Survival
Maryam Khamesi
“She’s unfair,” he says over the phone. His wife got upset at him for speaking badly about her to a friend. But his wife does the same. Just the other night he read her texts saying he’s an idiot because he can’t remember his own birthday.
He cooks, cleans, and randomly buys her flowers. Still not good enough. Lately, she’s been making nasty remarks, one of them being how he’ll probably molest his daughter.
“Why would she say that?” I ask.
He tells me that he and his older sister had a unique relationship when he was thirteen and she was nineteen. He’s been going to therapy for it, and his therapist suggested he share it with his wife for support.
“I’m sorry you went through that,” I say.
“I mean, I wasn’t exactly innocent.” He admits his sister still flirts, but he’s never told his wife. His marriage is the main issue though. His wife doesn’t appreciate him. He thinks he should divorce her and find someone like his sister.
“Do you want to be with your sister?”
“Not a relationship. A fling, maybe. But I just want a woman who doesn’t put me down,” he says. “You know, you have a really sweet voice.”
“Thank you.”
He complains more about his wife. She doesn’t like that he watches porn. He’s not addicted though. He’s cut it down to ten videos per day and has even asked her to watch them with him. But it repulses her.
“You know, I bet if I bought you flowers you’d actually say thank you, unlike her.”
I don’t respond.
“Hey, I have to go, but I’ll try calling again,” he says.
I’m now in a room with a victim. She’s seven and timid with golden hair that hides her face. She holds her overall straps as she talks.
“Dear, can you speak up, please?” the interviewer asks.
The volume of her voice remains the same. She tries to explain how she was touched. At one point she stops and stares at the floor. The interviewer reassures her this is a safe space and hands her an anatomically correct doll.
“Can you show me exactly where he touched you?” he asks.
She points. The interviewer nods and thanks her.
After we leave the room, the man says these cases are common. “Last week, we got a call about a child who was raped and decapitated and left in the woods. Just brutal. Good thing this little girl made it.”
She’s alive, yes. But her soul’s already dead.
Another body’s identified: a hitchhiker sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head. She was fifty-two and slightly decomposed when found. I knew her back when I was a child and played with her daughters. At her funeral, a woman whispers she was mentally unstable. One daughter isn’t there. The other reads a very short eulogy and leaves early. Her husband cries. I reflect on the short call I received about four months ago from a woman with a familiar and distinct accent.
“I don’t know what to do. My husband’s trying to take away my business. It’s all I have,” she said.
Before I could respond, she hung up.
I try to distance myself from these stories, but they always wake me. The same man being interrogated for sodomizing a child was molested by his own father. Sympathy seeps its way into the room for half a second before the questioning continues. When? How? Why? He answers in detail as if he’s telling a friend what all he did today. When he discusses tying the boy to the chair, he looks at me. His sunken face follows me.
I receive a call. “Hey, cutie. It’s me, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been fine. You?”
“Better now that I’ve heard your voice.” He updates me on the situation with his wife. He’s decided to stay with her, but if she keeps disrespecting him, he’ll file for divorce.
After half an hour of venting, he asks, “What’s going on in your world?”
“There’s not much going on.”
“It sounds like there is. I mean what you do, not everyone can do that.”
“I’m sure many could if they wanted.”
“No, they couldn’t because people don’t care like you do. You’re beautiful inside and out.”
“I have to go,” I tell him.
I jot the word beautiful on a sticky note and think of the soft spoken, seven-year-old girl who was interviewed. “My beautiful little girl,” her father repeatedly told her as he rubbed her. Beautiful is heartwarming. Beautiful makes one blush. Beautiful is unsettling.
In bed, I hold myself. My own touch is safe. I find guilt in allowing a man I like to caress me. It’s natural. It’s craved. There’s a fear of what will happen when this touch is replaced by resentment. He tells me he respects me. A part of me wants to break the barrier and feel the unknown. But each time I take a swim, I’m tangled in my own ghost net.
He kisses down my neck, reaching below my collarbone. “Is this okay?” he asks.
I nod.
His arms are around my waist. I place them lower. He grips me. My breath's heighten. The victim’s turn into screams.
“Stop, stop, please,” she cries as the guy pins her down in the living room and rips her dress. He’s inside, where he' always wanted to be but never belonged.
“Is this still okay?” he asks me.
“Yes.” I smile.
He bites my neck, and I unbutton my shirt. I push his head down as he kisses my breasts.
The victim continues to yell and tries to fight off the man but can’t. He grunts and forcefully thrusts.
“Don’t stop,” I tell him. I run my fingers through his thick hair. I smell a hint of cologne and cigarette smoke.
She lays still on the rug after he finishes and sobs. She has scratches and bruises. He leaves, but he’s permanently stained her.
I begin to moan. I’m wet. I feel it. “We should stop,” I say, panting.
“Okay, we’ll stop,” he says and strokes my cheek.
We cuddle on the couch for the rest of the night. I’m warm and cared for.
She’s cold and paralyzed. During the interview, she shakes. Her rapist was a friend from college she’d known for a semester.
“Could you tell me what he said before he pushed you down?” the interviewer asks.
“He told me he always liked me and wanted me.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him I appreciated him, but I never liked him in that way. But I didn’t … I didn’t really tell him that,” she says as if she’s at fault.
The interviewer asks her more questions. He’s gentle but persistent. Halfway into the interview she mentions she’s worried because her father’s a pastor. “My family can’t know about this. My father would kill me if he found out.”
After we’re done, the interviewer reminds me that we have to get as much information as possible. “How are you doing by the way?” he asks.
“I think I’m okay.”
“You need to make sure to take care of yourself. Hearing this stuff isn’t easy. It starts shaping the way you think over time.”
“How do you do this? This job, I mean.”
“It’s like walking. You don’t know where you’re going at times, but you keep moving. If I stop to look at every single thing around me, I won’t get anywhere. And if I don’t take the time to observe my surroundings, I’ll lose sight of why I’m even walking in the first place. There has to be some sort of balance.”
I go to the park and observe the children. Any one of them could be or become victims. They’re happy because life’s a playground and survival isn’t yet a responsibility. A mother hugs her son after he goes down the slide. He’s protected, a feeling each person should have.
A new headline reads that a female teacher was charged with sexual misconduct. The word rape is missing. It’s harsh. It’s difficult to digest.
“It should say a teacher is charged with raping her students cause that’s exactly what it is,” my colleague says.
“But how old are the two students? Teenagers?” another colleague asks.
“No, they’re in elementary school,” I reply.
“Well, that’s not good then,” he says and walks off.
The stories are endless. I wait for one to desensitize me, but each case is a fresh and larger wound. The man I like texts to grab dinner sometime. I don’t reply. I’m nauseated. My mind and heart are exhausted. The part of me prepared to crawl through another dark tunnel is absent. But somehow, I have to find it.
The phone rings. “Hey, do you have some time? I really need to talk to someone.”
“Yes, of course,” I respond. “I have time.”
This piece was originally posted on Medium on August 5, 2024.
~ ~ ~
July 2026
Maryam Khamesi
“She’s unfair,” he says over the phone. His wife got upset at him for speaking badly about her to a friend. But his wife does the same. Just the other night he read her texts saying he’s an idiot because he can’t remember his own birthday.
He cooks, cleans, and randomly buys her flowers. Still not good enough. Lately, she’s been making nasty remarks, one of them being how he’ll probably molest his daughter.
“Why would she say that?” I ask.
He tells me that he and his older sister had a unique relationship when he was thirteen and she was nineteen. He’s been going to therapy for it, and his therapist suggested he share it with his wife for support.
“I’m sorry you went through that,” I say.
“I mean, I wasn’t exactly innocent.” He admits his sister still flirts, but he’s never told his wife. His marriage is the main issue though. His wife doesn’t appreciate him. He thinks he should divorce her and find someone like his sister.
“Do you want to be with your sister?”
“Not a relationship. A fling, maybe. But I just want a woman who doesn’t put me down,” he says. “You know, you have a really sweet voice.”
“Thank you.”
He complains more about his wife. She doesn’t like that he watches porn. He’s not addicted though. He’s cut it down to ten videos per day and has even asked her to watch them with him. But it repulses her.
“You know, I bet if I bought you flowers you’d actually say thank you, unlike her.”
I don’t respond.
“Hey, I have to go, but I’ll try calling again,” he says.
I’m now in a room with a victim. She’s seven and timid with golden hair that hides her face. She holds her overall straps as she talks.
“Dear, can you speak up, please?” the interviewer asks.
The volume of her voice remains the same. She tries to explain how she was touched. At one point she stops and stares at the floor. The interviewer reassures her this is a safe space and hands her an anatomically correct doll.
“Can you show me exactly where he touched you?” he asks.
She points. The interviewer nods and thanks her.
After we leave the room, the man says these cases are common. “Last week, we got a call about a child who was raped and decapitated and left in the woods. Just brutal. Good thing this little girl made it.”
She’s alive, yes. But her soul’s already dead.
Another body’s identified: a hitchhiker sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head. She was fifty-two and slightly decomposed when found. I knew her back when I was a child and played with her daughters. At her funeral, a woman whispers she was mentally unstable. One daughter isn’t there. The other reads a very short eulogy and leaves early. Her husband cries. I reflect on the short call I received about four months ago from a woman with a familiar and distinct accent.
“I don’t know what to do. My husband’s trying to take away my business. It’s all I have,” she said.
Before I could respond, she hung up.
I try to distance myself from these stories, but they always wake me. The same man being interrogated for sodomizing a child was molested by his own father. Sympathy seeps its way into the room for half a second before the questioning continues. When? How? Why? He answers in detail as if he’s telling a friend what all he did today. When he discusses tying the boy to the chair, he looks at me. His sunken face follows me.
I receive a call. “Hey, cutie. It’s me, remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been fine. You?”
“Better now that I’ve heard your voice.” He updates me on the situation with his wife. He’s decided to stay with her, but if she keeps disrespecting him, he’ll file for divorce.
After half an hour of venting, he asks, “What’s going on in your world?”
“There’s not much going on.”
“It sounds like there is. I mean what you do, not everyone can do that.”
“I’m sure many could if they wanted.”
“No, they couldn’t because people don’t care like you do. You’re beautiful inside and out.”
“I have to go,” I tell him.
I jot the word beautiful on a sticky note and think of the soft spoken, seven-year-old girl who was interviewed. “My beautiful little girl,” her father repeatedly told her as he rubbed her. Beautiful is heartwarming. Beautiful makes one blush. Beautiful is unsettling.
In bed, I hold myself. My own touch is safe. I find guilt in allowing a man I like to caress me. It’s natural. It’s craved. There’s a fear of what will happen when this touch is replaced by resentment. He tells me he respects me. A part of me wants to break the barrier and feel the unknown. But each time I take a swim, I’m tangled in my own ghost net.
He kisses down my neck, reaching below my collarbone. “Is this okay?” he asks.
I nod.
His arms are around my waist. I place them lower. He grips me. My breath's heighten. The victim’s turn into screams.
“Stop, stop, please,” she cries as the guy pins her down in the living room and rips her dress. He’s inside, where he' always wanted to be but never belonged.
“Is this still okay?” he asks me.
“Yes.” I smile.
He bites my neck, and I unbutton my shirt. I push his head down as he kisses my breasts.
The victim continues to yell and tries to fight off the man but can’t. He grunts and forcefully thrusts.
“Don’t stop,” I tell him. I run my fingers through his thick hair. I smell a hint of cologne and cigarette smoke.
She lays still on the rug after he finishes and sobs. She has scratches and bruises. He leaves, but he’s permanently stained her.
I begin to moan. I’m wet. I feel it. “We should stop,” I say, panting.
“Okay, we’ll stop,” he says and strokes my cheek.
We cuddle on the couch for the rest of the night. I’m warm and cared for.
She’s cold and paralyzed. During the interview, she shakes. Her rapist was a friend from college she’d known for a semester.
“Could you tell me what he said before he pushed you down?” the interviewer asks.
“He told me he always liked me and wanted me.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him I appreciated him, but I never liked him in that way. But I didn’t … I didn’t really tell him that,” she says as if she’s at fault.
The interviewer asks her more questions. He’s gentle but persistent. Halfway into the interview she mentions she’s worried because her father’s a pastor. “My family can’t know about this. My father would kill me if he found out.”
After we’re done, the interviewer reminds me that we have to get as much information as possible. “How are you doing by the way?” he asks.
“I think I’m okay.”
“You need to make sure to take care of yourself. Hearing this stuff isn’t easy. It starts shaping the way you think over time.”
“How do you do this? This job, I mean.”
“It’s like walking. You don’t know where you’re going at times, but you keep moving. If I stop to look at every single thing around me, I won’t get anywhere. And if I don’t take the time to observe my surroundings, I’ll lose sight of why I’m even walking in the first place. There has to be some sort of balance.”
I go to the park and observe the children. Any one of them could be or become victims. They’re happy because life’s a playground and survival isn’t yet a responsibility. A mother hugs her son after he goes down the slide. He’s protected, a feeling each person should have.
A new headline reads that a female teacher was charged with sexual misconduct. The word rape is missing. It’s harsh. It’s difficult to digest.
“It should say a teacher is charged with raping her students cause that’s exactly what it is,” my colleague says.
“But how old are the two students? Teenagers?” another colleague asks.
“No, they’re in elementary school,” I reply.
“Well, that’s not good then,” he says and walks off.
The stories are endless. I wait for one to desensitize me, but each case is a fresh and larger wound. The man I like texts to grab dinner sometime. I don’t reply. I’m nauseated. My mind and heart are exhausted. The part of me prepared to crawl through another dark tunnel is absent. But somehow, I have to find it.
The phone rings. “Hey, do you have some time? I really need to talk to someone.”
“Yes, of course,” I respond. “I have time.”
This piece was originally posted on Medium on August 5, 2024.
~ ~ ~
July 2026
