female rage

CW: mentions of rape, homicide

Dylan Sarandos

Despite it all, she keeps going. 

Despite remembering his shouts, despite the claims he was an “innocent man”

(He wasn’t, really. Who did he think he was? Asking children to ride with him in the car, insisting–pressuring–women to close the distance between them)

She knows she did what she had to. 

So, despite this bottomless feeling in her chest, she keeps going. 

Images flash in her mind: An object, no, a person soaked in red substance. The metallic smell overwhelming her, filling the air around her until she doesn’t know where it begins and where she ends. 

She knows he played fate. He hurt too many people. Left too many things behind. Burns of rope around wrists, bruises around necks, blood dripping down thighs. And still, conflict rages in her mind. 

She didn’t start out like this.

Where does she go now?

Does this make her a bad person? 

What really defines bad? If anybody could be bad, she knows it was him. He wrapped people around his finger until they couldn’t escape. He left her partner’s body in a state of disarray: hair ripped from the root, bloodshot eyes, cuts down her chest.

He grabbed, he prodded, he took. 

Innocence, autonomy, the feeling of comfort in one’s own body. 

She wonders what other men like him exist. She wants to never know them. And still, she hopes she can rid the Earth of them.

She remembers it, the feeling. The blind, hot rage. The strength of her shove, the weight of the axe. 

She sees it. The splitting of a skull, the tears in her eyes, her partner’s coffin being lowered into the ground. 

She suffocates in it. The sinking in her gut when she got the news. When she knew he killed the woman who made her feel whole again. 

She revels in it. Knowing he can’t hurt anybody else. Knowing a woman, the very people he victimized, was the one to stop him.

For what she did to him, she’s unsure of her own fate. 

But she knows we’re better off. 

A man whose life consists of power is a man who will stop at nothing to get it. 

And yet, every power men have ever had over women is something they took. It’s time to stop. It’s time to stop forgetting that we can fight back. 

So.

Despite remembering nothing but death, she leaps.