This is a graphic piece including violence and adult content. Not for the faint of heart, weak of stomach, or narrow of mind.

            Maybe I didn't want to become that one experience.

I didn't want to be "the girl who says so-and-so raped her." I didn't want to be brave. I didn't want to stand up to those who would call me a liar and I didn't want to surf the awkward silences of those who believed me. Maybe that's why I never told anyone what happened.

But that would only be a half-truth, to say that was the reason.

The whole truth is that, as it happened, it seemed like destiny. My memory sang with voices from a dim childhood; an obese man saying, "Come sit on my lap." Smelling his sweat mingled with cat piss and old tobacco. And another man saying, "You wanna learn how to fuck?" in the hazy glow of my best friend's nightlight while she dreamt a few feet away. My tongue a corpse in my mouth, provided no answer. "You wanna learn..."

Yes, this had always been, and would always be. I seemed born for this.

I studied the freckles on his shoulder intently as he barreled into me, trying to ignore his labored grunting and the sweet stench of liquor on his breath. But I was fading into the recesses, hearing church bells and the flies buzzing along the screened-in porch of my childhood. Recalling my mother the way she was when I was small. Watching her long, honey-colored curls unfurl from an iron and swing down her bare back.

She sits at the mirror and winks at her reflection as she blows herself a bubblegum flavored kiss before turning to me to ask, "How do I look, Kid?"

            How does she look?

            Wearing dangerous spiked heels and a wickedly short skirt, her legs seem to go on for eternity. Her high breasts sit naked beneath the thin fabric of her dress, dark nipples vaguely visible beneath. Her grin is so incredibly wide that I can see every one of her pearly whites and her eyes dance a song that I've never heard before but it sweeps me up anyway. How does she look? She looks like she just stepped out of some guy's wet dream and into the spot where my mother should have been.

            She looks like the woman I want to be someday. She throws her head back and laughs when I say, "You look like a movie star, Mama."

And I remember how my patent leather shoes make a clacking sound on the tiles as I creep through the quiet house, past my mother sleeping naked on the couch with her mouth wide open and her snores reeking of booze. In the clean of the morning sunshine, I turn into the alley that connects my street to the street the church is on. Passed the dumpster and the old cistern. My footsteps echo off the walls of the apartments to my right, the same apartments, the same couch, where so many years later I would realize what I was born for. The church bells begin to clang nearby and my steps quicken. I'm going home. Home to the parent who is not passed out on the couch but has its arms open for me and its answers waiting for every question I'll ever have to ask.

 And I remember the apartments. These were efficiency apartments; we called them the Alley Apartments because they were in the alley between two streets. The apartment consisted of only the two rooms: the living/dining room and the bathroom. My friend and his friend were nearby, making out in the bathroom. I could hear my friend's raucous laughter on the other side of the door, hear her teenaged lover mumbling something sweet to her that made her laugh, but they didn't hear me crying over the loud music or their own giddy murmurings.

First I said it softly out of a desire not to hurt his feelings, then forcefully when he seemed to have not heard, followed by desperate pleading, begging, and finally I just whispered it like a prayer over and over. "No. No. Nonono."

And I sink back into another time, another place.

"I want to be Baptized, Brother Thomas," I say.

His furry brows smile at me but I already know he's going to say no. I don't know why he will say no but he will. It has something to do with the gray haired ladies and the things they say to each other at bake sales and rummage sales and on the church steps after services while I pretend not to listen:

"Poor thing, with a mother like that..."

"Woman spreads her legs all over town..."

"Drunk every damned night too..."

"And then she lets this poor baby come all alone to church every Sunday."

I know he'll say no but I ask him anyway.

"Baptize me, Brother Thomas. Please? I want to be clean."

"You're too young," he says.

Brother Thomas' wife used to be his stepdaughter. Her mother moved out and they had a wedding and now her tummy is round with a baby. A baby who'll get dunked, cleansed, as soon as it's born.

She takes my hand and leads me away from Brother Thomas telling me "Maybe when you're older" and "Someday you'll understand."

And I pushed and clawed at him with hands that were suddenly rendered small and impotent, childish against his flesh-colored stone. His knees dug into my thighs and his weight crushed the breath out of me while church bells rang over a distance of years, while the flies hummed in some long gone summer.

            And I'm talking a million miles a minute about I-don't-know-what. My Grandma Tina smiles and nods but her eyes are tired and far away. She says I ought to go outside and play. I say there's nothing to do outside.

            I say "Can I squish flies when they land on the screen door instead?"

            Grandma Tina has cancer. She's dying. There are notes all over her house with names on them but lots of them have my name. She says when she dies those will be my things, the old jewelry and the TV and her photo albums will all be mine.

            "I don't have anybody else, baby," she said when she showed me the notes. Her eyes glimmered but she didn't cry. She's not afraid to die, she said. God is holding her hand, she said. And I buried my head in her chest and hope she didn't see me cry.

            Grandma Tina goes to the screen, surveying the warmth of the day beyond. "You should look for a four-leafed clover," she says pointing to a green patch just outside the door.

            "Huh?" I ask, disinterested, eyeballing a fly making its way up the screen.

            "You don't know about the four-leafed clover?" Grandma Tina leans down to look me in the eye. "Some people say they're magic, you know."

She's got me hooked now and it's not just the word ‘magic' that captured my attention. Firing her amber eyes is a hint of mischief, a dash of pleasure, and (maybe) just a little magic of her own...

And his knees dug into my thighs and his heavy sighs took the breath out of me while I cursed my own dryness, wishing for a little magical moisture just to lessen the pain of his force, his will. Then, blessing of all blessings, there was moisture and the pain retreated a little so that I could slip back into my ocean, hold my breath, admire the color of sunlight refracting off the water above. So I could just lie there and wait for it to be over.

Even as it was happening, even as my fingernails etched bloody maps across his chest and shoulders, I was rationalizing. "Maybe he's just really drunk," I thought. "Or maybe this is my fault. I shouldn't have let him kiss me in the first place. I shouldn't even be here."  Before the deed was done, I'd absolved him, found him innocent in the court of my desperate psyche. He was my friend. I trusted him. Somehow, this wasn't happening. It was a misunderstanding, a mistake, my mistake. I shouldn't have been there, that was the most condemning theme of them all. He'd invited my friend and me, said he was having a party, and so we snuck off after I was finished with my babysitting job. But when we arrived, there was no party. Just two guys and a lot of beer. I cursed myself for coming there.

And I'm standing next to my mother.

And my mother whispers into the phone. "I can't do it, daddy. You tell her."

Tears glisten on my Mama's cheeks as she nods and then hands me the phone.

"Grandaddy needs to talk to you, baby," she says.

"Hello," I say.

My Grandaddy clears his throat in my ear before his caramel voice rumbles over the line saying, "Honey. Your Grandma Tina. She's gone."

"Where'd she go?"

He's quiet for a long time and when he talks it sounds like he's crying.

"She went to heaven, Honey, with all the other angels."

 And at last, with a few final thrusts and a flood of hot, sticky, fluid, he collapsed on top of me. I could sense, if not see, the smile lingering on his face. I don't know what thoughts filled me then, exactly. There was fear, certainly. I was quaking. My heart thundered in every inch of my body, from my hair follicles to my toenails. Stone cold tears leaked down the sides of my face and I stared numbly at the white ceiling above. This could never have happened to my mother with her honey-colored curls and her broad grin, could never have happened to Grandma Tina who was tough enough to face down cancer without crying. This could only happen to me.

My mother and Brother Thomas talk behind a closed door. My mother isn't really talking though, she's yelling and I feel sorry for the preacher cause my mom can really yell.

There were no notes, he says. And she had no legal will, he says. There was nothing of value anyway, he says.

"It was all valuable," my mother yells. "To my kid it was worth more than anything!"

He mumbles and mutters but he doesn't say she can have Grandma Tina's things. He doesn't say he's sorry. He doesn't say he's wrong and the one thing you don't want to do when my mom is yelling is forget to say all that stuff.

"You're a greedy child-molesting pig!" my mother shrieks as she storms away.

I scramble to keep up with her as she stomps toward home, a stream of swear words trailing behind her.

He layed on top of me like a spent lover, with me just waiting for permission to leave. He breathed evenly. I breathed haltingly. I wished only for him to get off of me so that I could figure out how to gather myself up from this place, this time.

"That was awesome," he whispered eventually. Then he was looking me in the eye, a grin spread across his face. "I didn't hurt you, did I? You okay?"

I nodded for lack of words, ignoring the tears in my eyes and the fact that my face was numb.

"Good," he sighed, he smiled.

Then I felt it.

A renewed erection stabbing at my bruised thigh.

"Can we do it again?"

Can we? It seemed such an oddity, this word, we. As if "we" had done anything in the first place. But I knew my answer didn't matter. He was already rising up, pushing my ripped panties aside once more.

Church bells clanged in my mind and I saw myself in a white dress, virginal, covered in white lace and shining beads. I saw the little bonnet I wore over my blonde braids and the patent leather shoes I wore over tights that should have been white but were gray. I saw the church rummage sale where they sold my Grandma Tina's junk shop jewelry. I saw gray haired ladies haggling over the price of her photo albums.

And so I just closed my eyes and said nothing. I didn't push or claw this time. I just waited for it to be done, willed him to be quick. I don't remember pain or thought or words.

And it was over, at some point. I only remember darkness, the inside of my eyelids. Nothing more.

And I thought of my mother as she is at this moment, while I am being held down by the violence of a man's desire she's alone in some room with a glass pipe clenched between her teeth. She lights the rock, inhales the smoke, and is able to forget for a second, for a minute, for a year, that she is broken. She's worshipping at the altar of oblivion, wherever she is, because she was born for this too.

"Wasn't he handsome?" Grandma Tina would say, sitting with her photo album in her lap, fingering the time-faded image of a young man, a son, who's been gone more years than he lived. She smiles while looking at him and she worships the dead, longs for death, and she doesn't cry when they cut off her nose, not even when that doesn't stop the cancer from eating away at the rest of her face. She just opens the photo album and waits. She too was born for this too but she's never expected anything more.

I can't find a thing worth worshipping though. I won't worship the parents who couldn't prevent this moment. I can't find rhyme or reason in worshipping, praising, celebrating a life that raped us long before there was some asshole pinning me down to a couch; raped long before there were vague memories of people doing what they wanted to me and to each other, of men doing what they wanted, of the church itself doing what it wanted. Before preachers who fucked their daughters came along, before there were church bells or mothers or grandmothers or anything at all-there was this. And we were all born for it, whether we knew it or not.

The next thing I remember is being on the street with my friend.

His juices, his will, mingled with my blood, soaked the baggy shorts I wore and slipped down my cold thighs as I stood there shivering. My friend and I began walking down the sleeping street toward her house. We were quiet for a few minutes.

She broke the silence, saying, "How'd it go? With Frank?"

We reached the end of the street and ahead was the gleaming white of the church, dazzling in the full moon light, with a simple wooden construction and a steeple from a storybook. I heard insects buzz through my memory and join together with the din of the church bells clanging and my mother laughing and my grandmother's voice, so full of love...

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth like dead meat. I pried it down, made it work with a great deal of effort; finally saying in a strained voice that didn't sound like my own, "I just kept saying no."

For a glimmering moment, I imagined telling my friend's mother about Frank and the church bells and my mother's smile.

My friend's mother was the leader of the Girl Scout troop and the one who rounded up the Godless neighborhood children every Sunday morning to take us to the Methodist church after my Baptist days of childhood were behind me.

She would help me. She would know what to do. She would know how to assign the word "rape" to this without making it my fault. But as I looked to my friend for an answer, the moment curdled. She was staring at the ground in front of her, expression remote and iron hard. She shrugged her shoulders and we walked on without another word.

Church bells resounded in my head as I thought, Maybe she was born for this too.