Sugar in the Raw
He told me he was writing a screenplay
about a gothic girl who gets kidnapped by a pedophile
except it wasn’t really kidnapping
because she couldn’t
care, it wasn’t any better any worse
than home, than school, than all the other faceless men she’d seen beneath their masks, their pants, and you
couldn’t really call him a pedophile because he’d
never done it before
he just saw here there where
no one noticed she didn’t show up
to her classes, no one noticed
she could no longer make eye contact with the face of the world,
no one noticed
that they noticed from the start
but didn’t want to take her hand
in their own, manicured & still freshly
washed.
“It was a shopping mall!” I tell him
when he says he doesn’t know
how or where, just why.
I tell him she’s fourteen at the coffee shop, because if there’s anything she hopes adulthood is
it’s drinking coffee
and being left alone
and she can walk around and not hear the taunting
but she’s too young to like the taste
and she gets a peach iced tea instead
pouring in packets of sugar in the raw
so she can crunch it like the candy reward of doing something right
when she’s only heard “wrong”
and he too hears it all
while she runs away wondering why no one intervened but not wondering
why she needed to go to the shopping mall to be within thirty feet of another beating heart, to feel its distant warmth
and he sees her again
tomorrow.
“It was the shopping mall,” I told him
and he liked it
for his story
staring up at the ceiling as us writers do
grateful for a couple words
in Scene Two
like pocket change you might use when there isn’t enough in your wallet
to get a soda from the vending machine even though you’re not all that thirsty
but drink half of before it goes flat
and you toss it out
my body
a canvas for you to read in its goose bump brail
but you never learned brail so you read the language as your own
and maybe one day I’ll learn it too
and let it stick like the sweat to the neck of a man
smoking cigarettes in a shopping mall parking lot
graying his shirt like the seats of the Cadillac he’ll
pull it off in with the swiftness of a man who knows
he doesn’t need to say “don’t tell.”
Stephanie Kaylor is a student at European Graduate School whose research interests include feminist theories of relationally and narrative structure. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Queen Mob’s Teahouse, BlazeVOX, and The Willow Review. She is currently based in the Northeastern region of the US where she is likely hibernating at this moment.
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