Full Dark, No Stars

She tried to tel herself the scraps of wood meant nothing, stuff like that only meant something in the kind of books she didn’t write and the kind of movies she rarely watched: the nasty, bloody kind. It didn’t work. Which left her with two choices. She could either go on trying to pretend because to do otherwise was terrifying, or she could take off running for the woods on the other side of the road.

Before she could decide, she smel ed the whopping aroma of man-sweat. She turned and he was there, towering over her with his hands in the side pockets of his overal s. “Instead of changing your

tire,” he said pleasantly, “how about I fuck you? How would that be?”

Then Tess ran, but only in her mind. What she did in the real world was to stand pressed against his truck, looking up at him, a man so tal he blocked out the sun and put her in his shadow. She was

thinking that not two hours ago four hundred people—mostly ladies in hats—had been applauding her in a smal but entirely adequate auditorium. And somewhere south of here, Fritzy was waiting for her.

It dawned on her—laboriously, like lifting something heavy—that she might never see her cat again.

“Please don’t kil me,” some woman said in a very smal and very humble voice.

“You bitch,” he said. He spoke in the tone of a man reflecting on the weather. The sign went on ticking against the eave of the porch. “You whiny whore bitch. Gosh sakes.”

His right hand came out of his pocket. It was a very big hand. On the pinky finger was a ring with a red stone in it. It looked like a ruby, but it was too big to be a ruby. Tess thought it was probably just glass. The sign ticked. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU. Then the hand turned into a fist and came speeding toward her, growing until everything else was blotted out.

There was a muffled metal ic bang from somewhere. She thought it was her head col iding with the side of the pickup truck’s cab. Tess thought: Zombie Bakers. Then for a little while it was dark.

- 6 -

She came to in a large shadowy room that smel ed of damp wood, ancient coffee, and prehistoric pickles. An old paddle fan hung crookedly from the ceiling just above her. It looked like the broken

merry-go-round in that Hitchcock movie, Strangers on a Train. She was on the floor, naked from the waist down, and he was raping her. The rape seemed secondary to the weight: he was also crushing her. She could barely draw a breath. It had to be a dream. But her nose was swol en, a lump that felt the size of a smal mountain had grown at the base of her skul , and splinters were digging into her buttocks. You didn’t notice those sorts of details in dreams. And you didn’t feel actual pain in dreams; you always woke up before the real pain started. This was happening. He was raping her. He had

taken her inside the old store and he was raping her while golden dust motes twirled lazily in the slanting afternoon sun. Somewhere people were listening to music and buying products online and taking naps and talking on phones, but in here a woman was being raped and she was that woman. He had taken her underpants; she could see them frothing from the pocket in the bib of his overal s. That

made her think of Deliverance, which she had watched at a col ege film retrospective, back in the days when she had been slightly more adventurous in her moviegoing. Get them panties down, one of the hil bil ies had said before commencing to rape the fat townie. It was funny what crossed your mind when you were lying under three hundred pounds of country meat with a rapist’s cock creaking back and

forth inside you like an unoiled hinge.

“Please,” she said. “Oh please, no more.”

“Lots more,” he said, and here came that fist again, fil ing her field of vision. The side of her face went hot, there was a click in the middle of her head, and she blacked out.

- 7-

The next time she came to, he was dancing around her in his overal s, tossing his hands from side to side and singing “Brown Sugar” in a squal ing, atonal voice. The sun was going down, and the

abandoned store’s two west-facing windows—the glass dusty but miraculously unbroken by vandals—were fil ed with fire. His shadow danced behind him, capering down the board floor and up the wal ,

which was marked with light squares where advertising signs had once hung. The sound of his cludding workboots was apocalyptic.

She could see her dress slacks crumpled under the counter where the cash register must once have stood (probably next to a jar of boiled eggs and another of pickled pigs’ feet). She could smel

mold. And oh God she hurt. Her face, her chest, most of al down below, where she felt torn open.

Pretend you’re dead. It’s your only chance.

She closed her eyes. The singing stopped and she smel ed approaching mansweat. Sharper now.