Any Man

by Amber Tamblyn

Yes, I am still breathing. No, I am not living.

No, I do not want to wake up after the surgery.

We sink to the bottom of each other’s oceans, drowning in shared silence.

again. I want to take off all my fingers like pen caps and write blood all over this room.

The rest of me will exit our picture’s future. I’ll go somewhere warm, black, and waterless, touching nothing, until she forgets my name.

Honey, why did you marry me? I talk a lot. Love you. Bye.

“Do you recall physically resisting at any time during the assault?

Donald met his friend for a beer after work and died instantly. Donald has to explain to his children what happened and will die instantly. Donald will touch his wife’s thigh and die instantly.

I’m so sorry to ask, but would you mind if I got a selfie with you?”

The shape of my mouth my neighbors and colleagues desire to set them at ease. It makes others feel safe with my story. I practice this smiling, this mouth’s shaping, in the mirror. I do it for them.

They never made fun of Jimmy’s silence or his stutter or his singing answers, ever.

No, I cannot feel my genitals.

“May I sit next to you, Donald?” “Yes.”

My mom says a bad thing was done to you by a bad person they can’t find and it was on the news. But I don’t care about the news. I only care about you.

It’s just, some people called you bad names that I didn’t like. And asked me how you could . . . could . . .” “Could what, Monkey?” “Could get . . . raped . . . and I didn’t even know what that word was.

“Why did you let someone put something in your drink?” “I didn’t let that happen, Jake . . . It was put in my drink when I wasn’t looking.” “Oh. . . . But why weren’t you looking, Dad?”

Article: Teen Charged After Berkshire Farm Fight Article: Road Closures Planned in Downtown Albany Article: 2017 Brings a New Year of Resolutions for the State of New York Article: Six Months Later, Two Violent Sexual Assault Cases Remain Unsolved

As you may know, Melissa is a legal commentator with the #1 current affairs talk show in the country. We think you are absolutely riveting and have been following your story since your assault a few months ago. We are such big fans! We’d love to bring you on the show to discuss your activism and your thoughts on your attacker.

sexual assault and how few men report being sexually assaulted, but also how few women are actually believed. That’s what I’d rather talk about. Let me know what you think.

Regarding your email address, we called your daughter’s school and someone there gave it to us. Hope that’s okay!

You can’t be fucking serious?! No that isn’t okay!!!

From Massachusetts, proud home of racists and Red Sox.

gotta laugh when I say that, because it’s funny, ya know? It’s so awful it’s funny. It’s nuts!

want to say to the new guys here, look, it’s okay to process your

shit however you want to. It’s your shit. It’s no one else’s shit. As long as you’re not hurting someone else. Your hell is yours and you get to decide, okay?

It’s not your fault. But healing your own pain does belong to you now.

“Anger has that peculiar quality of isolation; like sorrow, it cuts one off, and for the time being, at least, all relationship comes to an end. Anger has the temporary strength and vitality of the isolated. There is a strange despair in anger; for isolation is despair.”

I thank despair for keeping me honest. For never lying to me. I take it up to my place for a nightcap. I fuck it to feel better. I wake up a bitter man.

It also says the bite marks were not made by human teeth. I need a drink.

It belonged to an animal. A dead animal they found in the hallway. A cat.

Let’s just say we found bodily fluid—Jamar’s—in the deceased animal.

She and me and despair go way back. I got the most expensive one I could afford. The more expensive, the better she’ll treat you.

Helped her out of her brown wrap and tossed it on the floor. Told her to make herself comfortable. She insisted on sitting on the kitchen counter.

No matter what. I tell him I’ll be there and I’ll buy every fucking Sunday Dispatch in the whole Goddamn state and I’ll burn them. I’ll burn them all.

I cry harder than I’ve ever cried in my entire life. I cry until I evaporate.

She sodomized me with that handle, over and over, as I screamed for help. It’s a pain . . . it’s a cellular pain now, okay? It’s not a memory, it lives in me like a heart.

“I’m telling you this story because everyone who loved Maggie and cared for her believed it was the gusts that took her life that day. But it was me. I took her life. I took her life because I thought my life was taken from me.

“How can you go on living when you’re now being lived in? When you’ve been invaded?

How can you end your own suffering, without ending completely? How can you accept touch? Or walk through your life, a lived wound, forever avoiding some terrible, inevitable wind.”

I somehow might’ve asked for this because I was having drinks at a bar without my wife after work?

Kindly reread our correspondence. I made no such promise. I am sorry you had a bad experience but if it’s any consolation, our ratings were fantastic for your segment and I do believe your appearance, while difficult for you, was for the greater good and will benefit us all in the long run.

I’m so disgusted.

Jimmy changes the channel. I lock eyes with him in the mirror. I push my Scotch away and take a sip of water instead.

I’m honored to say that over the past eight years, we’ve been able to help authorities apprehend over 460 individuals accused of violent sexual crimes. I’ve been merely the conduit for those apprehensions, ladies and gentlemen,

I had “asked for it,” they wrote. I was a piece of shit. I was a deadbeat, a sinner, a prick, a pussy, weak, a pansy, a wimp, a candy-ass, a faggot, a bitch, a Mary, a limp dick.

Did you know that one in sixteen men in America have been raped? And those are just the ones who have reported it.

Sexual assault is the single least-reported violent crime. And when it is reported, the victims are blamed and shamed. Or not believed. Or silenced. Punished. Or their attackers are never prosecuted at all.

For lunch I could have as many tablespoons of mustard as I wanted,

but I could only have one teaspoon of ketchup per day. And cottage cheese was all right to eat, believe it or

SaS foods are what I called Skinless and Safe foods. Just a quick way for me to identify them.

We capitalized on it. We exploited it for ratings or whatever, for stories, with our memes and GIFs and tweeting and all that. We jump on the train. We show their pictures on live TV. We make clever hashtags.

“Yeah, I bet, buddy. The crying part came, for me, when Mr. Sands talked about his son. Naming his son Pear last year after Mr. O’Sullivan passed away from cancer.