Damn Fine Sentence #130

“I suppose everything sounds righteous when you pay it enough respect.”

I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a personal memory the words bring up. It’s about how books connect with your life.

---

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

“I suppose everything sounds righteous when you pay it enough respect.”

———Cebo Campbell

———Sky Full of Elephants

A man at the YMCA looked at me. He was standing like a shadow beside the entrance to the men’s locker room, as I walked by. He launched the look without a change in his posture. The look of assessment. He’d paid respect to the belief that a woman’s sole purpose is to be assessed, and the belief had became his righteous call to action. I caught the look without turning my head in his direction. I could have disrupted the advantage that stealth provided him, by facing him, by saying hey, to acknowledge our common humanity, which he had chosen to defile. Because alternative actions rarely present themselves to creatures of habit, I kept walking. Our distorted intimacy slipped inside me on a tear duct, then drifted down and down and down. I felt it settle just below my navel. There, it gestated—aggression transmuted by the mystery of creation—until I gave birth to it as this pretty paragraph.

Writing well is the best revenge.

A special thank you to my paid subscribers—-Anne, Cheryl, Emily, Eri, Lisa, Marilyn, Nicky, Peg, Tina, Usha, and the anonymous faextra.