The Last Women in the Forest

by Diane Les Becquets

more terrible thing still to love someone and not know if you’d ever been loved in return. There is something shameful in that prospect, the kind of shame that can reduce a person to someone she no longer recognizes.

That was before the story Marian had believed in, the one she’d been certain had been written for her, had begun to change, like a kaleidoscope. Turn the cylinder one way, and the pieces shift, and a new image appears, as if each of her memories were a shard that could be rearranged to fit whichever story she chose to believe, and she wondered if truth existed at all. The only thing she could be certain of was that each day forward would carry the past.

Einstein called the intuitive mind a sacred gift and “the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift,” he’d said.

Each of the victims was different, and yet there was that one trait that they each possessed: the assumption that sincerity would be met with sincerity.

murders, the perpetrator did not need to have intercourse with his victims for the murders to be considered sexual homicides. The sexual component was defined in terms of power. He took ownership of each of the women, he terrorized them, he humiliated them by having them take off their clothes, and he destroyed them.

The attacks were sexual because of the killer’s predatory nature, and they were hostile acts of aggression and violence against women.

As a child, the killer had learned to survive in a world he could not trust by dissociating from his feelings, and as a result he could come across as having a calm and in-control demeanor. But beneath the surface the killer would be harboring fantasies of reve...

Nick had even gone a step further to say that the killer would blame the victim for her own fate as another means of establishing his power over her, of degrading and humiliating her. Ultimately, in the killer’s mind, the woman was at fault for being the weaker se...

Additionally, Nick had said that the killer would have been ...

bears had a keener sense of smell than any other animal, three hundred times that of a bloodhound. A bear could detect its prey up to a mile away, and some scientists believed a bear could detect a carcass upwind from twenty miles away.

Tate’s supposed empathy was nothing more than a charade, a tool he’d

developed by closely observing others and mimicking their behaviors.

think this is why I enjoy used books so much. They have previous lives, like old houses, like people. Tonight I felt inspired by the poetry collection, and not because of the poems I read, though I enjoyed them very much, but by the inscription and my curiosity about these two people’s lives.

Regardless of whether rape is involved, these crimes are sexual homicides, as they involve men exerting their power over women. Too often women fail to trust their intuition when something doesn’t feel right. Too often they blame themselves for their vulnerability. And too often, for the rest of their lives, they carry the burden of shame for having been violated. John addressed these points in an email to me: “We can be quite effective at punishing ourselves for our perceived sins when what we really

need to do is get in touch with our own anger. Your personal world was stacked against you; the culture was/is stacked against you; your gender becomes a target you wear on your back. Are you at fault for any of this? Of course not. Maybe it’s past time to be totally pissed off.” This novel is my attempt to address the fear and vulnerability too many women live with every day, and to encourage women in those incidences when they still have a choice, to pay attention when something doesn’t feel right, to heed that small voice inside themselves.