True Crime

by Samantha Kolesnik

There was never a woman who I wanted to be. The movies didn’t show any women worth emulating. Just lumps and mounds, colors and shapes. Heaps of flesh you could make into chaos.

I wished someone would take a knife to me and treat me like a chicken. I wished they’d cut off my parts and package them to be sold. I didn’t need them.

We were all murderers, after all. Some of us just hadn’t discovered it yet.

All men did was rape, kill, eat, and fuck, as far as I could see, and it’s not like the fields knew any different. The world was just an echo chamber for man’s sin.

It was the look of a woman asking another woman, “How can you do this to me?” As if we were all connected in an invisible network of vaginas. As if I owed her something.

Home was the rising stench of laundry and the little hairs I saw in the sink while I brushed my teeth. Little hairs I did nothing about.

There was no evil in the world that was not man’s work. And there was no man in the world that was not woman’s work.

There was a rage so deep inside of me that wanted a man to dare try to kill me. There was a hate so deep inside of me that wanted me to dare just die.

Nobody kept their hands off a woman because a woman didn’t want it . . . there was always some man who loomed in the distance threatening something worse.

Men tried to squeeze the women in their lives together, as if our common biology were enough to bond us. That’s what men never understood about women. It wasn’t enough just to have breasts to want to be together. We had minds, too. Men never saw the minds. They saw lumps and mounds, holes and crevasses. Places to stare, places to molest. Men were handsy that way. Tactile.