He snakes a disjointed arm through the open mail slot in the front door, fingers the dead bolt just to see if he can, and he can. He knocks and I let him in, as though it is a choice.
I spend the next twenty minutes thinking of the time I saw a man die on the cold shoulder of the road, reliving the specific way in which all high-speed wrecks really happen in slow motion. In my head, I put my rapist in the driver’s seat and a brick on the gas pedal and I fill the tank with sugar and he’s dead in sixty seconds or a mile down the highway, whichever comes faster, but in my room, he is weighing me down, slowing everything down saying sweetie, sweetie so, so slowly as I’m spinning out and when something happens at this speed it never seems to end.
Some time after it doesn’t end, he lets himself out and drives safely home. I scrub the doorframe and handle and useless lock until there’s nothing left but my own fingerprints, and I think that at least there’s still some evidence to speak of, even if I never speak of it, and I’m the one it condemns. I scrub myself in a shower so hot that I hope it will earn me my place in hell, and before I go there, I pray that my rapist will fool god the way he has fooled everyone else so he can’t keep following me as I fall farther down as all of this keeps slowing down forever. I hope that unlike a shower, the fires in hell will be hot enough to relieve me of this skin and cauterize these nerve endings and smoke out all sense memories.
If I’m lucky, it will be quick, and the last of me will smell of burnt sugar, and that will be the end of it. Sweetie.
I douse myself in gasoline to be sure.

*