Julie Weiss | What She Remembers | Poets Resist

Julie Weiss received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from San Jose State University. She’s a 44-year old ex-pat from Foster City, California, who moved to Spain in 2001 and never looked back. She works as a telephone English teacher from her home in Ciudad Valdeluz, where she lives with her wife, three-year-old daughter, and one-year-old son. Her work is forthcoming in Lavender Review, Sinister Wisdom, Stonecoast Review, and Down in the Dirt Magazine.

Poets Resist
Edited by Asante Keron Hamid
October 29, 2018

Julie Weiss

What She Remembers

Most of all, she remembers red: the color of her lips pressed around his penis, not shimmery red, like the smudge of lipstick left on the cocktail glass he had offered her, but rivulets of blood his teeth had loosened when he bit into them and whipped it out. By then, his boy-next-door smile had mutated into some beast even a mother could abhor, his grasp on her shoulder had hardened, the blood vessels in his eyes had multiplied, had grown arms and were strangling her. The room tilted and whirled, like disco lights. Downstairs, the music and merrymaking kept on. She can´t remember how her dress ended up around her ankles, slashed in places as if by knife or claw, or at what point he had wedged cherries into her vagina, like a bad joke. When a friend took her home the next morning, her insides blazed, so she presumed he had wedged his penis in there, as well. She does remember a click — the door locking from the outside, a bed with gaudy red sheets, ropes and handcuffs and what looked like assorted mechanisms of torture that set her voice aflame. She isn´t religious, but she remembers the omnipresence of his hand, muffling her screams. Even now, he´s everywhere in this office, flapping his red-stained wings like a Stymphalian bird, screeching obscenities into her ear, as she tells the director what she remembers, as he looks at her with disdain, with disbelief, with a sizeable check in his pocket, recently donated to the college by the fine young man´s family.