Stalk: An Anti-Confessional
When they let me out of holding late the next day, they kept my shoelaces. I walked the miles home past cornfields scraped by August heat. At the end of the long straight drive built to keep the jail far back from the road, I passed two men talking, low and loose, waiting for a ride. These men were outside of the locked seamsealed walls of my own petrified skull and so I could not read them through my jangled eyes. Still, they seemed calm as two gentle cornstalks, enjoying the breeze as it eased through their leaves. I envied them. They paused in their business to commiserate as I clomped past, my pleather boots puddling hot around my ankles. “Can’t believe they even took them shoelaces from you,” said one man. “What they think you gonna do?” asked the other. “Fucked up,” I agreed. I loved them.
It wasn’t more than a handful of hours after they let me out of holding that the man from yesterday found me again. I was skulking outside of the jazz club I haunted in those days, fresh blisters slipped all around my heels, on a phone call placed for fishing in the sea of possible sympathy. “It’s him,” I hissed. He passed me on the sidewalk. He was looking for me. He’d come there before and told me he was looking for me there because he knew he could find me there, and there he was looking for me again—even after, even after, even after. I did not talk breathe think blink I did walk past him. I was the sidewalk, I was hot concrete, I was the dead tree, I was the big brass lamp, I was the clock on the corner, I was horror of horrors still myself, some shambling blitz-brained woman limping down the sidewalk alone. After I passed him, I could see his shadow pause, his shadow head turn to follow me.
My friend took a breath. “I thought I was going to hear you get murdered over the phone.”
Rather than get murdered, I went into the jazz club. A man I knew was inside. He had a voice of velvet, big drooping eyes, and a way with a wink that made him seem kinder than he was. But he did that day choose kindness. He paid my tab, commiserated right up until I changed the subject, then saw me home alone, the forty dollars left to my name still in my pocket. I loved him.
You see it’s not true that I hated all men.
And could it be said that I acted unfairly?
The man from yesterday would become the man of every day. I saw him scarecrow over the fields, taller than every cornstalk, with eyes that followed my every step. He showed up in all manner of reflections. He was over my shoulder. He was on the sidewalk, drunk and sobbing, hands grasping for the ankles of anyone who passed. Why won’t she talk to me. It rang and rang and rang inside my skull until there were no other words I could hear. Why won’t she why won’t she why won’t she. I heard he’d done it to other girls, heard too late that he was not to be trusted. My fear swelled to fill my body to bursting. I riffled through fears like each moment of new life needed an old fear to fill it, there was that night and what had gone down and the cop and the gender on my license that didn’t match my body I was ashamed that I hadn’t asked the cop why it mattered but it was too late anyway the cop showed the cop face his voice turned to the bad edge that being its own immensity of fear that you know if you’ve ever heard the bad edge in a cop’s voice and if you haven’t may it never be so and there was the cop in lockup who told me I looked evil (and there were the women in there with me who laughed in his face for it and then demanded that he get me a pillow—god how I loved them, how I will love them always, until my last breath on this earth—) and there was everything I stood to lose and all the wrongs I’d later do and here’s this asshole again with his fucking guitar crying like he has some reason to be sad, like I did something to him, and in fact he would say so to me later as he loomed over my back shoulder, me seated facing away from the street so I only saw his reflection approach me from behind in the big plate glass window, he loomed over my body and told me what happened between us wasn’t even a big deal but he was afraid to leave the house and he felt like too bad a person, until I said I don’t know your life or if you are good or bad, but you can’t talk to me, that was right and still I have come to believe that I did wrong and was wrong in the scale of my fear of this man who was after all just a sad little drunk, was no scarecrow looming over no fields. But how was I to know. From the neither right nor wrong of it. What did I do and what didn’t I know. What I did know. What didn’t I do. What was done to me. What I agreed to and what I accommodated. What was meant. What I did. Why. In what order. If it matters. How I was to know. Anyway I am neither justified nor redeemed. Not from the hot thick throes of it. Not from the jail. The jazz club. The fear. My back shoulder. The men. The cops. The shoelaces. The sidewalk. The corn.