This is my first published story. The day the editor called, I was working on another story, totally frustrated. The heat in my apartment building had gone off and I was in bed, writing, freezing. I slammed my laptop shut, turned off the phone (I didn’t have a cellphone then), and thought, I suck. I’m a horrible writer and I’ll never get anything published, ever. I pulled the covers up over my head and slept. When I woke, I turned my phone back on and had a message from the editor of Gargoyle, Rick Peabody, saying he wanted to publish this story. Here are the first few pages...

This story was published in Gargoyle.

                                             Healing

Usually at this time of the day Tim is deep into meditation.  He starts on the floor, Indian-style, slowly eating rice cakes from the bag. He closes his eyes and, in his mind, concentrates on the rice cake--the styrofoam texture, the beige color, the wheaty taste--until he becomes the rice cake, floating steadily against the blue sky, like a surreal painting. In this state, he is at peace.  And whatever makes him feel at peace, the doctor said, can't be all bad. But Tim, he warned, Don't underestimate the trauma.  Rape is not your everyday occurrence. And then he said, Time. He said, it'll take time for both of you to resume normal activity.   

Tim has been trying, though, for three weeks--since he came home from the dark room and found Sarah curled up on the wood floor shaking and naked--to resume normal activity. He does freelance photography for nature magazines like he's always done, but being behind a camera bothers him now, the fact that the second he peers through the lens he enters someone else's private world. He no longer wants the responsibility of seeing what he sees.  Last week when he brought the camera to his face he saw not the silver fish jumping in the stream, but the scene he cannot get out of his head, the one of the three men in tuxedos on New Years Eve, their jackets tossed aside, taking turns on the girl who lay limp like a puppet, red formal dress hiked up, legs spread so far they could split. 

Tim never told anyone what happened that night three years ago or how he, from the

slit of a door, watched it happen. He pushed it all down into another place, figuring he

would never have to retrieve the memory.

Breathing deeply, he watches his chest rise and fall.  He closes his eyes and tries to relax, but they don't stay shut--they drift around the room, straight up to the ceiling and around to the flowery wallpaper.  There are bright pink roses in the design that remind him of the roses on the cake he bought for Sarah's birthday party two months ago. After their friends left, the two of them got in bed and fed each other the last piece as if they were bride and groom. 

Sarah's key turns in the lock and he jumps up and greets her in the doorway, not with

open arms, of course--just an eager smile and probing eyes wondering, Well? Are you any

different today? Are you ready to embrace yet?

"I'm really beat" she announces. "The restaurant was totally packed again."

He slides her bag off her shoulder and sets it down.  "I made dinner," he says, hopeful.

"I just want to rest."  Her long hair is tied back in a braid but little ringlets friz around her hairline, softly framing her face.  He takes the braid in his hand and brings it up to his mouth, kissing it lightly.  It is as close as he comes to crossing the line of invasion.

"You smell like..., like..." he closes his eyes and, with his hand, gestures like an Italian, "spaghetteeni." 

"Funny" she says and walks toward their bedroom. He follows her through their apartment, she in high heels and he in bare feet. His feet make a slick sound as they come up from the floor.

"I couldn't meditate again," he says.  He sits on one end of the bed. 

"Maybe you're all meditated out."  She turns around so that her back is to him and takes off her white shirt, exposing the purple bruises on the sides of her rib cage that are now yellowing in places. He winces at these as always, a nausea uncoiling in his stomach. Over and over he has tried to picture exactly what happened that day--piecing together the fragmented clues she has given him: the slam of the door behind her, the thick hands, the black jeans, the reek of body odor--and all Tim's sees are enormous fingers discoloring her skin, then the image bursts into a kind of frenzied rage.

He can't stop thinking of how the pictures he was developing the day of the attack didn't even turn out, how it was actually a waste to stay in the dark room. He could have made it home earlier and clubbed the rapist to death.

She kicks off her high heels, shimmies out of her hose and changes into a long, thin nightgown like she's been doing every day now since it happened. She plops on the bed so that she's at the opposite end.  "God I'm hot," she says, fanning her face with her hands.  

"I'll go swimming with you," Tim offers.  Exercise will help, he knows.  

"Just let me lie here a while," she says.  

"O.K." 

"Uhhhh," she says. "My poor feet."  

He looks at her foot, which is swollen from the heat. On her nails there is magenta polish but most of it has worn off so that you can see the tips of the nails. His eyes travel up to her face, to her long blonde eyelashes that flicker as she drifts into sleep. 

He does this a lot now--watches her sleep.  The doctor said she is fully recovered--physically--but what matters, he remembers him saying, is "what's going on between her ears."  Sarah almost smirked when the man said this. She wouldn't even let him sign her up for a support group. 

"I hate those group things," she had said to Tim on the car ride home.  

"How do you know if you don't try?" He had sounded like a father but suddenly it was clear to him why parents always said it. 

She was looking out the window with her arms folded over her stomach. 

"Look, I'm just trying to help," he'd said. "Other people have been through this, too." He extended his hand to her shoulder but she moved it so quickly that his hand landed instead on the seat.

"Please" she had said. "Would you just not touch me?"  

Tim gets up from his end of the bed.  He lays his hand across her forehead.   

She scrunches up her face and turns on her side, curling into the fetal position.  "Uhhhh," she moans, barely moving her mouth. "Why am I so tired?" 

Her face is smushed up against the pillow, her mouth puckered like a little girl's.  Her nose is hard and almost raw on the tip from being sunburned so often.  He thinks it's ironic that she spent so many summers being a lifeguard.  It's hard to believe that she was once the one who saved people.

He goes out to their small balcony and sits down. The heat hovers like a heavy wool blanket, and immediately he begins to sweat.  He feels a stream dribbling down the center of his back which feels like an insect, the way it moves so fast, but he knows it's sweat. At night her fingers used to trace his spine, like a crawling spider, tickling his skin.   

Now, at night, there are no spiders on his back.  There are nightmares about people with no faces.  There is strong black coffee in the morning, one or two of Tim's phone calls to her each day, during which Sarah tells him how tired she is or complains how "blah" she feels.

"Come home then," he says.  "Let me take care of you." Let me make it up to you, he thinks.