Running Away

If you read everything I posted on Substack since November 2023 – then you’ve already read the two stories I’m combining here. This is my substack address: https://substack.com/@marybethdanielsonstories 

Just recently I read a powerful story by a writer I’ve never met, who lives in India. Rose Garg. Since Substack is about promoting each other, go ahead and subscribe to her, too. https://substack.com/@rosegarg 

Her story from two weeks ago, Kites in the Cold Sky, reminded me of my stories of last year. 

It’s relevant that my second story, about Eric, was written because a reader asked me what happened to the guy. 

We unfamous writers thank you, most sincerely, for taking the time to read us. 

...

Story 1. The Importance of Running Away 

I finished high school a couple years ago but after that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Some members of my family were not too helpful but I will not talk about them because I am tired of stories that start with what someone else did or didn’t do to us. Just know there are people in my life who think that because I am young and have all the regular female body parts .. this means I should find a male and be his wife or main squeeze or whatever. 

“Get a BF” is the story they tell us over and over. Yet plenty of us are looking at our mothers and aunts and sisters and the lady down the street and movie stars in distress and we are more than a little skeptical. I decided early on to avoid boys and men and roues and cads and knights in shining armor and the boy next door and all the others some people think I ought to find and bind myself to. So, with an attitude like this, plus no taste for college, plus a deep distrust of needing to be polite to customers .. what to do? 

I found a job in a laundry. Not kidding. Who works in a laundry these days? Well, me and every immigrant you can imagine. I’ve been working hard for low pay for so long that I now know a little Spanish, Mandarin, Azerbaijani, and Creole. This work is not as awful as you might think. Uniforms, shirts with names embroidered on the pocket, hotel linens, underwear from nursing homes, gym towels, warehouse cleaning rags; it all comes in, we clean it, it goes out from the immigrants and me. 

I’m fine with my life. Well, I was fine. My main doubts were that it didn’t seem like enough, you know? How can a person have all her ducks in order when she is 23? Shouldn’t there be more?

And that is where this tale starts. Though, of course, tails are not the beginning, they are the end. I guess this is the tale of the tail of my laundry career. 

I’d worked my shift and five more overtime hours until 8:07 that October night. I had to punch a time card which is how I know what time the tale of my tail began. I walked out of the steamy laundry into that raw dark night. The few trees along the sidewalk were bare, their leaves fallen, their clicking stick branches twisted in the eerie wind. 

I turned to walk home, my black parka zipped and cinched. my navy hat pulled low over my long dark ponytail, my glasses foggy. Just then a guy I didn’t know by name but certainly knew by genre stumbled from the bar across the street. He recognized my femaleness and started to yell the things drunks yell at women on dark nights.

I walked faster. He crossed the street towards me. I jogged. He ran. I swerved from my homebound route, cut a corner towards a street two blocks away that had more lights. I didn’t turn around to measure where my chaser was, I just raced like cold wind because he was a drunk idiot and I wasn’t. I heard his footfalls. I heard his taunting and threatening gibes. 

I made it to the lit street to throw myself towards a business with its lights still on. I slammed inside the door and yelled for help through my chuffing huffs for breath. A man so old that in my logic-blasting fear I thought had apparated from a fairy tale, rushed to the door. He slammed and locked it and pulled down the door’s shade. A voice from the back of the shop called, “I’ve got the lights, Armand.” The lights went off.

The drunk guy pounded the door while Armand was on his phone repeating his address and describing the man. 

I straightened from my breath catching stance. I looked towards the old man and blurted in my fear, “Are you a wizard?” His wife took my hand. “Here, Dear. Sit down on this bench. Police are on their way; you can hear them already.” 

I looked at her, a plump woman who looked at least a hundred. She had white braids wrapped around her head, a tidy black t-shirt and sizeable pants of indeterminate hue. I heard the sirens. I saw the shadowy legs of my would-be assailant suddenly turn to disappear from the store’s door. 

I started to come back into myself. “Thank you for helping me. People have told me for years I should not walk home alone but tonight is the first time I shouldn’t have.”

The police arrived. They talked to me, the old couple, and each other. I heard over their staticky radio that one of them had picked up the man who’d chased me. 

I sighed, unzipped my parka, and pulled off my hat in the warm store. 

The old woman told me that my hair was beautiful and that I looked like a disheveled Snow White. That made me laugh and so, slightly less overwhelmed, I looked around the store.

One entire wall was lined with wooden slots filled with paper. Reams and reams of paper. Some white and ecru that even from the middle of the store I could see had the raw edges of handmade paper. There were so many slots of papers in so many colors and hues. I saw red paper with golden edges. I saw tinted paper with marks that, as I wrinkled my forehead to look, I could see were inlaid flowers and leaves. There was huge paper in rolls and small books with bindings that were royal blue or paisley tape.

The other side of the store was lined with wood tables on which were bins and pots of colored pencils and tubes of paint, paintbrushes and chalks. Faint, lively music was in the air. There was a scent of roses, something astringent, and tea. It was as if I’d fallen into an elven rainbow factory.

My flawed family came to pick me up. Not so flawed, after all. 

The next day I went back to the Armand and Maisie’s Art Supplies and Paper Making Emporium, for that is who they were and what they did. I ran my fingers over the smooth and textured papers. I sniffed their weird and wondrous paper smells. I asked too many questions which Maisie answered with delight. I showed Armand how to finally open the online site he’d been trying to figure out for months.

Within weeks I was making the same pay as at the laundry, but now I was learning the art of papermaking and the craft of being polite to the kind of people who shop for art supplies. To my surprise, those kind of people were my kind of people. My old rules about who I would like or not like went out the window and now I am in the actual adventure of my life.

Running away was where I began. 

…

Story 2.  Eric’s Rape

Trigger Warning - This story describes and discusses sexual assault and intimidation. 

Introduction: In deep space there are black empty places that astronomers see when they peer through telescopes. At first they don’t know for sure what those blank dark spaces are. Is it a black hole i.e. a star that burned out and collapsed into itself? Now everything that gets close to it, including light, gets sucked in?

Or is it an eclipse? An eclipse is when one celestial body crosses in front of another. A planet or moon or galaxy between the viewer and object of the viewer’s vision will, for a period of time, obliterate the light that should be there.

It takes time and patience to know if the light is completely gone - or if it is simply hidden. 

…

Eric is the good-looking young guy at the bar who tosses his head to the side to get his dark blond hair out of his eyes. He rolls his wide shoulders inside his tight black t-shirt and proceeds to tell a dirty joke that makes the other guys snigger. He finishes the joke by fingering his beer as if it were a woman. The others hoot. It’s Friday night and he has a paycheck in his pocket from a legit job at an autobody garage. He has keys to his own room in the men’s boarding house. No more being broke. No more needing those pathetic social services. He feels great. He’s on top of it now. The world is his oyster.

Then he smells the sickly sweet smell of a cigarillo. Someone’s coming back from the smoking patio and the stench drifts into the dark bar.

Eric’s anger blows in like a derecho straight off the prairie. He yells for someone to turn on fans to blow that stink out. The bartender raises his eyebrows. Other guys turn away. The pal next to him tells him to lighten up, buddy, go outside and cool down. 

Eric swears as he spins off his stool and slams outside. It’s dark. He bends over, hands on thighs, shaking his head, willing the burnt sex smell to leave his nose, his head, his memories. He swears as he stands upright. Goddam it, can’t he ever go two days without remembering?

Across the street a woman walks out the alley door of the laundry and he recognizes her. She’s that pretty one he noticed a month ago when it was still warm and she wasn’t buried in a parka. She has a sleek black ponytail and a beautiful face; she looks, he remembers, like a Disney princess though she was as impolite as hell when he tried to chat her up. Blew him right off.

He yells now. “Hey, Pocohontas!”

She looks across the street at him, says nothing, swerves her head to walk even more briskly away from the laundry. 

Last time she was with some other women but tonight she’s alone. Good. She owes him a smile. He’s handsome and he’s got a legit job, a room, and a paycheck. She owes him. 

He steps off the curb into the empty street, still yelling, “Hey Babe.”

She starts jogging.

He jogs. 

She runs. 

He runs. 

Like that, he’s back in Alissa’s bedroom. Mom is out. Dad poured him beers to drink with the McDonalds he’d brought home. He’s twelve goddam years old and two beers in when his dad backs Alissa into her room and onto her bed. Easily, as if he’s done this often, he pulls her jeans down and her shirt up. Eric can’t keep up with how fast his dad’s hands are moving, the sudden, dizzying image of his stepsister’s skin. Her white, white skin. Her private parts, right there, he can see them, his dad is touching them. 

Eric runs faster now. He wants this dark haired fox who will run, who won’t be a victim, a woman worth chasing. He runs; he runs faster. He can smell her in the empty street because he’s running straight into the scent of her skin and sweat and detergent and heat. 

He hears his dad, “Come on Eric, I got you this ripe one right here, just for you. I can see you’re hard. She’s yours.”

“Dad, she’s your kid.” 

“No she isn’t. I remember Terrie and she was fun but the timing was wrong. This girl isn’t mine no matter what Terrie put on the birth certificate.” His dad leans back then, smoking his cigarillo.

Alissa is only a few months older than Eric. She moved here when her mom died a year ago. She hardly ever talks and she’s as white as paper with thin pale hair. 

“Right baby?” Eric’s dad looks at the girl who’s motionless, a deer staring at a hunter. Her tawny eyes are empty, gone wherever deer’s eyes go when they’re cornered. 

“See, Eric? I sire good-looking kids like you. She’s white as trash. Not mine.”

The beautiful dark-haired woman slams into the door of whatever that business is. He hears the lock click. He pounds the window; he needs to break it and get inside that store and inside that woman who will not let him rape her. He needs her. He needs a woman who will stop him.

Sirens wail.

…

Eric is hunched on the plastic chair in this glass-walled conference room inside this jail. Saves on correctional officers to have just one CO watching all the glass-walled pods plus whoever’s talking with their lawyer. 

Last time he came to jail, when he was a kid, his mom got him a paid lawyer. He did years in juvenile detention and was on monitoring after that. When he turned 18 they buried his juvenile conviction telling him that if he didn’t screw up again no one would know.

His public defender looks at him, “This unlocks your past. You know that, right? You are looking at real time now plus a sex offender status that will follow you the rest of your life.”

Eric crosses his arms over his chest. When he closes his eyes he sees her running. When he falls asleep he sees Alissa on her bed. He is empty except for when he’s angry. Why didn’t Alissa fight back? Why didn’t the dark-haired woman turn around and fight him. He’s good. Somewhere deep inside himself he knows he’s good. 

Maybe he’s wrong. 

The old lady attorney is talking to him. How can he even listen to a woman so old and thick, with ugly short hair and ugly glasses and a suit as shapeless as a car cover? 

“Eric? Are you in there? Listen to me.”

Eric drags his attention back to this room that’s as private as a plastic tomato box. All there is to see, now and forever, are men in orange, concrete, bars everywhere. Steel tables and stools bolted to the floor.

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever want a life again?”

He looks more sharply at her. “Yes.”

“Then I am going to tell you two things. Pay attention. I cannot get you off; that ship has sailed. What I can try to do is get you sentenced to a prison that has a program with an above average record of changing outcomes for SA’s. That’s you now, you know. A sexual assaulter.”

He’s overwhelmed. He’s pissed. He wants to hit her or throw up or crash his head into the plate glass walls until he slices himself open. He looks at her. Her hazel eyes behind her stupid glasses are staring at him like Star War lasers. 

“So Eric, first you need to consider this. There’s a decent program available and I think I can make a good case for why it is a good direction for you. It’s pretty far from here, it will be harder for your mom to visit you but I can aim for it if you want.

“The second thing is this. Your father was an adult when he set you up to rape your stepsister. He was the adult in the room when he created two victims. Your sister was a victim; God bless her because what she endured was unspeakable. But you were also a kid. You would not have raped your sister if your dad had not plied you with alcohol and egged you on. What you did was horrendous but you were a kid and you were also a victim and you need to deal with that now and for the rest of your life. That’s why a program that continues for months is important for people who are ready to be honest and do the work. So, Eric. Is this you?”

Eric feels his head exploding. He remembers. He shuts his eyes against the memories, against the pain. He shuts his eyes against the goddam tears beginning to sting. 

She sighs. These poor broken young people break her heart. “Eric? Eric? Open your eyes and look at me.”

She pushes Kleenex across the table. He ignores it. Inmates don’t cry, at least they don’t in glass walled rooms. He passes his hand across his face and looks at her. 

She keeps talking quietly. “There are these powerful statistics, Eric. 80% of women and 40% of men have experienced sexual assault in their lives. It wasn’t just you and your stepsister. It isn’t just you and her. You have work to do, but you begin by understanding you were both a perpetrator and a victim of enormous trauma.”

She stops talking to lean back in her plastic chair. They’re both quiet. He hears the shuffling of the men in the pods living their curtailed lives. 

He slides his hand back and forth over the surface of the utility table. “I hate this. Do you know anyone who did what I did, who changed and got decent and could live free?”

Her face gentles. “More than I can count. You might be surprised, someday, to learn who you are when you are not hating yourself.” 

…

I worked with inmates and offenders for ten years. I both co-led and solo-led ‘CBT/Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” classes that probation/parole officers could require for people with whom they worked. Some of the groups I led were for sexual offenders. Every individual was different with a different story and, truthfully, I liked most of those guys very much. CBT classes are deceptively simple; over a period of months participants learn ways to encounter and react to complicated situations. Statistics show that CBT classes make a significant difference in outcomes for all offenders, including sexual offenders.