Roulette

This is for Paul Stewart's Unnerve, Unsettle, and Scare Me Challenge, linked here:

I was still a little drunk when I got off the bus, full of bottled confidence, bolstered by camaraderie. It had been a good night. We’d talked and laughed, danced a little, and sat shoulder to shoulder in the humid fug of the club, knowing ourselves to be radiant and ripe with power. I had promised I would get a taxi, but I knew I was going to walk. I wanted to walk, to feel the night and the strength in my legs. Plus, it was ridiculous to get a taxi for less than a mile. That dick on the bus wasn’t going to push me around, sitting there, staring at me. Touching himself under his coat I think. Fuck him. I should be able to walk where I want to walk. Shouldn’t have to be afraid.

Cold air hit me like a sobering slap as I stepped down out of the sticky warmth of the bus. The trick, I knew, was not to look like easy pickings, and I strode out of the pool of light beneath the bus stop and into the darkness without pausing. The 3am streets were quiet, out here in the suburbs, the windows unlit dark squares staring down at me from every direction. Who knows which ones were occupied? My boots were loud on the pavement in the quiet, and it was this that first made me question myself. Each step seemed to shout “lone woman, over here” as I walked, but every effort I made to quiet my footfalls made me slower. Was that another footfall, behind me? Head up, breathe, nothing’s going to happen. Don’t look back.

I could see, at the end of the street, the light from the sign on the pizza place and the chip shop next door. Since the council turned the street lights off after midnight to save money, that corner was lit in green and red, a tired Christmas tree, wilting on the kerb. Still, I made for it like I was aiming for base, a point of safety before the next leg towards home. My shadow appeared beside me as I approached, tall and hanging back a little, but then drawing alongside me, growing shorter, only mine. Or is that a second shadow now, gaining on my, stretching, overtaking me. Arrector pili contract in a ripple from my fizzing scalp and down my tingling neck, across my shoulders, along my arms, the tiny hairs like cats’ whiskers, feeling for the contact….but no. This is still my shadow. Isn’t it? The man on the bus, he did not stand when I stood, did he?

I try to catch a glimpse in the glass shop front, and see only me, my not-going-out-like-that skirt too high, my boots too suggestive, my bulbous puffer jacket a transparent lie. I am not as strong as he was. I steal a glance behind me. I must not look afraid, I must not trigger the predatory pounce. But there is no one there. I think. Not close. No. Not at all. I think.

It is ten minutes home. Five across the car park. I am stood on the edge of that ocean of dark, that labyrinth of dead cars in shades of black. I remember, in my skin, the feel of his hand on my arm, pulling, tugging, beer breath in my ear. I remember the crush of his body against my lungs, the wall at my back, his hand pressing mine against the hardness at his crotch. I remember the shock of his fingers inside my shorts, and I remember the snap when I broke one, the punch in return when he recoiled. I remember the man who followed me home. The one who clawed at my door. Five different men. Not all men. Five uninvited men. Among more men.

In my pockets, one hand tightens around my keys, my fingers shuffling the jagged blades to protrude between my knuckles. The other clasps my phone a little tighter. I am afraid, and I opt for fast fear over protracted, plunging into the shadowed maze of the car park. I am walking fast, not running, not quite, and I am half way across, my breath as loud as my footfalls in my ears, when I see a man, standing, watching me. My heart jumps to hammer at my temples and I cannot turn away, though, if he hasn’t seen me, looking seems to invite it. He is very still, waiting, wait, a bollard, not a man? Was there a man, before, in the dark? A movement in my peripheral vision, and I hear a noise, my noise, small, pathetic, helpless. Helpless. Another noise? I can see the other shore so close, and I could run. I should not have to run.

*

Authors Note: I am aware this is well trodden ground, there is no twist, no clever angle, no supernatural thrill here. But there is also no fiction, though the piece is, in this format, a fiction. I was struck, when reading what Paul wanted, to be "afraid of turning off the light switch, walking down that alley, walking through the woods during the day or at night, or an empty car park", how in another context, he had described life as a woman. I dont speak for all women, I'm sure, but while these are just some of my stories, I do not have a girl friend who does not have her own, similar or worse. And each time you make it home, each time the shadows were yours, the footsteps inconsequential, the flash of movement just a fox, each time feels like you dodged the bullet this time. And we keep spinning the barrel, and reminding ourselves that it shouldn't have to be that way.