Thrust: A Novel

Do you know, beloved cousin, how the penny press we know was born on the night of her murder? There is no hotter fuel for consumption than cheap crimes against women and children. And blood.

Did she scream when the hatchet landed, or before? Of all the new accounts, none mentions a scream, or any sound at all. Nor was there any sign of struggle. This tells me that she knew her assailant, likely well, likely intimately. A young man of nineteen, so the story goes. But the details of the actual woman, her body, her life, were subordinated to the drool-worthy matter of the sexual violence, the voluptuousness of her body, half naked and expired.

I wonder what we have set forth into the world. Not the violence, which has always been there, men in love with killing women, but the story of it obliterating all other stories. A sexually unapologetic woman murdered and burned is the fact of it. That she was murdered again, by our consumption of her story, is the unacknowledged truth.

For your statue, cousin, remember those: the fact and the truth. Please keep in mind that woman’s bludgeoned body, and what we did with her. It will keep my rage alive.

I have kept a collection of representations of her. Among them, I do believe Alfred Hoffy’s lithograph is my favorite. You know the way I have designed my bedroom, my clothes, even my bookshelf — all of these were patterned after hers. Did you know that she created her own library inside her room? Books by Lord Byron. She even had a picture of the poet on her wall, and — oh, how you’ll love this — a copy of Leaves of Grass on her bedside table. With passages underlined. This dead woman, who paid so lavishly for the journeys of her cunt, was a literary adventurer. Brilliant. Likely more intelligent and creative than every cocksure narcissistic moron who brought his business her way.

My dearest, I will answer your question. The reason I will not remove the images of this girl and her murder above my bed, the reason I cannot let go of this dead girl or, for that matter, any dead girl, is that she was a writer. In a trunk found in her room, she kept more than one hundred letters, and books, and other papers. Her worktable was littered with pens and ink and excellent writing paper. She wanted — was determined — to say something.

What became of her instead is the creation of an uncontainable story, now merchandised for erotic consumption. The beauty of her green velvet dress was reproduced as if it were an allegory for everything secreted behind velvet curtains throughout this city.

The beauty of her corpse created a hunger. Exquisite. Naked. Dead.

The other reason I cannot let go of this dead girl — this beautiful, sharp, creative girl — is that she knew exactly what to do with her cunt. She employed it as a means of resistance: resistance to reproduction in favor of capital. This was an inspiration, my cousin — this was deserving of worship. Where other people place a cross with an androgyne hanging from it that they pretend is a man — a hilarious icon if you ask me, with its double entendre, its sexualized, baffled, naked body up against some fiction of sin and redemption; could there be a more sadomasochistic image? — I prefer another image: The bare-breasted prostitute. In the long moment before the hatchet hits her skull.

It’s more honest.

Love eternal,

Aurora