In This Body: Keys in My Fist
“She clips them to her hip with a carabineer, weapon sheathed”
Our monthly column “In This Body” is comprised of true stories about sex, gender, the body, and love, written by Fiona George, for NAILED.
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A girl cuts across the street diagonal from the crosswalk, just after midnight. She cuts it diagonal to get to the 7-11 without passing the two men waiting at the bus stop on the corner. Between her knuckles are keys, and she knows they’re no good but comfort. You can see the skin around them white from grip. In the 24-hour light of the double doors, she releases the keys from her fingers—the jingle. She clips them to her hip with a carabiner, weapon sheathed. She wants people to hear the sound, unmistakable, of keys let loose from a fist. She wants people to see it—not just her but every girl—dropping their makeshift weapons at their destinations.
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Self-defense and caution never came easy to me. I’d walk home alone drunk at night with headphones full blast. I’d do it without reverence for the dark corners behind bushes that I passed, without fear of each car that rushed by me. I was more afraid to be home alone at night than I was to walk home alone in the dark.
I’d decided to walk to the 7-11 around 11:30pm, so that I could get an energy drink to have first thing in the morning before a job interview. At 11:40pm, I started to panic. I hadn’t left the house yet. I was alone there, and it wasn’t my home. It was the home of a friend whose dog I was sitting, but the dog was at doggy camp for the weekend and I was there, alone at night.
After I’d run up the stairs to get my cigarettes that I forgot, then gone downstairs to leave, then went upstairs to get my wallet that I forgot, then gone downstairs to leave, then gone upstairs to get my keys that I forgot, and went downstairs to leave, I realized that I still needed to put on shoes that I’d left upstairs. That’s when I turned on the light at the top of the stairs for the fourth time, and the fourth time the coat rack at the top of the stairs looked looming, lanky, ghosted.
And that’s when I had to leave because the house was out to get me, and there were sounds through the walls.
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My big black headphones around my ears, keys jingled at my hip, the dark night in the corners of the streetlights glow. For two blocks I was unafraid. I let T. Rex blast 70s glam rock into my ears with no regard for the sounds around me, in the bushes.
Until that lull between songs. And the sounds in the hedges on either side of me were just the wind, but they were real. And the metallic scream of my keys filled the empty street, showed everyone where I was and that I didn’t even bother with the basic precaution, my keys in my fist.
The road was empty, even though it was a busy street any other time of the day. I stepped into the street, walking the dotted line between lanes. In the full glow from streetlight, to streetlight, far enough away from hedges and shadows to feel safe.
The keys clipped to the belt loop on my romper—my spaghetti strapped, short shorted romper—my skimpy romper—in the summer night heat—I pulled the keys clipped there from the belt-loop and put them through my fingers one by one.
With my other hand, free of keys, I pulled my headphones down around my neck and let the music play in the empty space around me, underneath all the noises of the night.
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When I’d get back, I’d sit on the front stoop for ten minutes waiting for a text back. The text I’d sent: I’m having a panic attack, can I call you and stay on the phone with you until I get in bed.
I’d left my lighter inside so I couldn’t smoke, sitting there on the concrete front step.
The outside was open, with plenty of space to run, and the noises always came from somewhere distinct. Inside, I would be trapped. The noises were nothing, were the house settling. Could be ghosts. People are people, and they are real, and solid, and though they do worse to each other than any horror-story ghost might do, I knew what to expect, and how to protect myself.
I couldn’t do that against my own fears of what did not exist.
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When I get to the intersection where the 7-11 is across from me, there are two men waiting for the bus in front of the store’s parking lot. Any crosswalk I could walk through legally, would put me on the same corner as that bus stop. I crossed illegally, in a diagonal line from the corner across from the bus stop, so that I ended up on the other side of the street half a block from the bus stop, in the entrance to the parking lot.
Right up till I get to the doors, my keys gripped so tight between my fingers that the skin around them turns white.
Once I get to the double doors, lit bright from the inside, I let my keys loose. They made music; angry, frightened, music. And I hooked them to my hip, where someone might hold a sword.
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To read the previous installment of In This Body: “In the Wake,” go here.
Header image courtesy of Suzanne Brown. To view her photo essay, “Folds,” go here.