The Crime of Her Hand in Mine

(Trigger warning for hateful language from one character in this work of flash fiction.)

~~~

Summer of 2012

The world was supposed to end a few months ago, but it didn’t. The billboard put up telling people to repent on the side of the town’s little two-lane highway still sits there, even though the anointed day of fire has come and gone. Without any flame, unsurprisingly. She’s still here, rinsing the remainder of the soap from the stained yellow sink, in the same kitchen with grease-stained walls.

She finishes washing the dishes, trying not to think about how isolation is a dangerous thing. The fact that she rarely leaves the house, save for work and grocery shopping, wouldn’t be so bad, if the circumstances were different. She wants to feel connected with the world. She wants to hold on to the precious moments of connection she experienced for the first time with another person.

But the dining room table is her schoolhouse. She does not leave this house. She does not get to see her friends face-to-face, except for one precious day a decade in the making.

She takes a deep breath, fills her water glass, and plasters on her game face. She always lifts the corners of her lips up the slightest degree so it never looks like she’s frowning. Such an infraction could rub him the wrong way.

She pushes the old sheet hanging in the door frame between the kitchen and the main room of the house. It’s part living room, part dining room, part storage unit. Space is always a problem with three people in a six hundred square foot house. The air in the main room is far cooler than the kitchen, blessed chilled by the air conditioner in one of the house’s south-facing windows.

She smiles at her father, says hello, and tries to hurry off to her room with her glass of water. She’s starting college soon, after all. Surely, all that paperwork she’s doing on her own is some pretense for being busy.

She is not so fortunate.

“Come sit down,” he says.

“Sure,” she says, her voice coming out a little high. She needs to keep a pretense of levity, just in case there’s any infinitesimally small chance she can escape his anger.

She knows this isn’t good. She sets her glass down silently, careful to make sure not a single move she makes could imply aggression or anger. She lifts the wooden chair, obtained from one yard sale or another, instead of sliding it out, so it doesn’t skid or scratch the old checkerboard floor tiles. They’re already breaking and peeling in so many spots. Best not to risk damaging them further.

“So you had fun at the convention?”

“Oh, of course,” she smiles, saying it for the thousandth time. “Thank you so much for letting me go. It was wonderful.”

The conversation follows the flow of every one with him; it feels a bit wrong at first, but it isn’t only hostile. But she can see the tension in his jaw. The way his eyes look sharp and calculating.

“It really wasn’t okay that you didn’t tell us that girl was coming.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that. I was just afraid of how you’d react,” she says. She remembers daring to glance at the clock, seeing the minutes tick by.

“She could’ve been anyone. She could’ve been a serial killer. What if she was a killer, she showed up at the con, grabbed you on your way to the bathroom, and we never saw you again?” he’s talking louder, getting angrier. “What if that had happened?”

“I knew she wasn’t. We’ve been friends for eight years. We’ve done voice calls and video calls. Too many to be faked.”

“Everything can be faked!”

It is 2012. The world was supposed to end this year, but it didn’t. Neither of them knows terms like deepfake yet. This was another time.

But she agrees with him, because that’s what he wants. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

And so, despite how she capitulates, how she agrees with everything he says to placate him, it still escalates. Somehow. She may never know how.

“I saw you flouncing around holding that girl’s hand. So what? Are you a fucking dyke now?”

Reality slides as his voice goes from careful, restrained, to angry.

His hateful words echo in her head. He spits a thousand slurs. She has to be careful. She can’t tell him he is wrong. If she does not capitulate, if she does not bow down, she will never ever—

Never, ever, ever, ever—

Escape.

He questions her like this for what feels like hours.

“No, we’re just friends,” she bites out, hating every word he says.

She’s learned, from that precious internet where she met her sworn sister, that such words are not okay to say.

“You know girls can get STDs from each other, too. It’s not just men and women.”

“I know. We really are just friends. Nothing like that would happen.”

“Just a friend,” is the lie she insists upon.

She’s her sister. Her sworn sister, not a sister of blood, not a sister with the genetic material of this hateful man. (Thank God.) She would never have a blood sibling; she was an accident from sloppy birth control pill habits. She was an unwanted surprise from the beginning that he now held on to so tightly.

The conversation continues, but she can’t remember more. There are more questions. More demands. The criticisms don’t end with that one accusation. She’s homeschooled and has been since first grade. She isn’t allowed to date. She’s been raised on a diet of don’t-trust-boys and don’t-dress-like-a-slut and men-only-want-one-thing-from-you-and-when-you-give-it-to-them-you’ll-never-see-them again. She gets this from both her father and her mother.

She hates all of this. She wishes she could change his mind. But she can barely endure his interrogation without breaking down in tears.

This was the only time she saw a friend face-to-face in eleven years. She wants this memory to shine in her mind like a little pocket-sized sun she can take out and have to herself on the painful days. She doesn’t want the echo of his cruel words pounding in her head.

But they do and they do. They beat and the pound.

She’s known that she needs to leave for so long. She’s always plotting, squirreling away every cent to make the great escape possible. She’s known for a long time. But this interrogation lays another layer of cement on her resolve.

She didn’t realize, in the moment, that holding hands could be such a crime in his eyes.

~

Author’s Note: The amount of hateful language in this piece is greatly abridged from the conversation that inspired this story. I hope the trigger warning at the top of the page is enough to prepare readers for some uncomfortable content.

As a writer, I am compelled not to ever type the sort of hate speech that appears in this story. Even if it’s coming from a character whom I deeply do not agree with or approve of, it feels wrong to even put the words in a document.

But as an abuse survivor, I feel compelled to be honest about the kinds of horrible words that might be spat at us. I don’t condone the language of the male character in this piece, but I didn’t understand what sorts of behavior were verbally and emotionally abusive when I was younger. It took years of therapy to realize the cruelties that were just a daily conversation for me growing up could be rightly called something else. Thus, for the sake of realism and awareness, the harsh language appears.