Empirical audacity.Just a phrase, one she sketched in black, a blueprint for her meanderings; perhaps a puzzle piece to a much larger story, one that she’d yet to write. Black morphed to blue, then to red, sharply contrasting with the pale blue veins on her wrist. Sunlight snuck through the horizontal blinds, slicing her into segments as she swayed slowly, left to right, feet upon the kitchen stool until she couldn’t stand it anymore. Not the sunlight. The sunlight was calming. Nor the quiet. The quiet soothed as well.

The urge to tell her story…

Facts and evidence never tell the whole story. They are, in fact, simply blueprints. Sketches. An attempt to make sense out of something senseless. She could have filled up notebooks with facts; time, date, what he was wearing, the color of his hair, his beard, that he wore gloves, the logo on his baseball cap, the patch on the sleeve of his hoodie, the sound of his pocket knife when the blade clicked into place, the feel of it as he…. Enough. Too much information.

The police report filled in the rest. Pictures of her silver Corolla, the dents in the driver’s side door that conformed to her body, the smashed in window, traces of blood and blonde hair. No finger prints (remember the gloves?) but DNA was readily available from the sperm that she rejected (and no, Mr. Akin, she did not have a way to reject a pregnancy, no matter what you think – that was just the universe knowing her breaking point, knowing that would set her over the edge, knowing she’d reached her limit).

She left them with a picture of him, as best she could give them. The beard is what she’d focused on. The beard and his mouth. How it had scratched when he’d ‘kissed’ her, not that something as savage as that could be called a kiss. She could still feel it, sometimes waking up to the feel of it against her skin. Her friends, the ones she confided in, took her seriously when she’d told them to shave theirs off, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough, that’s why…

She found herself in the bathtub, naked, shivering, curled up around her knees, trying to fill it with saline and then, knowing that, given time, she could drown in her tears and then, when that took too long, sketching out a deeper blueprint on her wrists. And for once, as she drifted off to sleep, she knew – she knew - there would be no more nightmares.

That would have been the perfect ending. Such a beautiful lie. The truth? The sound of her cats, pawing frantically at the door pulled her from her dreamless sleep, back into the world of jigsaw puzzles and dolls; a world that no longer made sense. Dripping blood, she began writing a new script, the crimson letters shaky. Sometimes you have to start over again and again, until you get it right. She was ready to start a new story, not yet ready to write the final chapter, all too aware of the power of words, especially …

Can you guess what they are? I’ll give you a hint. Four words, ones that you’ve heard time and again since you can remember. Think back to when you were a child, when anything seemed possible, when the world was full of magic.