I grunted as the garbage bin caught on the door frame and stopped me in my tracks. From deep inside the restaurant, the sound of pots and pans clanging under a running tap ceased.
“Are you okay, Nikki?”
“I’m fine, Lou,” I replied, blowing a stray strand of dark hair from my face. “Just caught the bin on the door again.”
“All right, then. Let me know if you need anything.”
The taps turned back on and my boss, Lou Henderson, resumed washing. I crouched down and, using the full force of my legs, heaved the heavy bin over the lip and set it onto the cracked black asphalt of the back parking lot. Ahead of me was about ten yards of dragging, and I could already feel the humid night air close around me like a suffocating blanket. A sheen of sweat broke out across my skin and my chest reflexively tightened. I took a couple breaths to steady my nerves.
Just a few minutes, I told myself, and you’ll be done for the night.
Step, drag, stop.
It took a monumental effort to get the metal bin moving, and I made a mental note to remind Sherry, the only other server who worked for Lou, to not overfill the bags in the future.
Step, drag, stop.
The dumpsters are at the far end of the lot, surrounded by a dry rotted fence and a low berm of gravel leftover from when they redid the parking lot back when I first started working here. I know the route between the kitchen and the dumpsters like the back of my hand—taking out the trash has been my job since day one—but I’ve never been comfortable with how, beyond the lot and its dim, flickering lights, the world seems to stretch out into endless darkness. Call it a kind of nocturnal agoraphobia (during the day I’m fine: I find the lush green fields oddly comforting): a grown up fear of the dark that has nothing to do with logic or reason and everything to do with superstitious dread.
I finally managed to get the bin to the dumpster. Now all I had to do was remove the bags and toss them into the large green bin, which is sometimes easier said than done. At five feet even, I stand eye level with the mouth of the dumpster, and I need to do a kind of jumping push to get the plastic lid to stay open. Tonight, as soon as I did so—it flew back against the fence with a dull thud—the smell of stale garbage wafted up and made me gag. I bent over and retched, unable to move because of the stench. Not for the first time, I wish I’d listened to my parents when they insisted I go to college immediately after graduation.
‘Nikki, why you want to slave in restaurant when you could get degree and become something more’, my mother said in her heavily accented English. ‘I will go to school, mom,’ I answered impatiently—‘but only when I’m ready. I’m only eighteen. I feel like I haven’t had a chance to live yet.’ That was back when I worked in my family’s Chinese restaurant in a town smaller than this, a few hundred miles East on I70, where we were the only non whites in the county. There I was an exotic curiosity—subject of both adoration and scorn—and I got tired of the scrutiny, just like I got tired of spending night and day with my parents (we lived above the restaurant). I left town the day I graduated high school with a hundred dollars to my name and the clothes on my back and I haven’t looked back since.
A man materialized out of the dark off to my left. I strained my eyes but without my glasses his face was a blur in the low light.
“Hello?” I called out, taking a nervous step back. “Who is that?”
He stepped forward, his large legs and wide stride fast closing the distance between us.
“Hey, I’m talking to you. This isn’t funny.”
He kept advancing. As he got closer, I began to make out some details, but my overall impression of him was still fuzzy. Tall, broad-shouldered, caucasian, with short dark hair and thick eyebrows. He was dressed in standard midwestern attire, jeans and a button-up work shirt, which meant he could be just about anyone. I made the decision to run, but by then it was too late. He jumped, like a predatory cat, and landed on top of me. We fell together, my small body beneath his, and when I hit the ground I hit hard. My head bounced off the pavement, causing me to see stars, and all the air left my lungs in a sudden ‘ugh.’ I lay beneath him, stunned, as he straddled me, pinning my arms beneath his knees and grinding my bare flesh into the rough ground. His movements were quick, deft, as if he were afraid of being interrupted at any moment. By the time I came to a reasonable facsimile of consciousness he had my blouse ripped open and my small, perky breast exposed to the cold scrutiny of the starry night sky.
I opened my mouth to scream—squirming beneath him like a landed eel—but he slapped a big hand over my mouth and all I managed was a hot, soundless expulsion into his palm. Seizing a handful of my hair, he lifted my head and slammed it back down again, stunning me. I went limp. My eyes watered and my vision blurred. I had a hard time focussing. My mind raced my heart, which beat a mile a minute, and only his hard groping kept me grounded in terrible reality.
“Slant,” he grunted, his hot breath stinking of alcohol. “Slope.”
He covered my little breasts with his hands and squeezed, his blunt fingers digging deeply into the tender flesh and causing fresh tears to spring to my eyes.I tried once to scream but my chest was so tight it felt like I was trying to breathe through a straw. I could hear myself wheezing, underneath the rustle of fabric as he undid his jeans and tore apart my skirt, like a kettle left too long over flame. It scared and embarrassed me, like I was a little girl again, struck by anxiety while trying to give a presentation about our state’s history in junior high. His cock was huge, its girth appearing to me like that of my wrist, and as he grabbed my head and brought my mouth toward it, I thought: there’s no way, it won’t fit, it can’t, he’s too big. I closed my mouth and ground my teeth together so hard my jaw ached. He pushed, poked, prodded, his hot, mushroom head coating my face with a sticky fluid I dimly realized must be his cum.
“Open up, chink,” he growled, and slapped my cheek so hard he knocked my head free of his own grip.
Whimpering, crying, snot mixing with blood from my split lip, I contorted my torso beneath him in an attempt to shield my face from his hands. But I might as well have tried to block an onrushing semi with my hands. He easily moved me, as if I were a doll, and before I fully knew what was happening, his dick was inside my mouth. I coughed, choking at the sudden intrusion, and simultaneously retched as my gag reflex was triggered. Somehow, I don't know for sure, I kept from puking (though it might be better if I did) as he used my mouth as a masturbation aid. Strange gurgling sounds emitted from my mouth, around his intruding flesh, as my lungs sucked air in and it was forced back out. I clawed at the ground in frustration, my fingernails braking as they raked across hard asphalt, wishing I could do something, anything, to fight back. He pulled out and slapped me with his wet organ, leaving a sticky patch next to my right eye, and in so doing knocked off my false lashes (I felt as much as saw them move across my eyeball).
I felt the pressure lift off my chest and arms and I scurried beneath him, legs kicking frantically, feet scrabbling for purchase. I can get away, I thought, but my hopes were crushed as he flipped me onto my chest—I screamed my first real scream as my nipples rubbed raw against the ground—and his weight returned. This time it really hit home what he as about to do: I felt him press his blunt thickness against the dry slit of my sex, and then he ran it back and forth against my nether lips. “No,” I gasped. “Please, please, please, not that!” I thought of my innocence, and how I’d naively been waiting for the right boy to give myself to. How stupid, I thought. You’re so fucking dumb! Pressure built and he was inside of me as my body gave way.
Tearing pain shot through me as every muscle in my pussy felt his intrusion. My virginity broke with a pronounced ‘rip’ of agony, and I shivered as if it were forty below instead of pushing ninety. His thrust was slow, deliberate, and designed to cause as much pain as possible. With his weight behind him—and on top of me—there was nothing I could do to stop him. Inch by inch his long, hard, thickness penetrated me, until his groin pressed against my buttocks and his tip painfully prodded my womb. I grunted, forced to concentrate on my breathing or else go mad, and bit my bottom lip until I tasted blood. He withdrew and repeated his earlier motion, this time a little faster. I noticed, with an intense feeling of self loathing, that my body was responding: my sex lubricated itself for my rapist, easing his passage, and even contracted around him, gripping and releasing, drawing him into me and pushing him back out—as if it, and by extension I, were somehow willing participants in this violation.
“So tight, so good,” he breathed. His hips bucked and I slid back and forth with the force of impact. “Oh, christ!”
He withdrew and I felt his absence like I would’ve felt a knife pulled from my body. I contemplated the possibility of relief; maybe it’s over, I naively thought, but my inexperience was drive home to me by the sudden and wholly unexpected pressure of his now-slick member at a place I never even considered.
“Oh fuck,” I whimpered, and frantically tried to crawl away.
He laughed, and bore down on me, forcing himself past my sphincter and into my dry rectum. At this point, I did pass out, if only for a few merciful seconds, the pain was too great. Thankfully, because he’d already been at me for so long, it didn’t take him much longer to finish—I heard him stiffen, then felt him spurt his rapist’s seed deep into my bowels, where it mixed with blood and leaked back out of me.
He pulled out, already soft, and dressed himself quickly. I lay there, panting, unable to move from the pain.
He picked me up, threw me over one shoulder, and carried me unceremoniously across the lot. We traced my earlier footsteps—back in what felt like another life—and I was groggy and semiconscious the whole time. I knew this final act of his meant nothing good for me, but just how bad it was I couldn’t yet fathom. I got a hint when the smell of garbage reached my flaring nostrils, then I was tossed into the dumpster and it surrounded and overwhelmed me. I landed on top of week-old bags of garbage and tried to stand. I couldn’t. My arms and legs gave and I wound up on the bottom of the bin, where a sticky, rancid kept me locked in place, with a pyramid of bags off to one side.
“Bye bye chinky,” he cackled, and the bags I’d originally set out to dump came flying in. “Hope someone finds you before the garbage truck comes.”
My breathing was loud and laboured in the hot, confined space. If I craned my neck I could see light beyond the mouth of the dumpster—that is, of course, until he slammed the lid shut and locked the lock. Then I saw nothing, knew nothing except my own pain. Part of me wished for it all to be over, if only so my suffering would stop, but another part of me refused to give up, to let go of it all and die. It was that part of me that mustered enough energy to start kicking the side of the bin. And it was that part of me that kept on kicking until Lou’s startled “Oh my lord god!” interrupted my rhythm and I could finally relax as sirens warbled through the otherwise quiet night.
