell yourself you deserve it. (What do you deserve exactly? You’re not sure).
4. You imagined it differently—more passion and mutual respect, hotter. You’ve done this before. He’s on your couch. You asked him to come. This was mutual. He claws at your shoulder blades, an apologetic expression on his face, at first. His lips hover over your tits and he mumbles nonsensical words that stem from bright red brain waves, phrases as fleeting as nightmares when they reach your ears. He’s not speaking to you, but himself. He tears at your zipper. Your pretty dress nooses your ankles.
5. Begin the long fall inward as your body absorbs his weight, your lungs adjusting. You take delicate little breaths as you wade deeper and deeper inside yourself, past all the embellished parts and then you’re wallowing in pitch black sludge—it’s hard to breath—but you’ve almost arrived at your source of power: the ability to sit and take it, that hollow-souled feeling. You absorb the liquor off his tongue, his teeth. This was mutual. His fingers beneath you, prying open inside you. You asked him here. Hope that he might extract something essential.
6. He burrows into your body the way he was taught from years of porn and Eli Roth films, his neurons forging a reward pathway associating $8 drinks with sex. Don’t let that itch build back up inside of you. Don’t let the hardness of his waistband sear the skin of your stomach. You wanted this. You’re so close to curling up inside your hollow place and giving your body over to him. And despite being so close to convincing yourself of the mantra vibrating against the back of your throat: I don’t care, I don’t care, I DON’T CARE—
7. YOU DIG YOUR THUMBS INTO HIS EYE SOCKETS UNTIL FLUID LEAKS DOWN YOUR FOREARMS AND SCREAM UNTIL THE EARTH CRACKS OPEN AND PRAY THAT HE FALLS SOMEWHERE DARK AND LOUD and hate that you’re even alive and having to live through this shit, in the first place.
8. Don’t cry.
9. Don’t you dare cry, girl.
10. Feel no moral qualms. Decide to keep murdering and to never change anything about yourself.
11. Sandwich the cheddar cheese between thick slabs of focaccia and let it sizzle on the skillet until the yellow spills out and your apartment smells like weekends at your parents’ house. Cut it into quarters like your dad used to. Turn on Sex and the City and take solace in the wild hair and relentless optimism and temper the rage in your chest. Wonder when you will stop—if you can simply turn it all off, a switch.
Samantha Tkac holds an MFA from Butler University. Her fiction has been published in Squawk Back and Drunk Monkeys. She is currently shopping around a collection of short stories focusing on the life cycle of female rage and the aesthetics of the grotesque, you know—fun stuff like that.
Image credit: istolethetv via a Creative Commons license.
This has got to be in my opinion one of the best expressions of frustration and the sheer rage many women feel with the socio-psychological preprogrammed mentality that so many “Men” have within our self fulfilling society. It’s a sad reality to so many men have this mentality that they can just simply “take” what they desire without consent, permission, or even a second thought as to the impact their arrogant ideology has upon other people, and more so the women of the world around them. Reading this short story… was to say the least,… POWERFUL.