Silenced E-Book

Ann Claycomb

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 490

Beschreibung

A powerful fairy tale of four women each cursed by the same abusive man. Gripping and essential, it will captivate readers of Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, Heather Walter's Malice and Menna van Praag's The Sisters Grimm. Four women. Four enchantments. One man. But he is no handsome prince, and this is no sugar-sweet fairy tale. Jo, Abony, Ranjani, and Maia all have something in common: they have each been cursed by the CEO of their workplace after he abused his power to prey on them. He wants them silent and uses his sinister dark magic to keep them quiet about what he did. But Jo, Abony, Ranjani and Maia are not fairy-tale princesses waiting to be rescued. They are fierce, angry women with a bond forged in pain, and they're about to discover that they have power of their own. In this sharply written, bitingly relevant modern fable, the magic is dark and damaging, and the women are determined to rescue themselves.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

July 27: Abony

July 27–29: Jo

July 27–31: Ranjani

July 31: Ranjani

August 1: Abony

August 8: Jo

August 8: Ranjani

August 9: Abony

August 9: Maia

August 10: Abony

August 10: Maia

August 10: Abony

August 10: Ranjani

August 12: Jo

August 12: Maia

August 12: Maia

August 12: Ranjani

August 12: Abony

August 12–13: Jo

August 16–17: Jo

August 17: Maia

August 17: Abony

August 24: Jo

August 24: Ranjani

August 24: Abony

August 24: Maia

August 24: Jo

Acknowledgements

About the Author

PRAISE FOR SILENCED

“A brilliant use of fairy tale lore plus wonderfully complex characters make this dark thriller a satisfying must-read.”

Kelley Armstrong, author of A Rip Through Time

“Andersen and Grimm blend with a gut-wrenching #metoo scenario in this gripping story of abused women struggling to regain their agency. Stylish writing, memorable characters and a touch of fairy tale scholarship combine to create an absorbing and highly original novel.”

Juliet Marillier, author of the Blackthorn & Grim series

“Ann Claycomb is a name in speculative fiction that all readers should know. Her newest novel, Silenced, is not always an easy story, but it’s a necessary one. Read this book; it will break your heart in all the best possible ways.”

Gwendolyn Kiste, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens and Reluctant Immortals

“Silenced is a gripping modern fairy tale with its foundations firmly in our folkloric past. Claycomb’s constructed a perfect story for the #metoo moment and beyond. Silenced is also a frank acknowledgement that a fairy tale can be just as much a nightmare as a dream, and only our own voices can set us free.”

A. G. Slatter, author of The Path of Thorns

“A sharp, sassy, searing novel, where life is like fairy tales and fairy tales are like life... where those fairy tales are of the most dark and dangerous kind, of course. I loved it.”

A. J. Elwood, author of The Other Lives of Miss Emily White

“Brutally dark and compulsively readable, this fresh and original modern fable unravels the traditional fairy tales and places female empowerment at their core. Bold, relevant and subversive, I couldn’t put it down.”

R. L. Boyle, author of The Book of the Baku

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Silenced

Print edition ISBN: 9781803360584

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803360652

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: April 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2023 Ann Claycomb. All Rights Reserved.

Ann Claycomb asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Paula (duh), a better friend than I could ever have invented or imagined. For Mirene, who would have rather liked this one, I think. And for Ryan, always, always, and with amethysts.

“‘Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine… ‘Men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better, and they have on the average a lot more money and power.’ ‘They’re afraid women will laugh at them,’ he said… I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ‘They’re afraid of being killed.’”

Margaret Atwood (Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 1960–1982)

“Having observed that the key to the closet was stained with blood, she tried two or three times to wipe it off; but the blood would not come out; in vain did she wash it, and even rub it with soap and sand. The blood still remained, for the key was magical and she could never make it quite clean; when the blood was gone off from one side, it came again on the other.”

Charles Perrault (“Bluebeard”)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Silenced deals with the theme of sexual assault and the silencing that many women experience when they try to report. The novel also includes brief descriptions of sexual assault. Although these descriptions are not graphic, they may still be upsetting for some readers.

So why write this book at all?

As a lifelong lover, scholar, and writer of fairy tales, I was brainstorming my second book in 2017. This was the year that revelations about the sexually predatory behavior of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and numerous other powerful men emerged in the national media, propelling the #MeToo movement into the spotlight. I had rejected several Western fairy tales as the basis for my next novel, feeling frustrated by the constraints that each story would force me to place on my female protagonist. As more and more women added their voices to the #MeToo movement, I found myself looking at fairy tales differently. These stories don’t just “constrain” women; they assault them. They trap women in comas, in towers with no way down, in the bodies of animals. They force women into slave labor, marry them to monsters, and punish them for daring to resist.

So I reconceived my book not as a retelling of a single fairy tale but as a #MeToo story incorporating several fairy tales. I also concentrated on not one but four protagonists, whose identities reflect the diversity both of my hometown of Washington, DC and of the women who have in the past few years come together to articulate a collective rage. Silenced does indeed deal with the theme of sexual assault and its aftermath. But my goal in writing it was to celebrate the survivors who, like my characters, refuse to be silenced or defined by what has been done to them. This is their story, and if it is your story too, I hope I have done justice to your courage.

JULY 27: ABONY

“Once upon a time,” Abony said, “he’d have gotten away with what he did, but not today. We’ve got to make sure of that.”

Ranjani, who was driving because she had to, pulled into a parking space near a sign that read POLICE STATION VISITORS LOT ONLY and turned off the engine. Then she sat desperately still, staring at the doors of the building.

“Breathe, Rani!”

Ranjani drew in a shaky breath.

“Is this it?” Abony asked. “Right station, right entrance?”

“Yes,” Ranjani whispered, “this is where I came in May.” She unclenched her hands from her lap to point down to the left. “I parked under that tree over there.”

“Great. You feel okay to walk through the door?”

Ranjani put a hand up to the chain around her neck, pulled the pendant out from under her blouse, and closed her fingers around it.

“I feel okay,” she said.

It was going to be a minute.

Rather than rush Ranjani even more—it was a small miracle she’d come this far—Abony focused on what she needed to do to get in there. She picked up her purse from between her feet and dropped her phone into it. She flipped the visor down and checked that her lipstick was still on and her hair was behaving as well as could be expected in peak-of-summer DC humidity. Satisfied, she flipped the visor back up, got out of the car, and shimmied as unobtrusively as possible to unstick her sky-blue sheath dress from the backs of her legs. She kept her face carefully blank of triumph or relief when she heard Ranjani get out and shut the driver’s side door just as Abony shut hers.

As they neared the entrance, two women emerged, one Black and one White, laughing at some shared joke. They were both in street clothes, but as the White woman reached out to hold the door, the lift of her arm revealed a gun holster against her ribcage. Detectives then, or whatever rank police officers had to reach to wear plainclothes and carry weapons. Abony wondered if their guns made them feel powerful, made them feel safe.

“Hey, great shoes!” the door-holder said.

The other woman looked down at Abony’s shoes and whistled.

“Damn. Pretty sure you’re wearing my paycheck on your feet.”

“And I’m pretty sure it’s my paycheck,” Abony snapped back. She swept inside the building, checking in the glass doors of the lobby that Ranjani was right behind her. As the doors closed behind the two police officers, she could hear one expressing indignation at Abony not being able to take a joke and the other teasing that anyone who could afford those shoes could afford to be a bitch.

Abony’s high-heeled pumps were pearlescent patent leather, shimmering from pale blue to pink to rose gold as they caught the light. The soles were a perfect glossy red. The shoes had cost Abony $650, marked down from $800, which wasn’t anything like her full paycheck. But that was just the one pair. Add $650 to the $775 for the pair the week before and the $1600 for the two pairs the week before that and…

“Abony, are you alright?”

Abony felt a prickle of sweat on the back of her neck. She drew in a deep breath and nodded without turning her head to meet Ranjani’s worried eyes. She looked instead at their shared reflection, of a statuesque Black woman in a sleek fitted dress and fabulous shoes that added three inches to her already impressive height and a petite young Indian woman wearing coral silk and flat sandals, with gold beads wrapped around the end of her long black braid. They looked elegant, professional, each in her own way. They didn’t look like rape victims too scared to come forward.

“Because we’re not,” Abony said fiercely to the in-the-glass version of herself. “We’re doing this. We’re not letting him get away with it.”

She pushed open the inner doors and herded Ranjani into the building.

*   *   *

Things went wrong almost immediately. Confronted with a long curving “Information Desk” that looked like a check-in counter at a hotel, Abony waited her turn and then told the young man in a DCPD polo shirt that they were there to report a crime.

“What division, ma’am?”

“Division?”

“What happened, ma’am?”

The hollowed-out lurch that felt like hunger but wasn’t hunger yawned in Abony’s gut and the sweat bloomed again on the back of her neck, under her arms, on her palms and the soles of her feet, making her feel like she might trip and fall if she had to walk too far now in her goddamn $650 shoes. She pushed through it to get the words out.

“We need to talk to someone in Sex Crimes.”

The young man’s face fell. He put down the clipboard he’d been about to offer and instead lifted the phone on the desk and made a call, speaking softly and rapidly to whoever picked up. Then he gestured them over to the right of the desk.

“Wait there and someone will be right down.”

Right down. Abony stepped far enough in the direction the young man had pointed to see the building directory on the wall and the bank of elevators beyond that. According to the directory, Sex Crimes was on the fourth floor, which meant that to get up to that office via elevator Ranjani would have to go through a door she’d never gone through before. They could take the stairs instead—but no, duh, there was a door to the stairwell too.

Abony wheeled on Ranjani as she heard the younger woman’s sharp intake of breath.

“We don’t have to go up,” Abony said. “When someone comes down, we’ll just ask to take a walk, okay? We’ll go sit on a bench outside. We’ve talked about this.”

“I know,” Ranjani said, but her eyes were huge and her knuckles white around her necklace. Meanwhile, Abony’s own resolve was buckling under the sweaty, shaky, nauseous wave of need that she wasn’t going to be able to resist much longer. If she kept trying she’d black out, the nice young man at the desk would call for EMS, and Ranjani would probably bolt, leaving Abony to blame her faint on heat stroke, convince the paramedics not to take her to the hospital, and then have to call an Uber to get home.

One of the elevators opened and a woman strode toward them. She had olive skin, curly graying dark hair, and a frown that might have been intended to convey the seriousness with which she was ready to treat their report, but which Abony could only see, through her own increasing dizziness, as irritation. She hadn’t thrown up from the need before, but it felt like a possibility now and she couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t vomit on the scuffed marble of the police station, all over her iridescent So Kate 120 pumps, or God forbid all over a Sex Crimes detective’s sensible black loafers.

Abony turned on her heel and headed back outside. She managed not to run because she couldn’t run in these shoes, not with her feet sweating inside them, not on this expanse of polished floor. She heard the woman’s raised voice behind her—Ma’am!Ma’am? Can I helpyou?—and Ranjani’s sobbing breath over her shoulder because of course Ranjani hadn’t needed much incentive to give up on this stupid doomed attempt to report what he’d done to them.

Because he hadn’t stopped at raping them. He’d done something to each of them afterwards—drugs? some kind of hypnosis?—then planted these intense, implausible blocks in their subconscious so they couldn’t report him no matter how hard they tried or how many times. He’d made Abony feel helpless, and Abony didn’t do helpless, goddamn it. She did not.

*   *   *

Out on the sidewalk Abony fumbled for her phone, found the eBay app, and bought the shoes that she’d made sure to put in her virtual cart that morning. They were a bargain at $665 and as soon as the Order Received notification text popped on her screen she swallowed the flood of saliva in her mouth. She wasn’t going to throw up or faint. She was still sweating, but now it was from standing outside in the July heat. Dropping onto the nearest bench, Abony pulled a package of scented wipes out of her purse, patted her face, and held the wet cloth to the back of her neck until the damp cold made her shiver. Then she was able to look over at Ranjani, on the bench beside her.

“You okay?” Abony asked.

Ranjani was sitting very straight, as she always did, with her hands clasped in her lap now and the pendant tucked away again.

“I’m okay. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Abony said.

“Did you buy some shoes?”

“Yep. I told you I’d do it if I needed to.”

“I’m sorry you had to.”

“I know.” Abony also knew she should apologize on her end for dragging Ranjani down here. Ranjani hadn’t wanted to come, terrified as always of encountering a situation that would force her to walk through a new door, but as soon as she’d told Abony that she’d already been to the police station near her house once, Abony had convinced her that they had to try.

“Excuse me?”

They both turned to see the woman from the elevator squinting at them in the blazing afternoon light.

“The folks at Information said you wanted to report a sex crime,” she said. “It can be scary but we’re here to help. You sure you don’t want to come back inside and just talk? Get out of this heat for a minute?”

This woman, this police detective who specialized in sexual assault, was so close. She wanted to help. It was her job to believe them. She would believe them when they told her what had happened. But would she believe the rest?

Abony couldn’t even explain the rest. The shuddering was already starting again, and if she talked to this woman any more she’d end up having to buy another pair of shoes, which would make two pairs in one day, which would negate the bargain price she’d gotten on the first pair, not to mention that she didn’t have a second pair saved at Gilt or on eBay or Saks or Neiman’s so she’d have to hunt one down and probably pay more, which would bring her monthly total up over $5000 and—

Abony heard a choking sound, realized it was her own voice trapped in her throat, and then felt Ranjani’s small, cool hand on her arm.

“Thank you,” Ranjani said to the woman. “We appreciate your help but we’re fine.”

“Your friend doesn’t look fine.”

“I am though,” Abony said, and felt her symptoms ease like a wave receding.

“We’re sorry to have bothered you,” she added firmly. She tucked the wet wipe inside her fist and stood up, swinging her bag over her shoulder and letting the shoes tell lies for her, about her confidence, her power, her sense of control.

The detective looked from one of them to the other and Abony could almost see her confusion in a thought bubble over her head. Ranjani was young, beautiful, and soft-spoken, but Abony had fled the building and let Ranjani speak for her a moment ago. So which of them had been the victim of a sexual assault and which of them was trying to talk the victim out of reporting—and why?

“I’m going to leave you my card,” the woman said finally, and made a point of handing one to each of them even though she had to step around Abony to put a card in Ranjani’s hand. As she walked away, Abony imagined calling her back, asking her to sit on the bench with them, telling her why they’d come. But she pictured the scenario almost idly, like playing out a possible car crash while sitting at an intersection: What if that Corvette ran the red light? What if that blue truck failed to yield? And she was done courting disaster for today.

She stalked to the nearest trash can to throw away the cleansing wipe and the detective’s card, then fished her sunglasses out of her purse and put them on, welcoming both the relief from the glare and the fact that the glasses hid her eyes.

“You ready to go?” Ranjani asked behind her.

Abony nodded without turning around. She thought about the things she should say to Ranjani right now: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to do this. We knew it wouldn’t work. She thought about the other things she might say, ways to brazen this out: Well, it was worth a try. We’ll find another way, Rani. We’ll figure something out.

She didn’t say anything. They drove in silence to the nearest Metro station, where Ranjani let her out.

Waiting on the platform for the next train, Abony got a text notification from her company’s emergency alert system: Urgent: Please read. The link took her to a screenshot of a Discord channel, of all things. She was poised to delete it and send the IT team a warning that they’d been hacked when a phrase caught her eye. She read the whole thread, then found the channel it had come from and scrolled through the recent content, baffled. Had the CEO sent this to her himself, or did someone else at the company know what he’d done to her? Abony wasn’t sure which was worse, or whether the conversation she read on her phone was meant as a taunt, a warning, or a riddle that—should she solve it—might point to how she could be free.

Fairy Tales Forever Discord Channel

We are an inclusive community; we celebrate all voices and identities. Expressions of hate, bias, or general assholery (yes, we know it’s not a word) will not be tolerated. For full channel rules and guidelines clickhere.

Discussion Boards

• Fairy Tale of theDay—submita summary of a fairy tale you love, hate, or just think more people should know about and invite people to share their thoughts.

• Question of theDay—submita question about fairy tales, or about a specific fairy tale, for discussion. We welcome questions you actually want answered, questions that keep you up at night, and rhetorical questions designed just to spark conversation.

• Fairy Tales for OurTime—seriously,these tropes are everywhere! Submit a real-life story that reminds you of a traditional fairy tale and invite our community to be amazed along with you at the way life really does imitate fairy tales. All the fucking time.

Question of the Day: What is it about women’s feet in fairy tales?

submitted by bellerules (member since 2015)

Jess: it’s a good question. There are So. Many. Fairy tales that seem like they’re about messing with women’s feet. “Little Mermaid,” anyone? And no not the Disney version the real one.

Eden: yes that one totally! And while we’re on Andersen has anyone read “The Red Shoes.” Go read it now but also don’t because it’s AWFUL. About this girl who is poor her whole life, has no shoes at all and just really wants a pretty pair of shoes, but then when she falls in love with these red shoes in a store, everyone tells her that good Christian girls don’t wear red shoes (!) and tries to guilt her into boring black ones. She gets the red ones anyway and wears them to church and everyone is *gasp* and someone (pretty sure it’s a man, duh) curses her so that she can’t get the shoes off and has to keep dancing in them forever!

badassvp: Agree, I hate that story. I hate Andersen in general for attitudes towards women, but that story is bad! WOMEN SHOULD BE ABLE TO WEAR WHAT THEY WANT. One note is that she doesn’t wear them forever. She finds a man with an axe and begs him to cut her feet off, which he DOES!! and then the shoes go dancing off down the road with her feet still in them and she gets crutches and wooden feet and becomes a beggar. It’s fucked up.

steph: I didn’t know that story but went and read it just now. Wow! That’s horrible. Thanks for sharing it though. Are there others?

Jess: Well, speaking of gross cut-off feet, remember notdisneyCinderella. When the stepsisters try on the glass slipper and it doesn’t fit, the first one cuts off her toes to make it fit and the second one cuts off her heel. So when that shoe gets to Cinderella, it would have been literally sloshing with other people’s blood.

steph: Ewwwwwww.

Jess: Also, GLASS slippers? How are those a style ideal? They just sound so painful to wear.

Eden: Agree! How about Grimm’s “Snow White,” where the wicked stepmother (thanks to fairy tales for giving all of us stepmothers a bad rap, by the way) is forced at the end to put on red-hot shoes made of iron and dance in them until she dies?

Jess: These stories are so fucked up.

badassvp: Ummm, hello, the way women’s feet are fetishized is fucked up generally which is WHY the stories are fucked up. I mean, how many of us own high-heeled shoes that give us mad blisters or just tear up our feet but we wear them anyway because we’re told they look “sexy” by men (and by women too by the way)? Right?????

<click to see more comments>

JULY 27–29: JO

Before she understood the full extent of what he’d done to her, Jo simply fled. She got out of the building by keeping her head down in the hall, on the elevator, and through the revolving door that led to the street. No one stopped her to comment on the fact that her ponytail had slipped halfway down the back of her neck and she was collapsed in on herself like someone huddled over a wound.

She claimed an empty row on the Metro and put her bag squarely in the middle of the seat beside her. It was 2:45 p.m. She had a 3 p.m. meeting with Ranjani from Creative Services about the promo campaign they were launching next month. She emailed Ranjani that she needed to reschedule, then turned her phone off and dropped it into her purse.

*   *   *

Jo’s apartment complex backed onto a state park. She ran the trails nearly every day, as much to avoid the silence that had settled over the apartment these past few months as anything else. The whole place was quiet and cold and clean now, had been since May, when Eileen had left.

So Jo had already run five miles this morning before work. But the moment she got in the door, she stripped and pulled on shorts, a sports bra, a red t-shirt. Her hair spilled out of its ponytail when she pulled the shirt over her head. She rewrapped it ruthlessly, tight enough that her scalp stung, then laced up her shoes. She kicked the heap of clothes on the floor aside as she left. It had been her best skirt suit, but she wouldn’t ever wear it again. Jo thought fleetingly of what she would be doing differently right now if she’d come home to find Eileen here, curled on the sofa reading, looking up with a smile when she heard the door…

Jo didn’t know what she’d have done then. She only knew what to do now.

In the woods, she didn’t set a pace. She just ran. She wanted to run right off the trail and into the trees, because you stayed on the trail to stay safe and if you weren’t safe anymore anyway, what difference did it make? But even as she ran, Jo knew there were worse things than what the CEO of her company had just done to her. A young woman’s naked body had been found in this park just a few months ago. Her ex-boyfriend had carved his name into her stomach before he’d killed her.

Jo stayed on the trail. She made it to the dog park that was the turn-around of her usual route before her breathing broke and she had to stop. In two hours, when all the dog owners got home from work, the park would be the scene of joyful chaos. Now it was deserted. Jo paced the perimeter, hands on her waist as she caught her breath. Her legs burned.

You must be a runner, Jo. I can tell from those long legs. Do they go all the way up under that skirt?

When she’d gotten a calendar request from the CEO that morning with the event title BOD PR Issue, Jo assumed it was something urgent to do with the company Board of Directors—theBOD of the event title. They were meeting the next week and it was almost a given that at least one director would have ruffled feathers about something. But before she’d even had the chance to sit down, the CEO had been talking about her legs.

Shit, Jo thought—and tried to say. Dammit. There was a wriggling, writhing feeling in her mouth, like the words were struggling to get out.

That fucking bastard. He fucking plannedit—

There were things coming from her mouth instead of words. She put a hand up automatically and caught them: two tiny black spiders and then, horribly, a centipede, the too many legs tickling her lower lip. She screamed and flung the things away, shook her hand to get them off.

Nothing but sound had come out of her mouth when she screamed. Jo gagged and tried again.

“Hello,” she said to no one. “Anyone hear this or am I talking to myself here?”

Nothing but her own wavering voice.

“Great. I’m literally talking to myself in the woods.”

She tried again.

The CEO of my company just rapedme—

But these words turned into things as they left her throat: a trickle of red ants and something covered in bumps that she could feel against the roof of her mouth—a fat little toad. She felt them swell into being the moment she would have spoken, then drop onto the back of her palate. Ant, ant, toad: not an exact ratio of creatures to words, but that was hardly a consolation. It was either get them out or choke on them. Jo spat the creatures onto the ground, wiped her chin. And finally understood what he’d meant when he’d smiled at her as she left his office. She’d been unsteady on her feet, shaking, but already angry. She’d been ready to go straight to the cops.

You won’t want to talk about this, Jo, he’d said. You think you do now but trust me. You won’t.

Jo walked home, feeling chilled and clammy in her sweaty clothes despite the heat. She told herself to be rational—ha!—and assess the situation one problem at a time.

What about what he’d done to her in his office? She was sore, between her legs and deep inside. Her back hurt from her futile twisting beneath him and her palms stung, imprinted with deep crescent marks from her fingernails digging into them. He had forcibly restrained her effectively enough, with his bodyweight on hers and his hands as manacles around her wrists, that she had barely been able to breathe, much less fight him off. But she wasn’t bleeding or even noticeably bruised, at least externally.

As for other problems, Jo was on the Pill for her menstrual cramps, so no risk of pregnancy. She tried to find this bleakly funny, that as a lesbian on the Pill she was now unexpectedly relying on it to perform its primary function. But she could only feel relief.

But she’d need to go get tested to see if he’d given her an STD. Fuck.

And what about what he’d done—what seemed to be happening to her—in the aftermath of the attack? Start with whether it was really happening, which seemed at once like the obvious question and the most ridiculous, because of course it was really happening. She wouldn’t suddenly hallucinate spitting out toads and bugs. Still… alone on the trail, Jo said again—tried to say—heraped me. Instead, she gagged and spat out a half-dozen iridescent green and gold beetles that looked like they wanted to fly away when they got over the shock of being spit out.

They were also really there, or at least her phone camera saw them, and so did the Insect Identifier app she found, which told her they were Japanese beetles that could wreak havoc on rose bushes but were not harmful to humans. Jo begged to differ but supposed the app wasn’t accounting for people having the damn things materialize in their throats. She picked one up, feeling the prickle of its legs as it tried to escape her cupped palm.

Back at her apartment building, she stopped and stretched near the door until one of her neighbors came out to walk a pop-eyed chihuahua. Jo recognized the woman from the mail room and encounters like this one but didn’t know her name. She waited until the woman was near and then let the beetle fall from her hand onto the sidewalk.

“Hey, be careful,” Jo said, pointing. “I don’t want your dog to eat that bee or whatever it is.”

The woman stopped and looked down, while the chihuahua, utterly uninterested, strained at its leash.

“It’s just a little beetle,” the woman said, “but thanks.” She bent closer. “He’s kind of cute, actually.”

So the things Jo was spitting out were real.

*   *   *

That night, she tried over and over to say out loud what the CEO had done, but every time the words emerged as bugs and toads and snakes. The snakes were awful; they swelled into existence in her throat and then kept coming, slithering out over her tongue while she gagged convulsively. But the centipedes were still the worst. Jo tested to see if there was any relationship to the words she wanted to say and the things she spit up by standing at the kitchen sink and trying to say the same sentence—myCEO raped me today in hisoffice—over and over, running the water to drown the hapless creatures that spilled out. If she could figure out how to avoid the damn centipedes… but it was a confusion of things with too many legs or no legs at all.

She found that she could write down whatever she wanted, so she documented the whole encounter in a clinical third-person narrative—theemployee attempted to leave the office but the CEO forcibly restrained her from doingso—the way detectives did in serial killer novels. She even saved the document in a password-protected file. But what was she going to do with it? She could email it to the police and to the company’s anonymous HR reporting portal, called “Tell Someone,” but that was precisely the problem. Eventually someone would want her to say, face-to-face and in real time, what had happened. And what would they do with a woman who says she wants to report a sexual assault and then proceeds to spit insects out instead of words?

The safest thing to do would be to just run away: quit her job, pack up and move, and never talk about what had happened. Safest—but Jo couldn’t get past the tightness she felt in her chest at the thought of leaving DC, of leaving Eileen and the chance that she might come back.

*   *   *

Jo put in for sick leave for the entire next week. The rest of the weekend, she slept heavily and long, then ran every morning, pushing herself so hard she ended up walking the last mile of her route. Mid-morning, she showered and tackled breakfast.

Eating was a minefield. She was starving from running so much, but the physical sensation of certain foods between her teeth—particularly anything juicy or bursting or with seeds—remindedher of the things that were coming unbidden up into her mouth. Jo dug the protein powder out of the back of the pantry, where Eileen had stashed it because it tasted like shit, and made smoothies. They still tasted like shit. Bread was good, but chips shattered under her teeth like beetle shells. Meat was right out, as were noodles. Ice cream was fine but not with any add-ins, and what was the point of plain ice cream? Jo drank coffee by the pot and then paced her apartment, too jittery to sit.

Monday evening, she rebelliously got dressed in jeans and a nice top. A group of friends was meeting for drinks and she might as well try being out in public by starting with a dimly lit bar and a bunch of people who were unlikely to suddenly turn and ask her probing questions.

As soon as she got to the restaurant, though, Jo knew this was a mistake, and would have been even if she didn’t have this literally unspeakable secret. These were—hadbeen—their friends, hers and Eileen’s. Jo wondered if they’d only invited her after they remembered that Eileen, who taught history at a private high school, was chaperoning a summer trip to Asia. The other five women in their group all gave Jo hard hugs and told her they loved her and no one mentioned Eileen at all, though Jo knew Eileen had been posting Facebook updates from China for the last two weeks and that everyone at the table followed her. They ordered tapas that Jo didn’t touch and a pitcher of sangria that she did, putting her finger in the pour spout to keep any fruit out of her glass.

Two glasses in, she realized she’d better eat some bread. She was reaching for the basket when someone asked if they’d all heard the latest: another politician had been accused of sexual misconduct, in this case of having a camera installed under his desk so he could look up women’s skirts when they sat across from him, and of storing extensive video footage from that camera on his work computer.

There was a collective shudder.

“Do you know what gets me the most?” one woman asked. “His assistant said that when she found the camera and confronted him with it, he just kept saying it wasn’t what she thought—”

“Oh, yeah, I read that!” someone else burst out. “He said it wasn’t a big deal because he hadn’t touched her. He has a camera looking up between her legs for almost a year before she finds it, and video footage—and you know exactly why he has that, eww—but he never touched anyone so no big deal.”

Jo looked down into her glass. Despite her efforts to keep the fruit out, there were bits of orange floating in the wine. They looked like translucent legs.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. There were murmurs of dismay and another round of hugs, but she imagined that they all breathed a sigh of relief when they sat back down after she’d gone.

Back home, she tore into a croissant, heated a mug of tomato soup in the microwave, and tried to calculate what time it was in whatever part of China Eileen was in now. Jo texted before she could stop herself: I miss you. Hope you’re having a good trip.

She watched her soup circling on the glass tray and thought about the politician and his camera and about her CEO. She wondered if there was a hidden camera—orcameras—in his office too.

Probably not, she muttered—or meant to. In the sexual predator hierarchy, I bet rapists think voyeurs are pathetic.

She had a brief suffocating sensation of something like a bundle of wool fiber materializing in her throat, then gagged up a tarantula, its hairy legs all tangled together.

So she couldn’t even refer to him as a rapist in the abstract. Good to know.

Her phone pinged just as the microwave finished. Jo got the mug out and read the text from Eileen: I miss you too. How are you?

Yeah, no way to answer that question. Jo watched the tarantula sort itself out on the kitchen counter and wave a tentative feeler while it tested the best direction to go.

The soup was too hot but she gulped it anyway, scalding the inside of her mouth and throat. Then she lowered the mug and poured the rest over the tarantula, sluicing the thing across the counter and into the sink on a scalding red tide. It seized up and rolled over on its back, twitching. Jo contemplated her options—the disposal or the garbage can—and imagined shreds of spider flying into her face from the bottom of the sink. She scooped the thing into the can with her mug, then tied the bag tight and took it out to the trash room.

Another text came in a few minutes later, while she was brushing her teeth.

Dammit, Jo. Can you just please TALK to me?

Jo typed, I can’t. I know that’s the problem, and then stared at the words, her finger hovering over the Send arrow. Another text came in as she hesitated, this one from the company’s emergency alert system—Urgent:Pleaseread—and she clicked the link automatically, half-relieved to have to think about something besides whether or how to reply to Eileen. The link took her not to a company message but to some kind of crowd-sourced fairy-tale encyclopedia, which was weird, plus the story tagged in the link was definitely not one she recognized. Jo read it in growing horror, because this had to be from the CEO—who else could have sent it?—and it suggested that whatever it was he’d done to her, it was somehow her fault.

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Fairy Tale of the Day: “Toads and Diamonds”

submitted by happilyneverafter (member since 2018)

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl whose mother died and whose father remarried a woman who had a daughter already. These two were lazy and arrogant, and when the father died suddenly, they made their poor stepdaughter/stepsister into their servant. One day, the stepmother sent the girl to the well for water. There the girl found a frail old woman who begged for a cup of water because she was too weak to pull the bucket up herself. “Of course, Mother,” the kind girl said, and drew a bucket of sweet water for her. “Bless you, child,” the old woman said. “From now on all shall know how precious you are whenever you speak.” The girl came home late and her stepmother threatened to beat her. “Oh, please don’t!” the girl cried, and a diamond fell from her lips. Astonished, the stepmother asked how this had happened and the girl told her, dropping jewels, nuggets of gold, and flowers with every word. The stepmother then called her own daughter and urged her to go at once to the well to draw water and be sure to give some to an old crone she would find there. The lazy girl slouched off, but when she got to the well she saw a fine lady clad in silk and jewels, who languidly asked for a drink. “No!” cried the arrogant girl. “You’re rich enough, get it yourself.” But of course, this was the same fairy who had appeared as a crone. “I see your character is as ill-favored as your face,” she told the rude girl. “And so shall everyone know who hears you speak.”

The stepsister stormed home to tell her mother what had happened, at which the mother screamed, for foul toads, spiders, snakes, and insects tumbled from her lips. The stepmother most unfairly blamed her stepdaughter for her own daughter’s misffortune and threw the poor girl out of the house. She fled to the forest and wandered there for days, living on berries and nuts. One day, the king passed by with a hunting party and, seeing the beautiful girl under a tree, asked for her name. When the girl told him, a ruby fell from her lips. Astonished, the king asked for her story. She told him, while flowers and other gems tumbled out, whereupon he put her on his horse in front of him, took her to his palace, and married her.

The stepmother and her daughter, for their part, lived on in their cottage and no one dared come near for fear of the dreadful things that the daughter spit out whenever she spoke.

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JULY 27–31: RANJANI

Ranjani was trapped in summer weekend traffic on the DC Beltway when she saw the email from Jo canceling their design meeting that Friday afternoon. She was simultaneously horrified and relieved, because she’d been so anxious about the planned trip to the police station with Abony that she’d forgotten to clear her calendar.

She didn’t bother to reply to Jo, who was probably headed to the beach or something fun anyway. The traffic started moving and Ranjani focused on driving. It took her another hour to get home and her silk dress was sticking to her back by the time she pulled into her driveway. Her car’s air conditioning worked just fine, but there was only so much it could do to counter the heat and humidity in stop-and-go traffic.

Amit’s car wasn’t in the garage, which wasn’t surprising. He almost never left work early, even on holidays, and given the constraints Ranjani had put on their schedule over the past few months, he probably hadn’t felt any incentive to slip out today. Ranjani let herself into the house quietly, praying that her mother would be napping or watching television as she sometimes did in the afternoon. That would give Ranjani a few minutes to change out of her sweaty dress, splash cold water on her face, and remind herself that despite Abony’s best efforts, nothing bad had happened this afternoon. She hadn’t had to face those elevator doors.

Shreshthi was indeed watching television, an Indian interview show, and while she offered her cheek for her daughter to kiss, she also waved an imperious hand.

“Shh, Rani! Let me finish my program in peace, please. It’s been a busy day.”

Going into the kitchen, Ranjani saw evidence of that busyness. A pot of dal simmered on the back of the stove and puri dough rested in a covered bowl beside the front burner, where a pan of oil was ready for frying. Ranjani checked to make sure that only the one flame was on under the dal. Then she slipped into her bedroom and shut the door, allowing herself a sigh of relief at being alone in the quiet. She unzipped her dress and tossed it onto the dry-cleaning pile, then climbed into bed wearing just her underwear and necklace, which she didn’t dare take off even now. She waited until the air conditioning raised goose bumps on her bare skin before she pulled the covers up.

Her mother’s dementia had been mild and stable for a long time after the diagnosis last year, but it was nonetheless progressing. Some days, like today, Shreshthi was mistress of all she surveyed, cooking a feast for dinner and cleaning the entire house, then settling in front of the television to offer sharp commentary on whatever show she chose. Other days, she started cooking only to wander away, leaving things bubbling on the stove, or plugged in the vacuum and left it leaning up against the couch with the motor on. Then she tried to watch television with her hands over her ears to block out the noise, which meant she couldn’t hear the show and ended up rocking back and forth in a paroxysm of frustration. Ranjani and Amit paid their neighbor Deb, who was a retired nurse, to check in on Shreshthi several times a day and to stay with her when she was really distressed, but soon it wasn’t going to be enough.

Ranjani couldn’t think about “soon” right now. She thought she might cry; she felt the pressure behind her eyes almost constantly these days. But though a few tears leaked out, she was too tired for a storm of weeping. She exhaled and imagined herself sinking into the mattress, where it was white and soft and clean. When Amit got home two hours later, he had to shake her awake. Ranjani pulled him down beside her and pressed her ear to his chest to hear his heartbeat. Amit was home and Shreshthi was at the stove frying up puri; Ranjani could smell from here that the oil was at the perfect temperature. Everything would be okay. They didn’t need to go anywhere new.

*   *   *

Ranjani had taken Monday off to be home for the plumber who promised to show up sometime between ten and four. She savored her unexpected long weekend, running errands to familiar stores, cooking, doing laundry, working beside her mother in the garden, watching movies with Amit on the couch after they’d gotten Shreshthi to bed. When she sat down at her desk on Tuesday morning, she felt more settled than she had in weeks. She worked on the edits for a single-image multimedia campaign, finally getting the color bleed where she wanted it. Then she turned to the project she was supposed to be working on with Jo and remembered the canceled meeting. She started to reply to Jo’s email with times when she was available, but then noticed an out-of-office message; apparently Jo was on sick leave all week.

Ranjani was debating replying anyway, just to say she hoped Jo felt better, when her cellphone buzzed. She snatched it up.

“Hi, Mami.”

“Rani—you’re still at work?” Shreshthi had a beautiful voice, deep for a woman, with the lilting accent of British-educated Indian women from her generation. Ranjani had learned only recently to hear tremors of uncertainty in that voice.

“I’m at work until five, Mami. Then I’m coming straight home. We can make dinner together.”

A pause. Ranjani’s hand went unconsciously to grip the pendant tucked inside her blouse.

“It’s—what time is it, Rani?”

A few weeks ago, Shreshthi had forgotten how to tell time. She could look at a clock and read the numbers on the face, but they didn’t translate into a signifier by which she could measure her day: time to get up, time to eat, time for Ranjani to come home. Some days this didn’t seem to faze her at all, but other days, Shreshthi knew there was something off about her sense of the world, and the awareness alternately enraged or terrified her. More and more, Ranjani didn’t like leaving her mother home alone. She and Amit had been asking more of Deb recently, but Deb understandably was reluctant to give up her retirement and had urged them to hire a full-time home health aide.

And of course, they could do that. But as Shreshthi’s symptoms worsened, they’d also have to go back to the doctor, who would send them to new specialists, to new labs for more bloodwork, to new clinical centers for MRIs and CT scans.

Infinite, necessary new places. Infinite, unpassable new doors.

Ranjani calmed her mother down as best she could, then called Deb and confirmed that today she was free not only to check in on Shreshthi but to stay for an hour or two. When Ranjani hung up, she had a headache. She knew she needed some food, but the thought of microwaving leftover dal and eating it at her desk made her feel trapped and depressed. Instead, she went outside to grab something from one of the food carts that always ringed Franklin Park at this hour. No new doors to go through to get there and she’d welcome the sun and the heat. She felt chilled from the inside whenever she thought about her mother’s illness or about what had happened in the CEO’s office and its impossible, dreadful aftermath, as though she’d swallowed a ball of ice that had lodged in her stomach and refused to thaw.

She got a gyros and a diet soda, then found a perfect spot to sit near the fountain, so that an occasional breeze blew a fine mist at her. She unwrapped the sandwich and ate a loose piece of cucumber before it could fall to the ground. Her cellphone buzzed with a text message: Hey how’s in-person work life?

Ranjani smiled. Maia English was the company’s chief information security officer. She had been one of Ranjani’s first colleagues to become a friend but had started working from home six months ago because of a mysterious health issue.

I was just thinking about you, Ranjani wrote back. Eating alone in Franklin Sq. Wish you were here.

Me too. Pizza or gyros?

Gyros! Ranjani typed. Will try not to drip on phone screen. How are you? How is working from home?

Not all it’s cracked up to be.

Ranjani took a bite of her gyros, did indeed narrowly miss dropping a blob of tzatziki on the phone screen, and wondered how to get Maia to really talk to her. Texting wasn’t a medium for intimacy, and when she’d gone remote this past winter Maia had deflected Ranjani’s offers to drop off food at the house or set up a Zoom call. Whatever health issue she was dealing with, it seemed to make her so tired that anything more energetic than texting was too much.

But even as Ranjani was trying to think what to say next, another text popped up from Maia.

Okay weird question. You ever read fairy tales?

Ranjani wiped her mouth and wished she’d gotten a few more napkins, though it was a rule of gyros that however many napkins you got wouldn’t be enough.

Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel? she wrote. I know them but not super well. My mother wasn’t a fan of fairy-tale princesses. Too helpless.

She’s not wrong. Have you ever read Bluebeard?

Ranjani sent back a confused emoji, then watched as three dots popped up from Maia, went away, then came back again. Finally, her reply appeared: I think you need to read it.

And she sent a link.

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Fairy Tale of the Day: “Bluebeard”

submitted by JennyK (member since 2017)

Once upon a time there was an incredibly wealthy man known as Bluebeard who was looking for a wife. He’d had several wives already, who had all disappeared, but he was so rich that a woman agreed to marry him. After their wedding, Bluebeard took his new wife to his castle and told her he had to go away on a business trip so she’d be there alone. He left her with a key that would open any door in the castle but warned her sternly not to open a certain locked door.

Bluebeard’s wife explored the castle while her husband was away, opening every door but the one he had told her not to open, but he was gone so long that at last her curiosity got the better of her. She opened the door and found to her horror the hacked-up bodies of all her husband’s previous wives. She tried to close and lock the door again, but her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the key in a puddle of blood on the floor. The wife picked the key up, locked the door, and ran to wash the key, but no matter how hard she scrubbed or what cleaner she used, the blood would not come off.

When Bluebeard returned, he asked for the key back and his wife tried to say she had lost it, but he became so angry that she was frightened and handed him the bloody key with trembling fingers. As soon as he saw the blood, Bluebeard knew that she had disobeyed him and announced his intention to kill her. He gave her an hour to say her prayers while he sharpened his sword, and the wife went to the tallest tower in the castle to pray desperately for help. Just as her husband rushed up the stairs to murder her, her brothers burst through the castle doors and struck him down. Bluebeard’s wife returned to her family and eventually married a good, kind man who helped her forget all about her terrible ordeal.

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JULY 31: RANJANI

Ranjani read the story Maia had sent her with confusion that coalesced into terror while the ball of ice refroze in her stomach, congealing her lunch until she felt ill. She didn’t “click to see comments.” Instead, she went back to her text screen and reread her exchange with Maia. In retrospect, it was clear that Maia had reached out specifically to send her this link. Ranjani typed Why, then accidentally hit send without knowing exactly what question she’d wanted to ask.

Why did I send you that? Maia replied.

Ranjani took a gulp of her soda. Sure, that question would do. Had the CEO put Maia up to this? Because he’d figured out that Ranjani and Abony were trying to help each other?

Maia’s next text seemed to confirm this: I know what he did to you.

Ranjani fumbled her reply: How? Did he tell you?

Jesus no. No!

Ranjani set the can down and wiped her damp fingers on her skirt. She asked, Then how could you possibly know anything? just as another text from Maia came through.

I know about Abony too.

Ranjani went from chilled to sweating and back again in an instant. Maybe it wasn’t even Maia texting her, maybe it was the CEO himself. And even if it was Maia, he had to have told her. But what did the fairy tale mean? She stared at the three dots promising another text as though they were the countdown on a bomb, then realized she didn’t have to wait for it to come through. She flung her phone into her purse and gathered up her trash. Her phone pinged with texts as she walked across the park, clammy with flash-sweat. Another horrible thought occurred to her: if this was the CEO, had it been some kind of trap?