accuse!!
in fact, maybe you’ve been fucking the whole time
For a while, I was one of the most popular girls on campus, apparently. I was a beloved socialite! A superconnector! Willing to walk everyone over to Seoul Taco or El Rancho after a night drinking shitty beer and complaining about our 50-hour-work weeks. Not that I noticed. Since I was too busy jerking my ego off to how hard I worked in j-school to jerk off any guys around me, as someone once put it.
I didn’t care if they called me a tease (I’d kiss you at a party but never talk to you again, whoops, that happened a couple times). I didn’t care if they wondered if I had ever ‘put out’ before. I didn’t care if they wondered if I was fucking the editor at the Missourian (I wasn’t; but this rumor started because he kissed me on the cheek in front of everyone at a party once and I thought it was as friends). I didn’t care.
Til of course, one day they caught me sleeping in class. Which ok, I’d done a couple times when no one is looking.
Today is different. Lo and behold, how does it feel to get dragged out of your chair by Rick (what the fuck man, we were just playing beer pong last weekend).
What the hell, I scream as Rick, football player build and all, tosses me over his shoulder. He struts down the hall. I wonder if I’m getting hazed for something. Laura and Marisa stare at me as I walk by. Kevin’s there too, and Jacob. Lily? What are you guys all doing.
Suddenly, Rick throws me to the ground. What? What year is it?
It’s not 2016. It’s not even 2021. It’s —
A fever dream?? I shout. Is it 2026? Why are all of them opening their mouths suddenly and pointing? Why —
“Admit it! You’re an ugly whore!” — or maybe they said, “you’re a beautiful woman!”
It was in Mandarin, a language I thought I understood but don’t. Why won’t they stop? What is going on.
They do it again and again. They kick me, grab my hair, spit on me, scream at me, beat me. Can they at least do me the courtesy of explaining what I’m doing wrong? —
ACCUSE!!
Suddenly, the walls around me are lit up. We’re at Church Street Boxing Gym in Manhattan, New York, not Jesse Hall in Columbia, Missouri — there are projectors with scrolling words full of my sins, and suddenly there’s footage from every single timeline since I lost my virginity —
YOU’RE ABNORMAL! THEY SCREAM AS A CHORUS
YOU KNOW WE KNOW, actually — you never did things the proper sexual way
Which was to fuck people you actually yearned for — wow you failed at that
Accused: of being upset John chose someone else and imagining that he wanted to be with me
Accused: of being hurt Dom lost his virginity after I confessed my feelings for him
Accused: of refusing to believe Frank when he wasn’t turning everyone against me for rejecting him
Accused: of running around the world instead of staying with G and asking for your own abandonment
Accused: of writing Justin a love letter he never answered
Accused: of finding Andrew the Korean Christian virgin beloved pastor’s son sexually attractive and waiting two years to beg him to be your friend again
Accused: of believing Tommy actually cared about you
Accused of being put through tests again and again
Accused of never pushing a man and manipulating him into going out with you
Imagine being able to hire a male prostitute. A real one. Like, just to cuddle, make me dinner, listen to every bad thing that’s ever happened to me, cradle my head when I cry it’s not my fault. Tell me it’s special, that I’m a generational genius who will save the world, it’s my destiny. Take me to a party where I can forget it all. I fall asleep to this promise. He leaves in the morning after letting me beg him to stay, the most orgasmic thing anyone could ever do to me.
“You are !” I blink and come out of my reverie. The struggle session accuser, Orpheus, steps forward.
I’m what? I ask. Too much? Too interesting? Too beautiful? Too unbelievable?
He stares at me, eyes reflecting the uderworld.
How dare you name that, he fumes.
Actually, what you are, he said, is pathetic for caring
The verdict? “Death to you by way of sexual diminishment.”
What? I said.
The crowd, they start humping the air! I scream and watch in horror as this movement creates a whirlpool in the air, and somehow extracts out of my head, bloodily so, a film reel that is traveling further and further out of me, memories of every time I believed I was wanted, all unfurling all diminishing all disintegrating I live all of this! all at once as it’s shattering in front of me, and then it is gone forever. It is a misrecognition now — footage playing on a tv screen in front of me, what once might’ve been familiar…
“Well you were never sexually attractive enough for me to want to sleep with again anyway,” said Orpheus, his face twisting into each and every one of my sins.
Do you, I choke out desperately, at least still yearn for what it was like to be inside me? Or did you find someone else to walk your earthly days with?
He was silent. The mob surges behind him and closes in.
“Dearest Crys,” I cried. “Receive my spirit. Do not hold this sin against them.” I fell silent.
She isn’t dead! The crowd cried. She’s the immortal Crystal. She can rejuvenate. They kick my motionless body. Get up! Get up!
The Holy Spirit of Crystal opens my eyes, now violet. Sorry, it says. You only have this one now. I can move my mouth but not my body. I can speak but I cannot animate. Well now I really can’t have sex with anyone ever again.
What a pity, said the crowd. You are so lovely though.
Also, they add in unison, we don’t believe you. You can totally fuck. In fact, maybe you’ve been fucking the whole time. Fuck if we know!
I smile slightly. Wouldn’t everyone assume that, that because I’m so powerful and holy, that I am a slut? Haven’t you read the sacred texts? People cursed with the gift of seeing are doomed to celibacy as penance for trying to touch God.
The crowd disperses. I lay. Did that happen to me? I ask in horror. From the crowd walks up a Chinese woman with a slightly cross eyed look - S. She sits down in front of me cross legged. Sex is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone, she deadpans. Imagine fusing bodies and then thinking it’s special and having that shatter and looking for them in everyone else.
Beats me, I said. I’ve barely ever had this happen. I’m prob more traumatized I didn’t have sex with most of those bearers of sin.
S glares. You want them to forget don’t you
Yes, I cry, I want reality to bend to my will but to be actually as horrible as my mind fears. If it’s not that bad, then I am just misrecognizing Gods good! I am the problem! I am the defective one
Well. S said. That’s all of us. Welcome to being human.
Suddenly I stop crying. Tears just dry the fuck up. A sunny day. The crowd in the distance is now frozen, like an impressionist painting.
S looks curiously at me. You know you made this all happen right, she said. All you have to do is pretend they can hear you. Speak to them as the lover would.
I whisper, I’m sorry.
S smirks. No, one more time. She’s switching up to English. The sky is clearing.
I stare in wonder. Then I realize what she means.
And I whisper,
You loved me.
Suddenly everyone in the mob starts moving again, in an ecstatic dance format. Scorpio full moon tonight.
Screaming bloody morder
Then they turn on themselves
Beat themselves up
They’d rather die than let you let them love you, S deadpans.
They would never collaborate with the fascist institution that is love. They couldn’t bear to dissolve like that.
Soon they’ve finished ravaging each other, now somehow each laying next to me. I see their faces more clearly. All my accusers, all the men I sinned against by wanting them.
I notice Joseph a ways away, kneeling in front of his own accuser crowd with his ugly rainbow coat that’s turned purple and grey. His evil eye bracelet so tattered it’s almost fallen off. I’m afraid for his heart; I don’t want it to get contaminated.
The crowd is forcing him to snort a substance. The substance of forgetting. Or is it the substance of remembering?
They won’t force him to stop seeing, says S, but they will make others unable to believe him.
Well, maybe I should’ve called him Cassander. But I chose Joseph because he can mog everyone once he’s done being sold out.
I walk over to Joseph. He looks at me wordlessly. I am nervous if I should talk to him, say anything that would make him stop seeing me as the enemy to evade, the impetus of desire as lack who’s here to disavow him yet again. I brush his hand and then hold it. His gaze softens to tenderness, like how I hoped he’d render me. He leans in — our lips touch. He pulls back, opens the hand we held. Inside is a black stone, inscribed with the words “a man with honor, a child of God. let your light be that which no one can ever degrade”.
Do you want a cigarette? I say.
I don’t know what happens next.
In one reality, he says, I thought you’d never ask.
In another reality, It’s pouring rain out as we huddle in this alley. We make our way to the Uber.
In one reality, Once we’re home, he lays me down tenderly and soon we are naked, his mouth traveling down my stomach, together again but it feels like a redo of the first time, beneath it all, my sighs whisping up into the sky like mist into the never ending story of the future.
In another reality, the rain gives way to the ocean, as it pulsates, before it melts everything into dust, the bodies moving like shadows in the night as the fantasy snaps into