They Never Learn

by Layne Fargo

Reading was my most reliable escape in childhood, the one way I could get away from my father while still trapped in the same space with him.

“Men like him don’t want a relationship, they want a fan club. The more members the better.”

So tonight I prepare: picking out the perfect outfit, shaving my legs, shaping my nails. All the things most women do to prepare for a date. But little do they know: killing a man is so much more satisfying than fucking a man could ever be.

His face darkens with a mixture of embarrassment and anger—perhaps the most dangerous combination of emotions in a man.

“The whole time we were married,” Mina says, “I knew he was cheating on me, all the signs were there, but he’d deny it, tell me I was imagining things, that I should see a therapist for my ‘pathological jealousy.’ ” Her voice breaks a little, rage seeping through the cracks. “He made me feel insane.”

“You know what’s really fucked-up?” she says. “I used to wish he would hit me.” I’d had this same thought about my father. His abuse was all emotional and psychological; the only marks it left were internal. Impossible to see, easy to deny. “Alexander could lie and cheat and turn my own mind against me, and everyone still thought he was so charming. But if I’d showed up to work with a black eye just once, everything would have changed. They would have had to take it seriously.”

It’s exhausting, being in my head. I wish I could stop thinking. I wish I could be like everyone else.

They want us to bend and bend, let them say and do whatever they want to us. They get away with it, over and over again.