INTERSECTIONS: Hoyt Lake @ Jogger Path

SHE WAS

by Luanne diBernardo


The hook jabbed into her back.

She had only just passed him, tall and fat and fishing at the edge of a pond stilled with sewage, the stench of death. Disinterested, he bothered not to turn the way people do when they’re lost in a task, she would have noticed had he glanced her way. Still she knew what it was when it struck her.

She’d been running the same path for years, knew the sting of a pebble snapped back from a passing biker, knew the scratch of a low-hanging limb, and though unexpected, knew that what pierced her back was in some way attached to the man who chose to not glance her way. She felt the slack in his line pull taut, his poorly-aimed cast intending to sink the barb that stubbornly tempted to slow her, his nylon cord unspooling to the speed of her sprint, the speed that he followed. A marathon runner, she managed to keep just ahead of his tug without turning to see who or why. Her heart beat the pace of a toy wound too tightly, her shoulders cranking her right-angled arms into movement, her fists blurred forward, then back.

Her legs moved on their own, her feet barely touching the ground, the earth spitting divots because of the force that thrust her knees her calves her feet, her speed what moved the world into motion. She ran with everything she’d ever known packaged safely inside her, now pulsed into fight, the newfound thrill of a life worth saving. She ran with no thought but this thought: it had come.

Though not penciled on a calendar, nor some scrap of note left deep in last winter’s pocket, this was a day penned in time, inevitable. For years she’d seen it in dreams, his knife popped into the fat of her calf then ripped up the length of her thigh, to her buttocks. She saw it a hundred times in her sleep, her flesh splayed wide like an overboiled hot dog, her muscle the white of citrus peel, while blood streaked both sides of her calf with ribbons of thick, sticky red. She saw how his knife next spliced her other leg and she wondered where each dream would stop, what she thinks of now while the fisherman quickens his pace.

She, (with an exertion that was its own reward, exhilarating if not for the burning across her shoulders and down her spine, if not for the fisherman gaining behind her), could already see him reaching her throat, not to choke, but to fell her balance, her legs collapsing beneath her, her knees overextended and ruined, the promise of a pain she would host the rest of her life. She would slam to the ground like a fallen deer, a thud that would surprisingly have no feeling, not even his fists pounding bone against bone, her offering of jaw, the feature most like her father’s, graceful the way it defined her chin, then upwards to meet her delicate ears, none of which she took for granted.

She knew her life could have been more, but she knew it could also have been less. Still, it disappointed her when men neglected to notice, or when they did, how they still found reason to walk away, though it’s true she was never so obviously pretty. She knew which features played well because of how they fell on a face of mismatched parts, her cockeyed smile and thick puttied nose, clear dark eyes that betrayed her time and time again. No feature so perfect as that which resembled his, that it meant so much made her angry. Even now while running with a hook to her back, her insides busting because of who chased her, he who happened to be where she happened upon, wrong that his weight would crush her ribs and lungs, her hands at her sides and clenched into fistfuls of fabric, she pulling upwards while he pulled down from where he crowded between her legs, both fisherman and runner unwilling to lose. Pinned and pleading in somebody’s voice, confused by the fisherman’s indifference, by how he forced her pants from the part of her body that nobody (not even the boy who wore his dead father’s dog tags) had the right to see. The part of her body she rarely considered except when time to pee, to bleed, to clean. A part of her body unlike her father’s and so never studied, somehow more foreign with her back pressed against the earth.

He weighted her with a force that planted the hook like a carpenter’s staple, prongs spawning fire that paled at the force of his thickness, a violent push that punctured the mysterious and tender pulp just inside the spread of her legs, no matter that it didn’t fit, no matter the way it ripped her into a bloody nest by cramming and pushing and grunting its way to a place it did not belong, a body he had no right to claim.

Years later she will forget how her flesh looked when as young as that day. Her thighs then firm and strong will remain that way, like her buttocks, though lessening, once dominant. She will remember nothing of his hands or face or if she ever touched him; nothing of his scent or what he wore. Those years later she will understand nothing about his forceful intrusion, profanely impersonal, will think nothing of her broken jaw, reshaped, her knees unhinged, arthritic. Those years later she will remember nothing so well as the violence of his walking away -- not so much the direction he took or if he ran or walked or stumbled –- but the possibility that nothing of her remained with him. That she had not imposed on him something imperceptible and nameless, something he had not wanted but that would linger the length of an average life; a graceful line traced in dirt, what never was, and then gone.