Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

Little-known fact about victims: they can tell whether you believe them by which term you use when you ask what happened to them.

Our piety was of the Episcopalian sort that places great importance on the clothes you wear to worship Jesus the homeless Jewish carpenter before driving straight from church to the country club for brunch among other families who, like you, are white, Anglican, wealthy, and heteronormative, because nobody else is permitted to join.

The lesson was that, in some things at least, prayer is no match for politics.

the feel of his smile on my own mouth.

could not believe this man, this college freshman, would consent to stand in front of me, exposed as he was, letting me hold him, behold him, as I was. How convinced must he have been of my intentions? How certain of his own pleasure? I thought of him with near condescension, the entitlement of another man in his underwear in my dark house throwing a long shadow. What was this force that led men to break down like this?

It was a mouth pressed against mine, shoving and sucking, as if in preparation—with the same economy of force my mother used to cram halved lemons and heads of garlic into the cavity of a roasting fowl.

had gone from too shy and intimidated to talk to boys I didn’t directly know to paranoid about who hated me or wanted me to suck his cock.

For decades I forget them, if forget is the right word for the white blast of nothing the mind deploys like an air bag at the memory’s approach.

But my parents’ version of shit was not all that impressive, or else they didn’t have much in the way of a fan.