COTTON
November 28
Dear Shiloh,
I woke from a nightmare a few minutes ago, one that left my heart pounding in my chest and soaked my tee shirt and sheets with sweat.
It smelled of fear, my sweat.
I stripped the bed and my shirt and stood beneath the shower for a long half-hour, letting the water run over me until it ran cold. Then I sat beneath its streams on the ceramic floor of the tub, arms wrapped around my knees as I shuddered.
I couldn’t break free tonight. Couldn’t escape the memories.
The smell of loblolly pine and the crunch of needles beneath my sneakered feet.
The figure up ahead, stretching in the curve of the deeply shadowed trail.
A mild alarm spiking along my spine. Nothing major. Not yet. Just confusion, and irritation that he won’t leave me alone. He’s never here. What’s he here for?
His voice when he speaks my name into the trail’s silence.Hello, Emery.
My nod as I breeze by him. No stopping. No pleasantries.
His hand, tangling in my ponytail and stopping my forward movement with a sudden, jarring halt.
You gonna ignore me, bitch?
I’m on the ground in a bafflingly short number of seconds. My training…my strength…where did it go? What is good for? He rotates my body and bears me bodily down, his heavy form pinning me into the soil and loam, making me part of the decay of countless organisms and entities. Grinding me into my own form of dust, nothing left but my animal senses and adrenaline.
Fight. I kick my feet against the ground and buck and shriek, but the position he has me in gives me no advantage. He punches the side of my head, his fist glancing off my cheekbone before his palm—god, it’s so big—presses my ear painfully into the ground. I can hear the muffled thud of my own heartbeat in my ear, in sick beat with Creedence. Bad Moon Rising.
Stop fighting. You’ve been eye fucking me since you got here.
He runs his greedy other hand up, down. Pinches hard. Dips his head and bites my neck, bared to him. His hand rips at my shorts, pushing them down until they tangle around my knees.A shoe scrapes against my legs as it pushes them completely off.
Not happening. Not real. Nightmare—
My garbled scream cuts against the night until he shoves something in my mouth. My underwear? Then it’s just keening, rising from my throat to the ugly rhythm of each push as he invades my body, steals my dignity and autonomy in the most final of ways.
Yeah. Mother fuck that tight—
Block it out. Focus. Other things. My cheek scrapes against the ground where it’s held. My scalp stings where he grabbed my hair. There’s a splinter of something in my eye, but I can’t shut it, I can’t, I need to—
Wake up. Wakeup wakeup wakeup
He kicks me when he’s finished. Hard, in the ribs, as one would a miscreant dog, and I feel a searing pain that makes me curl in on myself. Spits on the ground beside my face. Bends low, and tucks a piece of loose hair behind my ear.
That was good, babe. Now keep your fucking mouth shut.
He kisses my ear and I shudder into the dirt, watching his feet as they walk away.
That’s when I know. I’ll never wake from this nightmare.
SOMETHING WAS WRONG.Off. Without moving, I opened my eyes. The room around me was dark, the lamp I had fallen asleep to extinguished. My journal still lay across my chest, where I had laid it when I decided to rest my eyes for a minute.
I guess that minute had turned into something a bit longer.
What had awoken me? I stretched my senses out, but heard nothing louder than the pounding of my own heart, saw no shadow deeper than the dark, smelled… Wait. I smelled it then, the tang of oak and leather. Brodie’s soap.
