Westerly

They arrive at a dilapidated porch and he extends his hand to her. She holds it and he lifts her into his arms. She closes her eyes and feels like laughing, only he seems so serious. He kicks open a battered, aluminium screen door and they enter a dark room. The rugs must be so thin; his footsteps echo around the sour space. Finally she is in a brightly lit room. A kitchen. She opens her eyes as he sets her down onto a kitchen chair. Chrome and hard like a hospital chair. He takes a beer out of the refrigerator and snaps back its ring-pull. It is as if he has broken its neck - the can whimpers a final, helpless breath. She opens her mouth to speak, but no sound comes out. She is in the kind of drunken state in which everything is clear and bright and slow. A clock somewhere in the room, probably chrome, ticks to infinity. He strokes her cheek with his free hand and she shivers. His touch is measured, deliberate - she feels like that can. She keeps thinking she should say something, but her mouth is dry. Her tongue lies splayed, a bleached fossil in the dust. The halogen lights hurt her eyes. The pressure of his hand of her cheek increases and she tilts her head up to see him. But he is not there. Only his hands - now on her neck, now over her breasts, now pulling her dress down to her waist. She is powerless to stop him. Stop, she says in her head, I don’t want this. But it does not stop. It is rough and hard and she knows she needs to get out of there. She pushes back the chrome chair and it scrapes futilely against the linoleum. She knows she needs to run through this halogen hell, over the worn carpets, through the broken screen door, out into the street, into the night, into safety. The chrome clock gives her a second, but it is not enough. The lights blaze; the pain sears through her skull. I don’t deserve this - she thinks. Then everything is drowned out: her thoughts, the clock, the lights, the pain. There is a roar in her ears that she pins all her hopes on and then nothing. It is all nothing. It is funny that no one has ever been able to describe nothingness. They should ask her now.