The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

I wonder now why my mother didn’t plead guilty and cop some sort of deal. Did they not offer her a deal? Did her lawyer think he could plead self-defense? Didn’t her lawyer know that the only thing harder to win than a rape case is a woman defending herself in a domestic violence dispute?

“Oh good, Michael.” She squeezed my hands. “So sleep on the couch for tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll figure out a more permanent place for you.” Tomorrow, I imagined her saying, we’ll figure out a more permanent place for your disgusting, diseased, morally frightening body, which is too much for my son to handle, my son, who is eighteen years old and who may soon enlist in the army because he is willing and able to kill people, but I will refuse you the comfort of your normal bed, on this, one of the worst nights of your life, in order to appease his bigotry and coddle his feelings of superiority to you.

It was my otherness that so angered those boys, my unknowableness, my dangerous wrongness. They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrence couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.