Untold Ways We Disappear
creative nonfiction by Charlotte Hamrick
The evening began in anticipation. A long ride into town punctuated with passing scenes of country houses flanked by fallow vegetable gardens, white-sheeted clotheslines, and muddy pickup trucks. In between, forests dotted with kudzu-covered hills, pines, and gold-shimmered hardwoods. Every scene, every turn in the highway as familiar as the lines in my own palm.
Not soon enough, town appeared with its gold-shimmered lights just beginning to blink on. At age eleven, town was a place I passed through on the school bus and sometimes where, like that evening, I was allowed to go to the movies on a Friday night to meet up with a friend or two, try on the unfamiliar clothes of belonging. But one night, my friends weren’t there. I decided to stay anyway because it wasn’t often there was spare money for the movies.
Soon after the theater lights went down, an older boy shuffled down the aisle and sat next to me. I was wondering if he thought I was someone else when he put his hand on my bare knee. I froze. Unformed thoughts flickered in my head like light-starved moths. His hand was cold and shaking and I heard a light rattle. When he moved up my leg and reached my crotch, I jumped and ran out of the darkness into the bright, popcorned friendliness of the lobby. Everything looked normal. I stood there for a moment, blinking with my heart thumping, uncertain what to do next.
I thought about calling my mother to pick me up, but I knew I’d have to come up with a reason why I left the movie early. I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I didn't look sick. I didn’t look like I’d just been groped by a stranger in the dark. I looked normal. What would I tell mamma? A boy put his hand up my dress and I didn’t try to stop him? I felt embarrassed, ashamed, confused about why he did this thing to me. I could hear my mother asking, “Why didn’t you leave when he sat next to you?” Because I didn’t want to be rude? Because I’d been taught to not draw attention to myself? No, I couldn’t talk about this with her.
My mother worked days in a factory and nights at home cooking, cleaning up, bathing kids. I didn’t feel like I knew her or she, me. We had never talked about what to do if a stranger touched me inappropriately and I didn’t know such things happened. Most of our short conversations consisted of her telling me which chore to do and me silently doing it.
I walked out of the theater and onto the sidewalk. I stood for a moment under the pulsing marquee like an actor on stage who’d forgotten their lines then moved to the side into a pocket of darkness. My body felt numb, breathless, disjointed, vulnerable. I withdrew to the brick wall behind me and watched cars full of teenagers drive by laughing and honking. It was a Friday night and that’s what small town kids, normal kids, did on a Friday night. I didn’t feel normal.
I never told anyone about that encounter. The truth about that older boy, a man really, is that he wasn’t a total stranger to me. I’d seen him in our little town over the years. He must have had polio as a kid because he used elbow crutches and leg braces that made his gait look painful and difficult. He was very thin and pale, always alone. I felt sorry for him. I wondered if he had family, if he had friends. I wondered if other boys bullied him or if he was as invisible to them as another brick in the walls of our small southern town.
Invisible was how I felt during those years. I’d really gone to the movies hoping to be accepted into a clique of kids that gathered there on Friday nights. I was newish in town and often felt left out of things that the born and bred kids took for granted. I always felt on the edge, just out of sight.
In the theater that night, it was like I was a thing and not a person. I’ve had conflicting feelings about this incident. Was I simply an unexpectedly convenient opportunity for a socially inexperienced man? I was a child, yes, and that’s been the stickiest part to shoo from my mind. I also feel guilty for imagining I was a victim when I think of all the times I saw him alone on the streets, imagining his possible vulnerabilities. It was all mixed up in my head. Still is.
I don’t know if it’s compassion, shame, or a shared sense of not belonging that’s left this experience lingering, or a combination of all of it. I was frightened by his aggression, but I wasn’t hurt or scarred. I’ve tried to imagine what created such darkness in the heart of that boy, a darkness that spilled onto me. I wonder, still, about the unknowable truth of it.
Charlotte Hamrick has been published in a number of literary places including Still: The Journal, Atticus Review, Flash Frontier, New World Writing, and in Best Small Fictions 2022 and 2023. She is Co-EiC for SugarSugarSalt Magazine and Features Editor and columnist for Reckon Review. Charlotte writes The Hidden Hour on Substack. She lives in New Orleans with her husband and a menagerie of rescued pets where she sometimes does things other than read and write.