by Stephanie Sauer
I turned to the speculative with this piece before I thought to report the event to police. It did not once cross my mind, in fact, to call the police. Thirty plus years on the planet had taught me that the speculative was my only recourse.
I can breathe along the river, even this crowded river with a road busy at rush hour, used condoms and Styrofoam strewn across the dirt. I can let my guard down, relax into the pedals, the motion, the dry valley heat. I can admire the crows lined neatly on branches. Just an hour, that is all I need. That’s all I can give myself on this day. So I set my mind to resting.
I bike twenty minutes south along the Delta, free from thinking. I look ahead to gauge my passing on the left of a parked pickup, as there is no shoulder. I notice this pickup has a broken side mirror. I pedal on, watching the fields to the west and how the angles change them. I veer left again, notice the same mirror. How does one accidentally bust out a side mirror, I wonder. But I do not think much of it because I am trying not to think. I pedal at an easy pace and watch crows rearrange themselves on branches. I veer left again, notice the same busted mirror. Blood rushes to my palms. The skin on the blades of my shoulders pinches tightly. A heat burns fear into anger. It registers: I am being followed. I pedal on, refusing to let whoever this is make me feel small, restrict the space I can inhabit in the world. I refuse to let this silver pickup truck spoil my ride (read: health). I want to scream I don’t deserve this shit! I have put up with enough crap already in one short life! So I pedal at a quick clip and, when the truck passes again, resolve to look this fuck in the face and sass back, tell him off (I’m already assuming it’s the ever-leering him of every woman’s horror story scenario). I see him parked again. I pedal hard, then slow enough to turn my head, ready to shout. Instead, I see the silhouette of this man’s penis (of course it was a man) erect against the western sky. It takes a moment to register, but I realize this man has rigged his front seat to recline all the way back and elevated it to eye level for just this purpose. He probably punched the side mirror out himself.
Panic sets in. I notice that there are few other cars around me. I’ve biked far enough south to have found peace but am now playing out the scene in my head: Young woman biking with no phone along levee road brutally raped, mutilated, dumped in Delta. Investigation to follow. People sigh what a shame as the next bit of news slips me into a statistic. And all because this man feels entitled to terrorize. Decades of minor slights and unacknowledged horrors double my blood as if to give birth. I stop pedaling. I pull my bike to the opposite side of the road, plant both feet at its sides and face in his oncoming direction. I brace the handles and thrust up my chin. Enough! I throw lifetimes of rage in his direction. The truck erupts in flames. The man cannot escape. The rigged seat has caused the lock to malfunction. He is trapped, arms flailing against the window, flesh bubbling. I sit back on the seat of my cruiser and pedal at a leisurely clip. I watch the crows rearrange themselves on the branches and smile at the sun setting on the fields out west.
I engage with the speculative as if by instinct, which is something I say as if by instinct I did not mean a skill I learned to survive in a culture that teaches women that we are not protected, that what we say will not be believed, and that we deserve and must expect myriad horrors. I came to the speculative from a young age as a way to exist at all, somewhere. I turned to the speculative with this piece before I thought to report the event to police. It did not once cross my mind, in fact, to call the police. Thirty plus years on the planet had taught me that the speculative was my only recourse. When I finally did call the precinct, only after witnessing the reactions of men in my life—reactions that betrayed the expectation of one who feels entitled to live in a world that does not regularly terrorize them, reactions I had been cut off from enjoying—the officer did not bother to make a report. The officer, in fact, asked me what I expected him to do about the situation as he laughed. I hung up.
Turning to conjecture is not passive nor escapist. It is not only about survival. Writing the speculative allows me to consider what it might be like to inhabit a world in which gender violence and terror are held to immediate account. There, I can imagine what it might be like if power and privilege were distributed evenly among humans. I can imagine what it would feel like to exist free of the looming threats of sexual assault and murder. Together in groups, alone in their rooms, and alone together across media, women have been speculating for centuries, our questions rising in frequency: What if there were consequences? What if I had power? What if we sought justice? We imagine the world we want into being. We speculate about how we might shape it. The speculative is a precursor to action. It is a requisite for lasting change.
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Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary artist and author of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press) and The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (University of Texas Press). She teaches prose writing in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas program and is a co-founding editor of A Bolha Editora in Brazil.