He’s gone after a few seconds. No running. No panic. Just gone.
I turn to the side and double over, vomiting the remains of the dinner I had a few hours ago. I heave until my stomach is empty and my chest is hurting.
I don’t remember calling the cops. I don’t remember kneeling by the man on the ground and whispering over and over, “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.” I don’t remember anything except the blood on my hands. And his eyes. God, his eyes. Dazed and fading. The very same eyes I saw on my dad in the hospital before they closed forever.
The police arrive. An ambulance takes him away. They ask me questions: how tall was the attacker, what did he look like, did you get a name? Like I had a chance to ask him to introduce himself.
I answer. Kind of. Through the fog. I shake. I throw up twice more. One of the paramedics wraps me in a blanket like a child.
The man doesn’t survive. I know because I go to check on him the next morning.
The city doesn’t change after that.
But I do. I change.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just in quiet, gradual ways that no one notices but me.
I stop using the alley. I stop working night shifts. I stop walking with headphones on.
I start wearing protective crystals and touching them often for my own comfort. I start checking my locks three times instead of once. I start getting this tight, crawling sensation in my stomach whenever someone raises their voice. Even if it’s just to cheer.
The worst part?
It follows me. Even after I leave the city and come back to Big Love. Even after I return to the comfort of the diner and Grandma’s warm hands and my old room with its creaky bed frame. I can’t forget. I can’t unsee it.
What I saw reignites the nightmares that started long before, involving the last day our parents were alive.
I thought I’d overcome it. I really did.
Until I hearaggravated assaultandJerichoin the same sentence. My safest person in the world now associated with the worst memory of my life.
I laugh at first when I learn it. A bitter, defensive kind of laugh, like the universe is playing a cruel joke on me. Like this laugh is some sort of a years-delayed reaction to all the previous traumas.
Of course the safe, grumpy man next door—who looks like he could snap a person in half with one hand—has a record. Of course he does. And not just any record, but one for assault, something which has been haunting me for half of my life.
I thought I’d grown to know the man.
Turns out I don’t. Not really. I know he has callused hands that can be gentle on my body and a big soul that secretly loves the rooster. I know he’s protective of his niece and family. I know he smells like pine and paint and has a look ofdanger in his eyes that makes your knees buckle, not from fear, but something worse—want. He feels like a mystery wrapped in a cozy evening blanket.
As it turns out, the danger is real, and the mystery is dark. It’s too dark for me to accept. Too heavy to handle.
Not when every cell in me screams that it could happen again.
Maybe not to me. Maybe not by him.
But that doesn’t matter. Because it only takes one second for everything to change.
One punch.
One scream.
One alley.
And the life of a whole family is altered forever.
And I promised myself, all those years ago, that I’d never be around people who can change other people’s life on a whim. On an uncontained emotion. That I’d never get close to someone who could turn a switch and become something unrecognizable.
So when Dick tells me about Jericho’s time for assault, I shut down.
