The Journey Prize Stories 30 by Sharon Bala

Author:Sharon Bala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

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I followed the Yogis a while longer. “For fun,” I followed them along the narrow streets where the Thai prostitutes sit and blink and hope for johns they don’t want to fuck, and I thought, I am not like them, and again, and again, nearly every feverish night, they led me dancing with them. Again, the girls, sirens with long hair, their transformation by then for me was complete and they danced on borrowed legs, they belonged someplace deep down below the water, where they could breathe.

But it was comfortable and familiar to be surrounded by women instead of men.

“I was raped once,” one of them revealed to me one night. I told her I was so sorry. “I’m not,” she said. She smiled, so brightly, and let her hair hang loose. “We all were. That’s how I got into Yoga. That’s how I met all these girls. A support group, sort of.”

But then the shadow of the man came to us one night. We slept on hammocks inside of mosquito nets in a makeshift cabin on the beach in a different town. The girls had gotten drunk on the beach with another group of tourists, waving their oh-my-Gods like boobs at Mardi Gras.

“Teach us how you do it. I feel like everyone here wants to fuck you,” they’d begged me, sipping on warm beer, giggling and bubbling the way nice girls are taught to.

“Just don’t give a fuck. Just.” And when people start to view you as wise, you start to believe you are. “Just feel the weight of you until that becomes your power.”

Then in the ocean-loud, pulsing heat of 2 a.m., the shadow was slipping into one of their beds—the one whose body she claimed had been filled with water at birth instead of bone, the one who had reminded me of my sister that first night these raped women had saved me from a maybe-rape, and she was laughing. “What are you doing? How did you find me here?” She laughed again.

“Shhhh,” he said. “Shhh.”

I listened to them. She was quiet. He was entirely silent and I wanted to tell her never, ever trust a man who makes no sounds in bed. And I wanted to know if she was okay. But I was afraid. I think back to that night when maybe I could have been made a hero—I felt that I should have stopped it. She never fought him. I never heard a no. I never heard a condom wrapper tearing. I heard only the bones of a knee crack, the sandy floorboard as he lifted his body into the cot—the darkness that was absolute. And the breathing I heard was my own. And I thought of the sister I was never kind to. I was never kind to her, as a little girl, or teenager. And I didn’t know, had she died a virgin? Had she ever done a thing she didn’t want to do? And I hadn’t known her favourite colour when she died.

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