Dear Damage by Ashley Farmer

Author:Ashley Farmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books

I drive alone to Nevada to see my family and once I’m through the three-hour traffic slog I slip so swiftly through the desert night that I don’t know how fast I’m going. A cop catches me, slaps me a ticket, and it’s a huge one because it was almost one hundred miles per hour, this speed, this sailing, nearly the kind of fast that gets you locked in desert jail. I’m shaking when I call Ryan from the side of the road to tell him, but he’s sweet about it, if not incredulous and slightly pissed because it’ll be expensive and he’s the slower driver, not amped up the way I am. The ticket feels like a referendum on my character because I’m usually a rule follower, although I’ve gotten disillusioned with rules, come to think of it.

I’m only a few more miles down the road when a neighbor calls me, a neighbor who normally wouldn’t call me, and never at this hour, so I suspect something’s weird in the building, maybe the kookier neighbors riled up and rowdy. Instead, she says, “Ryan’s okay but he got jumped.”

I don’t get it, can’t quite grasp what she’s getting at, and so she explains that a group of guys beat him outside our courtyard gates. I ask to talk to him, to hear proof that he’s alright, and his voice sounds dejected and fed up, not frantic like I’d expect. He needs stitches, has a concussion, isn’t allowed to sleep. They busted his glasses. His wedding ring flew into the bushes, something a cop helped him find in the dark. He’d refused the ambulance they brought because of cost but they made him promise to go to the hospital with this neighbor, our friend, made him swear it. Only later will I see the picture she shot on her phone: Ryan beaten beneath the streetlamp, so much blood, eyebrow split, dark red soaking the red button-up he’d worn to teach in that day.

No license plate on the idling car. No way to catch them. They only stopped beating him because Ryan yelled up to our neighbor’s open window and she, this adjunct teacher like us, ran toward the mess, screaming and scaring them off.

“You got lucky,” one cop told him. “It doesn’t usually end this well. But be careful, because they could come back to finish the job.”

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