“Bullet List for My Aged Kidnapper” begins with a gun and ends with a song. With a list form, Patricia Q. Bidar leads us down the long dark alleyway of time, where traumatic recollections ricochet off “bathroom sink[s]” and “stucco neighborhoods.” Both a prose poem and flash essay, Bidar’s hybrid piece seeks a semblance of peace, but does not grant absolution. —Court Harler
I did not provide my parents’ phone number for you to demand money they didn’t have. I provided made-up digits, only coming clean with your gun to my skull.
I did not tell the police the whole story. Safe at the hotel where I worked, I answered their dark blue queries. Behind their eyes I discerned that I wasn’t the kind of victim they had to care about.
- Did not disclose I’d been raped
- Did not throw away my underpants, which remained unwashed at the bottom of the hamper until your sentencing day, when I torched them in the bathroom sink
- Did not retain my name, fearful of being found
- I did not have a safe relationship for decades. I scraped together abject connections—men who were beneath me, cocaine, weed, alcohol—sinkholes of regret
I didn’t argue when men accused—the rare times I talked of it—Crutch! Fabrication! What they really meant was, What the hell you expect me to do?
- I don’t leave my shutters open at night
- Or during the day
- I have not forgotten what I learned: sexual violence, like politically motivated torture, is human and intimate
- Did not look for you until decades passed
Once, you brutalized me. Now you are an old man on a dismal patio in the same stucco neighborhood as before. I am an old woman, in faraway but similar environs. We both arise early for the senior discount day at the market. We falter on stiff hips. We wait overlong before we INSERT CARD! and QUICKLY WITHDRAW YOUR CARD!
At home, we rest our eyes. We doze. Outside our front windows, people flirt, fight, fling food wrappers on our patchy lawns or in our gutters. We mutter profanity to the weeds. Sing aloud, sometimes.
PATRICIA Q. BIDAR is a native of San Pedro, California, with family roots across the American Southwest. Her work has appeared in Wigleaf, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, Waxwing, and Pithead Chapel. She lives with her husband and dog in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Featured image by Mathias Reding, courtesy of Unsplash.
Flash the Court 