Morning-After Email by Brenna McPeek

       Danny Navarro CC



Morning-After Email


In college they called it forcible touching, which seems coy to you now in an age where everything is a slap in your face, and it was a skin-crawling thing, this touching—no, wait, not was but is because it still happens all the time despite the sallow spotlight we’ve since shined on it; let’s just call it out for what it was to you at the time: a bad thing, a Terrible Something you didn’t want to put a real name to, though we can all guess what Terrible Something we’re talking about because we’re all women here, and while there are many bad things that can happen to a woman there are only a few truly Terrible Somethings and your university used to send them out to you via “petty crime reports” (pussy crime reports, everyone called them back then behind the school’s back) over email on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, or any night really where inhibitions were down and boundaries discarded, meant as warnings, you think, but they read like bad after school specials: Caucasian male, age 26, medium build in a hooded sweatshirt, approached a female co-ed walking home from the bar, forcibly touched her breasts and her groin, ran only when she screamed; on breezy Sunday mornings you and your roommates would read these scenes aloud in dramatic fashion, hungover, crying laughter, and mainlining coffee or Adderall or coke to help you do your studying or drinking or whatever it was you used to do before you had Real Life problems, before you realized it wasn’t funny, none of it was, not the casual cunt grabs or the crude reenactments or the five foot eight Caucasian males with medium builds and hands hungry for compensation (and do they ever feel satiated?), and ten years later, after all the performative laughter and the private heart, lung, and mind-wringing, you hate that you now find cool calm in the mutual woe of it all when you talk to other women who’ve had the same or similar Terrible Somethings happen to them, that you can say me too and find relief that you can add your pound of flesh to the scale in a way that carries weight, that anoints you with the voice of a main character instead of a supporting one; yet still you wonder if your casual cunt grab in that dark alley was too trivial in the grand line of Terrible Somethings to give it much swinging power—even though that man who you had never seen before that moment (and will now never forget) was the first man to touch you down there, in that place that once belonged only to you, and even though you were too ashamed to report your pussy crime and have it memorialized in an email and too ashamed to leave your room for two days after because         
you’d been drunk                                              you’d been alone                                             you’d been chosen  
in the same way you’d chosen that dark path to walk down because it was the shortest way home 
how could you be                                              so goddamn stupid                                         jesusfuckingchrist
who are you to say you’ve suffered when you used to laugh in a former theater kid way (peas and carrots peas and carrots) at the very thing that happened to you, the thing that you were once too ashamed to name you now decree loudly, so loudly (in solidarity!) that you might as well engrave it on your Instagram bio, your acknowledgements page, your tombstone—but no, don’t be dramatic, darling, no really, please calm down: your Terrible Something doesn’t warrant the ink or the elbow grease or the MLA formatting; we’ve already laughed it into something as thinly drawn as a morning-after email, so delete it or perform it or forward it to all your friends out of fear you’ll die if you don’t—whatever you choose to do, we’re all in on the joke.

Brenna McPeek is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She has her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Fatal Flaw. Her work has been published in Grain, Story, Harvard Review, Necessary Fiction, and other publications.

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