Patsy

by Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

And while people would pardon convicts, drunks, and men who fuck goats, cows, dogs, and children, they are suspicious, almost terrified, of a woman without a family and no religion. Jesus is the only viable excuse a young woman can use to deny the penis.

We have neither di right nor permission to enjoy human things like Americans—vacation, rest, strolling in di park, di sunset. Who are we to do dat when we taking up space, taxes, an’ air, according to dem? Dey have all di power to punish us fah stealing from dem—fah daring to t’ink we can dream, much less love.”

There’s a difference between wanting to die and not wanting to live. She doubts she can explain this to anyone. She’s tired of dealing with the dark thing mocking her as a nameless, faceless interloper on foreign soil. Before, it had mocked her as a helpless secretary trapped inside a cubicle, an unwilling mother with no way out but inside her dreams.

She realized then, as she does now, that the darkness lives with her; crouches in certain corners of her room; lingers well after the rain stops on an overcast day; persists in the silences when she doesn’t have music blasting through headphones to drown it out. She wishes she hadn’t survived.