1. echo
The flashbacks are the hardest part.

Echoes. Footsteps. An alleyway. Puddles.

They come sometimes in supermarkets and Rebecca starts to scream. An aisle, beverages, a row of thin plastic, and her hand reaching for orange soda. The shaking begins. Like dominoes, the two liter bottles cascade brilliantly towards the speckled tiles. Rebecca crouches into a ball and covers her head. The stock boy comes over. Sometimes the manager.

“Miss?” he asks. “Is everything okay? Miss?”

Resonating splashes. Footsteps. Murkiness after rain.

Sometimes a cab.

The door locks and the lock echoes and the world outside goes soft. The bowels of the car are metal, and tight.

First reaction, voiceless. Stunned. Numb so much it spreads and she has trouble knowing when her foot hits the ground. Walking, thudding down the empty streets with the cold and her breath turning to clouds and no feeling. No words. Walking. Finds a cab. No reason for a cab to be there. Sits down and holds herself. Driver knows. Takes her to the hospital. Doesn’t make her speak. Doesn’t make her pay. Gets her inside. No words.

Has to tell the woman she’s been Footsteps--oh God where did that sound come from raped. Can’t speak. Motions for paper. Writes down an r.

Scraggly. a.

Woman speaking, lips moving.

Might be saying “Okay, let me take you to a private room, and I can take down your information over there. I’m going to call Sexual Assault Services, and someone will join us there in about five minutes.”

Might be saying “What the fuck you fuckin lyin about, bitch? No man ever touched you! Quit wasting my time, I got real hurt people here.”

Might just be moving her lips in the cruelest of jokes.

The room is sterile, cold. Rebecca can’t feel the pen in her hand, the hard surface of the examining table beneath her. Signs everything they put in front of her. Eyes so blurred she can’t see the dotted line. She is asked if she wants a trained detective involved. Shakes her head. She hugs herself and the social worker starts to talk about the first step, medical attention.

“This is going to be tough on your body,” the social worker begins. “You’re going to be given some very strong antibiotics. Keep in mind that the doctors only do this as a prophylactic.”

Rebecca nods.

“Do you know what that is?”

Rebecca shrugs. Still hasn’t said a word. Probably won’t. Just holds her knees and looks at her lap.

“It just means a preventative measure. It doesn’t mean you’ve contracted an STD. The antibiotics will hurt your head and your stomach, though.

“Also, you’re going to be given post-coital contraceptive, which you probably know as the Morning-After Pill. This doesn’t mean that you’re pregnant, it’s just a prophylactic. The pill, I should say, will make you very nauseous and very tired. The doctors will give you something for the nausea, but still and all, it’s a lot of medicine that will be going through you at once.”

Sometimes an attic.

The smell of an attic.

Sometimes a store window where the mannequin comes to life and leans over. He has a tux, and a cane, and dark, dark eyes that glitter in the night. Rebecca has to get off the streets while she can still see the people in front of her, before the present is shredded like a glossy magazine page.

Footsteps. Puddles. The smell of the sewer.

Afterwards, the shower. All the windows and doors locked and the curtains all drawn and the alarm turned on, and then the shower. Heat pouring through a haze of steam and wetness just wash it away, wash it all away, the feel of him, the feel of it, wash it all away soaking through her, her skin raw from the scrubbing and the heat. A room rich with the scent of soap, the sounds of rushing water and Chopin playing furiously from the connected bedroom through cheap speakers. The sounds of choking, and salt of tears.

And still, wherever there are holes between the sounds, when Chopin rests his long dead fingers between tracks, she can hear the echoes, puddles; Rebecca quickens her pace, feels her heart race, but is careful not to turn her head or look behind her shoulder for fear that she might be right soft white noise of cars driving past her with no intention of stopping. There is a comfort in the sounds of the cars, in any sounds that fill the terror that silence can invoke, but the comfort doesn’t last.

The shower, instead of the kit. It had been her choice, her first decision of the night. Her definitive, empowering move. No insistent social worker, no doctor, and no policeman could make her go through that. She had listened to what was supposed to be the gentle voice of a supportive person explaining the procedure, and she had asked for her pants. The female doctor had been explaining “...nail clippings, combing of the pubic hair, a swab of each of the areas of...” and Rebecca said:

“I want my pants.”

The doctor tried to calm her down, told her the percentage of women who regretted not having the kit later, and she said:

“I want my fucking pants, all right?”

And they brought them back to her, ripping the seals of the evidence bag, and she put them on, and she wore them in the taxi, and she wore them in the elevator, and she wore them as she approached her apartment with stilted steps, and as soon as the door was closed she tore them off so violently that the buttons ripped off of her fly. She pulled all of her clothing off as if trying to remove her skin, and started to convulse with the cold and her own reticent tears. She hadn’t allowed herself to cry yet, just felt numb.

Now, the tears come.

Rebecca races in every direction: the stereo, the oven, the bathroom. She turns up Prelude No. 13, throws her clothing onto the lit burners, breaks her smoke detector with a violent jab of the broom handle when it complains, and dashes into the shower with such speed that she cracks a ceramic wall tile with her shoulder.

The heat is on, and the steam is already beginning to fill the room. She looks down, and sees the purple blotches all along her thighs, down to her knees, sees the claw marks on her ribs and breasts, the bite marks on her shoulder, and falls to the floor of the shower, pounding the walls and reciting over and over again that it couldn’t have possibly happened to her, not to her, that it was a dream, and she was fine, and oh God everything hurt and her chest hurt and, and what if she contracted something bad, would she know?

Sleep. Dreams.

Footsteps. Closer. One wrong turn and where did all the streetlights go? Suddenly might as well be Harlem in the middle of the theater district. Rebecca hates this goddamned city.

Days of meaningless sleep.

Days of discontinuous sleep--restless, useless. Getting up to go to the bathroom, to go to the fridge. She hears a pounding at the door, then sleep. Pleading voices. The phone, at first, until Rebecca pulls it from the night table. A satisfying clang as it falls to the floor, dead.

Continual noise. Music, TV. The latter of the two marks the passage of time, the shifts between days and nights in Fox’s programming, the numbers that count down until the month will finally end. An excruciating wait, and for what? Rebecca opens the bathroom door and she sees--

Finally, Rebecca looks over her shoulder. There is a man, Hispanic. Stubble.

This can’t be happening, she thinks, I support our public school. I don’t dress slutty. I just want to find where I parked my car!

Stubble, not a beard. An ugly jacket, brown and stained with deeper browns, stained as well with rain. Rebecca panics and turns down a blind corner, into an alleyway that she can’t see the other end of. She looks straight ahead, puts her hands in front of her, and runs into the black. Behind her, she hears footsteps, and they echo painfully against the walls.

--nothing.

A prayer. A beautiful, dark, sparkling prayer. From nothing, from waiting, from hopelessness, a prayer draped in a river of flowing red begins to come to her. It finds her in a dream and she runs from it at first, horrified, and then it begins to find her in the days.

A river of red, pouring out from her neck, spreading wonderfully across a dress as white as a wedding gown, as white as snow. An ending, and then silence.

Rebecca imagines becoming this prayer.

Dreams of red, and flowing. A spreading stain on the snow to be washed away, to melt and feed the grass. Redness and beauty and an end.

Rebecca runs forward with her hands in front of her, seeing nothing. She slams her wrist and then her head into the side of a large dumpster. She falls to the ground, face down, into a puddle.

She hears footsteps. Stale rainwater falls from the rooftop.

Echoes magnify in the dark.

But Rebecca is not ready for the dream. She is brave, and the one room apartment grows flat. Her first trip outside is through the fire escape. She thinks she is ready to breathe the crisp air, and she is right. She marvels at the pace of life below her, and she actually smiles.

She has loved the sky all her life. She has always maintained that the last thing she wants to see in her life is the sky.

It’s amazing, she thinks, about the world as a whole. I’m going to go down there.

Dressed in baggy sweats, she braves the metal stairs with only one hand on the railing, and then she braves the streets. Everything bustles, and she relishes the wind on her cheeks.

In the store front window, she sees a mannequin that reminds her of Mr. Peanut, complete with monocle and cane, and then her pupils grow wide as she becomes convinced that the mannequin is her rapist.

For the first time in her life, she has a shaking spell, and the voices of those asking her if she needs help fade further and further away.

Footsteps. Puddles. The smell of the sewer.

2. survivor
Three weeks into daily sessions, thirteen remain.

Thirteen people sit around a table, leafing through their copies of the packet. One woman in a comfortable sweater is standing up, her hands on the back of the chair in front of her. She wears glasses on a piece of string around her neck and her name is Dr. Laufer. She is the eldest, and her eyes wrinkle in the corners. She seems nice, before even speaking.

“The work you will do,” she begins today, “is important work. It’s a necessary first step that links a survivor to the treatment that will help her best. You’re not therapists, and nobody expects you to be therapists. Even if the caller wants you to be the one to give her the magic pill that makes everything better, even if she says she’s ready to feel better and you just need to tell her how, you can’t do it; but you should all be very proud of yourselves all the same for training for our team. We’ll never have a magic pill, and the best thing we can do for a survivor is listen to her, because talking is important. It’s about releasing pent-up emotions. It’s about getting it off the survivor’s chest. We’re not here to judge, and we’re not here to force any action. Yes,” she looks at the young man with his hand raised, “Cimarron?”

“Um, why do you keep calling them ‘survivors’?”

“We like to try to put a positive spin on the words we choose. You’ll all catch onto the lingo. Words like ‘victim’ can be detrimental to the survivor’s well being.”

“But the caller--uh, the survivor--has just been raped. I mean, a positive spin on rape? Do you really think that spending time calling them survivors helps them at all?”

“I don't know, Cim. But would you risk calling her anything else and possibly upsetting her?”

“Well, I don't know. I mean, of course not. No. I guess I just--”

Dr. Laufer is good, not just as a therapist, not just as a rape counselor or anonymous phone personality or teacher. She’s good.
“I know, Cim. I understand your frustration. You want to help, not to play these stupid little semantic games. Everyone who is here is going to help, but first you must all recognize how delicate the work you will do actually is. That’s why we’re going to spend a lot of time just sensitizing you to things that callers will probably never talk about. Here’s a good example of what this is all about, on page four of the training manual. Someone want to read it out loud? Afterwards, let’s reflect on it for a moment in silence. Go ahead, Lexi.”

Lexi is a bit ditsy, an attractive brown-turned-blonde, a recent divorcee. This is her self-confessed betterment project. She doesn’t plan to go on to test to become a counselor, just wants to be more aware, came with a friend who has since quit. She reads in a high-pitched voice that reminds Cim of a whiny child.

“There are only three ways people’s bodies can be penetrated against their will. They can be shot. They can be stabbed. They can be raped.”

Nobody speaks. Then, beginning with a soft sigh, Dr. Laufer continues. “You’ve probably gotten bored of me in a hurry, I bet, so starting today there will be other counselors, rape survivors, policemen, hospital examiners, social workers and lawyers in here throughout the training. We won’t get much time alone anymore, except before and after every visitor. After some sessions, I won’t have anything to add, but we’ll just sit around and talk about how we feel. When we’re on the phone, we are trained to not have any feelings or judgements of our own except concern, but here, in this room, it’s important to get out everything that we think, every doubt that we have.”

Today, the speaker is Krieg Garon, MD. “Now that we’re officially through with the basics, we’re going to talk about every type of caller that could conceivably reach us,” Dr. Laufer says, “from those with questions or wanting a simple referral to those who have had childhood sexual trauma, to those whose rapists are asleep in the same room, to those thinking about harming themselves while you’re on the phone. Today, Krieg has graciously come to talk to us about those who call almost immediately after being assaulted.”

“Hi,” he begins. He is tired, and smells of the hospital, though he is dressed in a lumberjack’s plaid shirt. “Picture this. It’s your first day in the office. The phone rings. You pick it up, your big moment. The person on the other end is hysterical.” Badly imitating inappropriate hysterics, he mouths, “I’ve ju-just been s-s-sexually assaulted.” “Now,” he says, “what do you do?”

The question sits out there for a minute.

“You ask the caller how she’s feeling,” Candice suggests. She is a plant, a graduate of this program sitting through it again as a refresher course. The rest of the class envies her, because she gets to staff the phone line once a week.

“How do you think she’s feeling?” Krieg shoots back. He’s a clinician, not a therapist, and he may know his way around the vulva, but he’s got room for improvement in conversational skills. “Never ask a question you know the answer to.”

“Ask where the person is, maybe,” Aria offers.

“Yes,” Krieg says, “that’s your first concern. Is the person somewhere safe?”

The ball rolling, other suggestions pour in. “Do they have someone with them?” “How long has it been since the incident?” “Are they in need of immediate medical attention?”

“Okay, good,” he says, “let’s say they are in need of attention.” Imitating again, he says “I d-don’t want to go to a-a hospital.” His voice changes dramatically for the imitation. It’s disconcerting. He looks around. “Now what?”

“Have them call a physician.”

“I d-don’t want a-anyone to know.” It is clear that everyone is put off by his impersonation. Yes, he’s seen victims--or survivors--and the trainees haven’t, but somehow that doesn’t give him the right to use his unsettling voice.

Krieg works his way through a checklist. Have them go a hospital. Failing that, send them somewhere to someone with medical training, even if they can’t perform a rape kit there. If the caller won’t go, have someone come to them, even if only an on-call social worker. If they refuse, try to get them not to be alone, just to stay with a friend. Still nothing? Make them stay on the phone, or get them to promise to call back the next hour or the next night.

“What do you do if they hang up on you?” Krieg finally asks. “They hear all your options and then they hang up?” “I-I have to go now,” he acts out.

He looks around at the intent faces of the frightened trainees. He focuses mostly on Cim, who looks almost hurt. Cim is taking this hypothetical very seriously. “Jesus,” Krieg says, “at that point, you’ve done all you can.”

Dr. Laufer looks around the room. “Now,” she says, taking her time to meet everyone’s eyes, “I know I’ve said this a thousand times, but since we’ve just turned a corner: anyone who feels the need can stop at any point in the training, and no one here or anywhere else will think any less of you for it.”

Everyone looks around at one another, and more than a couple of glances are directed at Cimarron. It’s not that he’d be a bad counselor, the others think. It’s just that, well, he’s the only male. Even after completing training, he’ll only get to assist beside the phone, offering suggestions to the other person staffing, researching bits of information that the female staffer requires. What could be his motivation to go through with this? This isn’t fun for anyone.

Last week, for instance, the class saw a video of a rape kit. Lexi’s friend threw up, and stopped attending training. The video was as intrusive as a rape, as painful. A few people cringed and gasped. Everyone sat around afterwards and just waited for the heaviness of the air to lift away, but nobody spoke.

Dr. Laufer watched the counselors in training with sad eyes, knowing that she had just stolen a part of their innocence that could never be returned. Everyone would go to sleep that night with the image of exactly ten pubic hairs being plucked with tweezers from a woman sitting still as a corpse with her legs spread open.

Everyone would remember the way the pubic hairs were placed into a ziplock bag while their former owner sat and watched pieces of her body being taken away. Any dignity or humanity she may have had left over after the rape was quickly washing out of her face, and efficiently being plucked from her skin.

3. encounter
Not every trip out is a horror story. Rebecca has days that are nothing like the cab ride, the supermarket, the street fair. Sometimes, she goes to the store, and she buys chicken, and she goes home.

Once, on a line, a man brushes against her by accident, and though the--

Feel of him pushing down against her, feel of him forcing down her arms, turning her over onto her back in the murky wetness, pinning her. Feel of his teeth sinking into her neck. Sound like a hiss, sound of air being released, sound coming from inside her neck.

--experience makes her recoil in misplaced terror, she recovers quickly. The man apologizes, and she manages to hear him speak, and voice a shaky response. This is not her rapist.

This is a married dermatologist waiting to buy chicken. He could probably give her a cream for her thighs, for her scars on her neck.

Rebecca manages to stay on line.

Still and all, she dreams of him, the one who raped her. She has lost his face; just the stubble remains, and lots of it. She dreams she is shaving her legs in the shower, when she slips, and cuts herself. The blood is beautiful, bright red dwindling immediately to pink in the shower’s flow. She traces with her finger a line of blood, tracing down her leg all the way past her calf. She reaches the floor by her heel, when she sees she is staring at the hair that she has shaved. The hair is like stubble, and she looks up, and he is there, and the shower drowns out her screams and all she can do is gasp through a hole in her neck.

Sometimes, she wakes up and notices scrapes and bruises that she hadn’t had before the dreams. Eventually, she gets scared, and gives into a long-fought temptation, and calls the hospital for her results. They’re mixed. No HIV, no incurable diseases, but something odd and non-lethal definitely mixed into her blood. It’s him, she thinks, inside of me. They’d like a urine sample, they say. Maybe it’s genital herpes, they say. She lets go of the phone without hanging it up. She keeps her back straight. Waves ripple away from the phone as it lands, traveling through the air.

Puddles. Echoes. Rain.

More time, no answers. She decides the cuts are not from a blood disease, and she is hurting herself while she dreams. She doesn’t like this, because it’s tangible. No matter how frightening the dreams of red, flowing, a river of red, swimming, breathing it, feeling it in her lungs like gills, tasting it, feeling it fill her ears, embracing it, opening her eyes to the red death escape are, she knows that so long as they remain dreams, she can deal with them. She was told in the hospital that many rape survivors experience Rape Trauma Syndrome, called RTS, and one potential symptom is self-mutilation. This, she balks at.

She also hates the term survivor. It makes her think of the Holocaust.

It’s okay to have been raped, she tells herself, even to say the word: raped. Fucked against my will. A stranger’s penis in my vagina. It’s okay to face that. It’s not okay, though, to continue to be raped. No more cuts, no more dreams.

She wants it to be done. And so she keeps going outside. And, once outside, she takes comfort in the changes in the sky.

Rebecca has always stared at the sky.

Sometimes an attic.

The smell of an attic. His breath all around her, his thigh in her groin. His elbows on her arms, his nails raking across her shirt, and a musty smell.

The claustrophobic feel of an attic.

She never goes out in the rain, and, when she drives, she circles the block for an hour sometimes, because she won’t park anywhere but right in front of her destination. She’d rather refill her gas three or four times.
She won’t talk to people with beards, or goatees, or mustaches.

She won’t make eye contact with anyone.

She stares at the sky for hours and hours.

Forgiving boss, though. Ed. Never really spoke to him in two years with the magazine, and he starts off angry and assuming. She speaks sparsely, and his tone drops flat, and he hushes and coos like tree branches talking to dying leaves, and asks her how long she needs.

She says she wants to start again.

He says, “Hell with that, you’re taking some time. You’re a copy-editor, not a superhero. We’ll deal, and you’re still on salary. You come back before you’re ready and I’ll send you home again.”

She comes back, and he sends her home again.

She hates the time at home, and the apartment seems to have soaked in the taste of smoke, from her clothing that first night, and everything she eats tastes burnt. She doesn’t want pity or understanding men. She wants to make her own choices and decisions again, but sometimes she hears the steps creak in the hallway and disappears into a void of echoes.

She closes her eyes, and opens them. She sees nothing either way, no glints of light, but she hears his breath, hears the dripping of water into puddles. Hears the echoes. Her lower body goes numb beneath his weight, but she hears things.

He takes his time, and actually unbuttons, one at a time, every last button on the fly of her jeans.

She stops trying to fight, no point.

“Please,” she begs, but her voice is flat, “please use a condom.”

His teeth sink into her again, and her eyes roll backwards.

She prays for unconsciousness, but it doesn’t come.

Why did he unbutton my pants, she wonders, just to rip my panties?

But sometimes the same sounds bring her back. The creaking of the stairs outside her apartment also remind her that she is home, and no one is there unbuttons each button slowly, fumbling with one hand, the other over her shirt, tugging.

Some moments remain pure.

Six months after a mutual breakup, three weeks after being pinned to the ground, Rebecca get a call from an ex-boyfriend named Eugene who actually answers to Eugene.

“Hi, Bec,” he says, “it’s Eugene.”

She makes a muffled noise into the phone, startled. “Um. Hi?”

“Don’t hang up, k? I just want you to hear me out.”

There is something amusing in this for her. She chortles. “Okay,” she says.

“Over coffee.”

She shakes her head. Then she remembers he can’t see her. “No, Eugene. But thanks.”

“But Rebecca,” Eugene protests, “I just want you to hear me out. I’ve changed in so many ways, and I’m a bigger person for it, and I think we would have a lot to offer each other.”

She is gentle, but she gets off the phone. Afterwards, she just thinks about the name Eugene and laughs and laughs until tears stream from her eyes. She laughs and sinks back against the wall, falls to the floor, imagining having a conversation with Eugene about how much more mature he’s gotten.

She rolls around on the floor, and it doesn’t remind her of an alleyway. She cries from mirth, but there is no intimation of raindrops in her tears. She bites her lip, but she does not feel the bite of a man on her neck.

Some moments remain pure.

She gets into bed, and she watches Leno. Feeling completely wonderful, she laughs at the monologue, too. And that night, she falls asleep without any dreams at all.

When she wakes up, she sees that she has scratched the skin off of half of her right shin. Her bed is a bloody, sticky mess, and her hair is matted with sweat, and her heart is pounding.

She looks up, and for no reason at all, she sees his face, the pointed ends of his stubble. She is awake, and he is actually in her bedroom, looming over her bed.

With all of her power, she shrieks.

He smiles through the stubble.

She throws the phone at him and it rushes through him and slams into her wall.

She blinks.

Her bed remains a bloody, sticky mess.

The flashbacks are the hardest part.

4. altruism
In a disappointing twist, training ends one week early. “Apologies, but last sessions are cancelled,” the note on the door reads, “due to illness.” Dr. Laufer, everybody realizes, is still and all a very old woman to be working with them at nine every night.

Nobody feels unprepared, just jumbled and rushed. They had all of the instructional portions of the training, but none of the summary. They learned when to lie to a suicidal caller, and how to keep a silent caller on the line. They know the numbers of every hospital in the calling area, and have reference sheets for every imaginable service. They have seen phone calls simulated, and they have role played each type of call until they were prepared for anything that could possibly be thrown their way.

And now, by virtue of an unscheduled attack of influenza, they are counselors. No last week of sitting around and talking about the experience training, no exit interview, no final words of caution or gratitude. “Your certificates are available in the office,” the note finishes. They will pick them up in the morning, when they go in to be paired off, to find out with whom they will staff. Each of them to be assigned as an appendage to a senior counselor, each of them having, at first, only the role that Cim will always have, sitting beside a phone, assisting, learning. They will spend their one night a week drinking coffee and reading the Times, and then, when the senior counselor tells them it’s been long enough, they will be given issue to pick up the phone for the first time, and they will wait with their bodies tense for a call that seems to never come, and when it does, they will almost drop the phone. But once the phone reaches their lips, their voices will be soft and fluid as they say, “Hello, you’ve reached the hotline.”

That is the moment for which they will all wait, inexhaustibly, as nights drag on agonizingly slowly, and mostly uninterrupted.

Lexi is still among their ranks. She has said a final goodbye to the group after every class, and then she kept coming back. She never justified it, but it became obvious all the same that she has grown to love the work. She role played with such fierce intensity, treating each fake call as though it were a real call, as though it were a suicidal caller. When the class would give its daily updates at the beginning--“the bonding time,” Dr. Laufer had called it, where they spoke about their private lives--Lexi eventually ceased to talk about her divorce, or her son, and started to talk about books she was reading with titles like But Look at How She Dresses and Seven Things to Never Say to Someone in Trouble. Lexi excelled, shocking everyone who had her pegged for a dud, and went on to become the second most insightful member of the crew.

Second to Cimarron. Everyone knows this. Even the violent feminists, the ones who have co-founded anti-male organizations before beginning this training, the ones who are rape survivors themselves. Cim is perfect on the phone. He matches the tone of every caller, and he knows things without being told. He never asks for details and he lets silences last as long as necessary to make the callers talk. Even Candice, who staffs on Wednesdays, acknowledges that she wouldn’t mind, if the choice were hers, being an alternate to him when a call arrives.

She puts in a request for this, to have him as her sidekick, but he never knows that. He just thinks he is assigned to work beside her by virtue of good luck, not having to meet someone new and establish a relationship with no foundation outside of long, still nights spent waiting for the phone to ring, half-hoping it never does.

Dr. Laufer is the only person who remains unenthusiastic about Cim’s skills. The hotline rules forbid Cim from answering the phone, even after training, and he accepts this. Dr. Laufer asked him once why he got involved at all, and he replied that this was the closest thing he had ever done to altruism. He would never hear a caller say thank you, he told her, but it wasn’t about satisfaction. It was about helping someone with absolutely no rewards. And if the best he could do was look up information for the senior counselor, then so be it. Dr. Laufer patted him on the shoulder, told him she wished she had a granddaughter his age. Then training continued, and Cim continued to know exactly what to say.

Then training ends, and Candice asks for Cimarron to be her partner. The office allows it, though requests for partners by senior counselors are unusual. The only reason this one goes through is because Janice, working scheduling this quarter, believes Candice has a crush on Cim despite her being seven years his senior, and Janice thinks Candice has been single far too long, and Janice has a romantic streak that would make cupid blush.

But even if Candice does harbor a tiny crush on the trainee, when Cim first sees the office, any hopes that Janice might have had are crushed. It’s a Wednesday night, and Cim and Candice are replacing the late night crew and getting ready to work the graveyard shift. The office is white, with walls stained with brown blotches, on the fourteenth floor of a building with an elevator that hums nervously and lights up in the most uncomfortable fashion. The office has four chairs, and one window, and no air conditioning. There is one long table, adorned only with laminated lists of reference phone numbers, one rotary phone, and one clunky computer. There are two posters on the wall, both generic and about Rape Awareness Week. A list of senior counselors’ phone numbers is taped to the only filing cabinet. The filing cabinet contains paper, and pens. There is absolutely nothing humorous anywhere in the office.

Cim thinks there should be a couch, for between phone calls.

“Where would you put it?” Candice asks.

“It could go where the chairs are,” Cim suggests.

“Oohh,” Candice responds, pretending to be impressed, “and then we can field calls on the couch, too.”

“Right. And we can replace the Rape Awareness posters with some fine art. Maybe put a stereo on the filing cabinet.”

“No,” Candice counters, “replace the cabinet with a stereo. Get some of those giant speakers.”

“Hip-hop.”

“Beebop.”

Candice smiles. “Want a tour of the office?”

“What, there’s more?”

“I was going to show you the pencils.”

Cim nods. “How about the bathroom?”

“No bathroom. Coffee maker in the shared kitchen at the other end of the hall, and bathrooms on alternating floors, so there’s one below us and above us, also at the far end of the hall. The key is in the filing cabinet.”

“What happens when you have to go to the bathroom? What do I do if the phone rings?”

“Cim,” Candice begins earnestly, “if the phone rings and I for any reason at all am not here to pick it up...”

“I know; keep away from it.”

“No!”

“What? You want me to put the caller on hold?”

“No, Cim,” Candice says. “I want you to take the call.” She preempts his objections. “Trust me. I’ve been volunteering here for two years, and if ever a man should be able to answer the hotline phone, it’s you.”

“I don’t want to upset Dr. Laufer.”

“I don’t want a rape victim to say that nobody picked up the phone.”

“Candice,” Cim is shocked, “you just called her a ‘victim!’”

“Yeah, Cim,” Candice says after a pause. “I guess I did.”

5. abort
God only knows what day it is, and it’s late.

Rebecca is tired, and tired of feelings. Rebecca is tired of reality being so fragile that wind sends her somewhere where she can’t see the pavement by her feet.

She leaves her eyes open and prays for just a glimpse of the sky in the dark, feeling nothing at all beneath her shoulders. Just a glimpse of the sky, she begs God.

God answers only with a drizzle.

She is tired from crying.

Tired of crying.

She has given up on eating. More and more often she finds herself just staring off into space. She gets a call from her boss, Ed, very gentle, but he would like her to come back.

She quits and hangs up like a gunshot in the dark.

And the landlord doesn’t know. He wants his fuckin rent, bitch. Are you in there? I can stand here knocking all day. This place is for payin customers only, and I want my fuckin rent.

For hours, days, she stares at the sky.

Sometimes without a reason.

Afterwards, as he pushes off of her, driblets of blood spill from his mouth onto her mouth and neck. They sting like drops of acid.

She is motionless, and mute.

And her fantasies. She thinks of hanging herself with her bathroom robe. It has a belt.

Nighttime, she looks at the list they gave her in the hospital. It’s not because she wants to talk, she tells herself, but it’s an activity to keep her from falling asleep. She is afraid of sleep right now, and acknowledges that.

The cheapest of the options: “Anonymous, non-judgmental, 24-hour phone line, for all matters concerning rape and sexual assault. We’re here to listen.”

She falls asleep.

Red. And flowing.

With baby steps, she dips her toes into the pool, and it is warm, and it is red. The temperature is perfect. She holds onto the railing and walks in the shallow end, down the ramp, until her thighs disappear beneath the red.

Another step stops the pain that has been there since feeling started again is gone.

Another step and she isn’t worried about being pregnant.

Three more, and the claw marks are gone.

The next two are very slow, very slow, but afterwards, they heal her neck.

Another. She breathes through her nose. The drops of blood he dripped on her are gone.

Another step, she thinks, and she’ll be gone, gone and part of the beautiful, pure, silent red.

Creak.

Just another--

Creak. Creak. Plodding stomps.

Rebecca wakes up in a panic, heart racing. Might have died, she thinks, if not for the sound of someone coming up the steps. She stares forward with horrified, unblinking eyes.

This is the worst thing to her, dying with her eyes closed, indoors. She doesn’t want to die with her eyes closed ever.

It’s late, and Rebecca is tired.

She picks up the list, and scans it again. She bites her lip gently.

Rebecca calls the hotline number, and holds the phone a bit away from her face. She hears the phone ring, and it is loud.

Once, twice. A third time.

She hears a voice, like a single rock shattering a window in a soundless night.

“Hello, you’ve reached the hotline.”

The voice belongs to a man. Why on earth--?

Why not, she supposes, but it’s not for her.

She lets the phone drop, and walks towards the window.

Cim is holding the phone like the limp arm of a friend who was just shot. He knows certain things without being told.

Rebecca reaches the window, and looks out at the sky. This is what she has wanted to see for a very long time.

Cim closes his eyes. Rebecca keeps hers open.

They breathe slowly, and in perfect unison, as Rebecca makes a decision all on her own.