The Secret Molestation

            I thought I’d join the sexual harassment bandwagon by writing this piece.

            The memory was hidden deeply but from time to time it would surface if only for a moment. She would take a deep breath and then shove it back under where it would fester until the next time. And when the heinous recollection did reappear she often asked herself, “Did that really happen?”

            After all, she had been little . . . three maybe, or a month or two younger. How could she possibly remember? But she did. It wasn’t the actual incident that she recalled so well, but the feelings surrounding it. Her loving mother had put her down for a nap in Grandma’s spare room; she was alone on the musky-smelling bed, an old, round-faced, alarm clock having ticked her to sleep. She lay on her back with her arms stretched upward, tiny hands cupped, and chubby legs splayed open beneath a thin, pink blanket – the one that was adorned with happy, white lambs jumping fence after fence after fence. She had been cozy; she had been content; she had been safe . . . until the awful moment when she was not.

            After minutes of slumber, she was roused by a sensation, a sudden knowing. She was not alone. She should have opened her eyes, but she did not. Instead, squeezing them tight, she ludicrously willed her little body to sink straight down through the chenille bedspread beneath her, and farther still, into the mattress below, away, away. A sudden frantic desperation consumed her; she wanted to flail her way out of herself . . . but she could not. And at long last when she was alone again, she lay still, unmoving, feigning the sleep that had been snatched away only moments before. She was silent, her very own voice failing her. She listened though. She listened. She listened well - to quick footsteps clicking down the winding staircase, to a man’s deep and distant cough, to the lonely call of Grandpa’s barn owl, and then to her grandmother’s clock . . . tick, tick, ticking away to another time.

            And there would be another time. Other times. This one, though, was the first time - the memory tenuously locked away, the tarnished key to it tucked in her heart forever.

           

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