“You are a tiresome little man,” I said.

He looked at me with hate and disdain but with the sure notion that he was on top, untouchable.  I felt for him; I did because even as I sat there I pictured him being hit by a bus or a meteorite.  Small in stature with a paltry excuse for a beard, the man’s watery, red eyes strained not to blink at me.   Here, at the bureau of motor vehicles, he was boss.  Any giant of a man or weary citizen who needed assistance would have to go through him and his rules first.

When I was sixteen, I was beautiful.  I went to a small high school in Washington state.  I was on the cheer-leading squad and had not failed in being elected to the homecoming pageantry.  Different guys on the football team, the basketball team and the baseball team asked me out and were perfect gentlemen.   I wasn’t flush with money, but I had a summer job at my uncle’s ice cream parlor and I raked in the tips during the summer months, cleaning tables and talking to the tourists. My parents were indulgent, so I spent money on what pleased or looked pleasing on me.

While being raped one summer evening at 16, the idea went through my head that I had been nice to all who knew me condescendingly.  As the air left my lungs while he flung me around like a rag doll, I had small visions of myself.  Minor flashes of memories being predictable, unimaginative, safe for people who wanted no personal challenges.

I felt the pain of being hit, slapped, choked and eventually violated in a way that made me wonder at the man’s rage, over someone like me.  His anger toward me was a pathetic, despicable, criminal act.  Terrified, cold, in enormous pain and for the first time inarticulate outside the sobs and cries I uttered, I connected with something inside of myself which now to me seems somehow wholly separate.

I saw in my attacker’s face the power he felt in his strength, in his ability to cause me pain.  I saw too that he felt himself untouchable.  When the switch blade bloomed out of his throat in a clean and gleaming silver slice, I could only look at it in a senseless stupor. The separated part of me acknowledged that a switch blade should stick out of his throat.   The man who had caused me such pain and humiliation had a look of dumb blankness on his face, then terror. When his blood pulsed out of his mouth to the beat of his heart. I had sense enough to squirm out beneath him, scraped, beaten and sickened.

To this day, I do not know who killed him.  The police asked if I had done it not blaming me if I had, but I did not kill the man.

My recovery was long because no one believed me when I said I wasn’t afraid to be alone or in gloomy places.  Everyone thought I was hiding, that eventually I would turn into a melting sobbing victim. the dark didn’t disturb me nor did strange men.  I went back to working at my uncle’s ice cream parlor the next year, but I stopped cheerleading and did not accept the homecoming honors; the idea seemed somehow too small, too narrow in scope.

“You are tiresome,” I said again to the watery-eyed man before me.

“You need three forms of identity and three letters that addressed to your house, they cannot be personal letters.”

“I lost my driver’s license, I didn’t commit a crime.”

“Those are the rules, and I’ll thank you for not insulting me.”

“Are these rules implemented to protect me or to protect little Nazis like you?”

“Next!  Number 312, please.”

His voice was high and strident, and I knew that he had dismissed me.  A shadow, a low thundering movement that chilled my back seemed to brighten the air similar to lightening in the stagnate room; this stagnant room housed the bureau of motor vehicles.

“Don’t kill him,” I whispered under my breath, just in case I have an avenging angel.
The little man behind the counter refused to look my way but blinked and peered for number 312.