BY Angelica Cabral
TW: contains depictions of sexual assault
It seems that every day a new man in San Francisco loses the ability to speak.
There is no disease that we know of. Simply, one night a man goes to sleep chatting away and talking in his sleep through the night, but when he wakes up, he cannot make a sound. His mouth forms around the words but he comes up empty and his mouth hangs open, serving no purpose other than to let air in and out. The news repeats to viewers over and over that “doctors are looking into it.” People are thinking thoughts and they are praying prayers. And yet.
Tuesday night I head to my university’s campus for my weekly lecture on bioethics. I hope one day to be one of those doctors “looking into things” and my professor insists in a voice that becomes dronelike after just a few minutes that it is the most important class any of us seeking to join the medical profession will ever take. His voice is low, but not low enough to be sexy; it’s easy to let it carry me out of focus. After about an hour he stops and so does the buzzing in my head. He tells us to get with our partners.
My semester long companion is Randy, a tall, shaggy haired blonde with expressive amber eyes. He walks up to me, his white sneakers flopping on the ground, and takes the seat across from mine.
“Hey, Randy. How was your weekend?” I pull out a stick of gum and start chewing it. Between work and school and family, a constant stream of electric peppermint and lattes made by depressed gay freshmen at the on-campus Starbucks are the only things keeping me sentient.
Randy pulls out his phone and shows me his Notes app. The first note reads:
i lost my voice. no I’m not sure how. yes I’ve already seen the doctor.
He pulls back his phone and opens a second note, this one titled “For Gloria (bioethics partner)”
It reads: don’t worry, i can still be a good partner. my voice being gone doesn’t mean i cant write an essay. and id hate 2 give up having a pretty girl like u as my partner ;)
When I pull my eyes up from the phone, he is grinning at me unabashedly and despite his hot breath on my hands, I must admit that he’s charming. Like the little mermaid, his loss of a voice makes him a bit disarming but unlike her, he still has a way to express interest.
“Yeah, no worries, we can still be partners.” I hand him a stick of gum to show that everything is cool between us. In return, he jokingly blows me a kiss. “I guess you can be the transcriber of our essay.”
We spend the rest of the class working; when the teacher dismisses us, I quickly get up to leave, but Randy stops me, placing his calloused hand on mine. His hands are something I’ve always liked about him; they show he’s known at least some level of hard work in his life. He rushes to type something on his phone and hands it to me to read:
maybe we could hang out outside of class sometime? catch a movie? who needs to talk on a date anyways?
He looks at me expectantly and I could say that I said yes because I pitied him, but that’s not true. The truth is I have always in the back of my mind wanted someone like Randy to take an interest in me and if it took him losing his voice for that to happen, so be it, I guess. “Sure, Randy, I’d like that. Let me put my number in your phone.” I enter my information and hand it back to him.
With a quick wave of his hand, he walks out of the room, his untied laces trailing behind him.
When I get home, the house is uncomfortably quiet. Between my aunt and uncle, my mom, and my grandma, the house is typically bustling when I get there, especially right after dinner. I usually come home to an unkempt scene where everyone is still seated, in various stages of disarray, sharing tequila and beer, even Jenni, my 17-year-old sister.
The door creaks noisily when I open it and I see the group sitting around the table, food untouched. “Hey everyone. What’s happening, is everything okay?” My mom, Rosa, looks up at me when she hears me and says nothing, but gets up to pour me a shot of tequila. I take it quickly, my upper lip pulling back with a distaste for hard liquor I’m beginning to worry I’ll never grow out of. “Okay, I had my tequila. Someone tell me what’s going on.”
I note that my sister is avoiding my eyes and hunching over quite intensely, letting her curly black hair fall in front of her face. I look to my uncle, who I have always gotten along with, but he simply sighs when he meets my eyes.
Finally, my aunt speaks. “Your Tío lost his voice this morning.”
I exhale with relief. “Jesus Cristo, I thought somebody died.” Everyone but my sister looks at me angrily. I take a moment to avert my eyes and focus on the Virgin Mary painting hanging on the yellowing wall. Right next to the frame holding Ronald Reagan’s photo. “Sorry, I just mean that it’s not the end of the world. We’ll survive.” I take my Tío’s hands in mine. “Tío, a boy in my class lost his voice today too. We communicated just fine. And I’m sure they’ll find a cure soon. This won’t be forever.”
My Tío smiles at me obligingly and lets go of my hands to pick up his beer. He nudges my aunt who seems to be having an out of body moment. “Yes, mija, you’re right. It just was so unexpected,” she says.
“I know, Tía. We’ll get through this. I promise. Now, I need to eat some dinner.” I walk to the leaking refrigerator and pull out some rice and beans to heat up a plate. I turn on the stove and throw some butter in a pan to start melting.
Without a word, my sister rises out of her chair slowly and walks down the hallway to her room. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was the one who lost her voice.
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A little past midnight, I’m in the room I share with Jenni. Atoms, molecules, and all the other minute things that make a body function are detailed in the textbook in front of me. The ethics of how a body operates is only one of my classes; the rest focus on the logistics, with numbers and images swirling in my head as night after night I try to make sense of what is also the study of my own inner workings.
Jenni, who I assumed had fallen asleep, gets up in a slow and uneasy way. I barely process her movement, assuming she’s just going to use the bathroom, but she pulls up the extra chair and sits next to me at my desk. I continue with my reading and note taking and wait for her to speak. She does. It comes out haltingly and like every word is painful in her mouth, a stilted way of talking as if she is being forced. Because of this, she reigns in my wayward attention span quite easily.
“Gloria, are you really, really busy right now? I’d like to talk to you about something.” She touches my shoulder lightly, her fingertips just barely making contact with my weather worn sweater. Jenni has been so many things since she was born but gentle is not typically one of them. A brash younger sister, she’s been known to prank me and slap middle school boys who were acting up. Our adolescence required a certain toughness that she more easily leaned into than me. Well, she used to be like that. And I think she still is. But we don’t speak as much as we used to since I started undergrad.
“I can spare a minute. What’s up?” I was about to make an assumption, figuring she had a question about how best to navigate taking her nascent girlfriend to prom without upsetting either of their Catholic mothers. But I let her lead.
“Um, something happened with Tío before he lost his voice.”
No one expects medical advice from a 17-year-old but I’m not typically quick to discount her. Perhaps she noticed something even he hadn’t quite realized that could explain what was happening. “What happened? Did you see something?”
“I- fuck. I didn’t see anything. Something happened when I was with him the other day.” She exhales so slowly; pause and space are rarely allowed in our conversations. I say nothing. “Mom, nana, and Tía were out on a girl’s trip to the nail salon, and I was home with Tío. He. Um. He came into my room to talk.”
“To talk?”
“Yes, but he-” her words don’t trail off so much as abruptly stop. “He put his fingers in me.”
“In you?” I know what she means. Obviously I know. But between the moment that I ask this question and the moment it takes her to respond, there still exists a reality in which she corrects me and reassures me it’s not what I think.
“Yes. It’s not the first time either. It’s not all the time though, it’s just happened a few times since I turned 14.”
Three years pass by in a blur in my mind. I was just starting college, throwing myself into schoolwork and a job at the coffee shop and clubs and scholarship applications and endless writing and reading and talking and projects and financial aid and meeting with teachers and office hours and-. It doesn’t matter. I did everything that I could think of to keep me on a path that would lead me out of this house. Tío had never touched me like that. Had my schedule and distractions left him the opening he had been waiting for? If I had been the younger sister, would it have happened to me?
I look at Jenni. She is looking up at me with tears forming in her bottom eyelids. I say nothing yet. So, this is why the men are losing their voices.
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A few months ago, a girl was found early in the morning passed out on the lawn of one of the more popular and rambunctious fraternities. Sexual violence is so weaved into our lives that it is the sort of story you force yourself to ignore unless it is happening to you or someone you know. To be a woman is to rely on cognitive dissonance to survive. If we paused long enough to process how many men, even ones we are related to, see us as a site of sex, violence, or both, the weight of it would hold us down forever. It begins to feel like a when not an if and the women who make it to adulthood unscathed feel like a miracle that exists against all odds.
The girl, whose name I don’t remember, was completely naked from the waist down and her bra had been pushed up, her top slung around her neck. There was blood around her body, mixed in with vomit, a sickly greenish red. It wasn’t just the obvious assault that alarmed campus, it was the fact that she had been left there alone all the way until the next morning. No friends found her afterwards, not even the person who had assaulted her could be bothered to cover up evidence of a crime. How many people had walked by her passed out body and didn’t know what to do so they did nothing?
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My mother. My aunt. My uncle. My grandmother. Me. How many of us are guilty? How many of us are complicit?
My grandmother, who bore my uncle in the middle of a civil war, breastfeeding him on dirty buses while pregnant with my mother. Fending off men who screamed obscenities at her on the street while raising a boy who ended up this way. She turned 90 last March.
An uncle who routinely babysat my mother when he was only a year older than her. The default parent while my grandmother brought new, domineering men to the house in the hopes that one would eventually trade her genuine stability for her body. Maybe one of them was inappropriate with my mother. Maybe one of them was inappropriate to my uncle. Maybe I can still find a reason to forgive him. Or to understand?
And my aunt, a career women who quit work to have kids with my uncle and be a stay-at-home mother. When they realized she was infertile, she lost hope in every aspect of her life. Periods of time missing for us and her when she would leave on binges, and we’d find her three days later in a bar or a field or another man’s house. My uncle, sobbing to me every time, asking for help with the find my phone app. He never cared where we found her as long as we found her. Once he lifted her near comatose body off a dirty couch, brought her to the car, and showered her when we got home. He put her in fresh clothes and rubbed her back as she slept. At this point they had already moved in with us, a consolidation of the remaining family members still in San Francisco. The burdens of our shared trauma made easier to carry with my grandmother cooking for us all and my aunt recovering in part through the joy she felt at being a teacher’s assistant in Jenni’s Kindergarten class.
My mother used to practice speaking English in the mirror, working to form the words without an accent. Touching her mouth and lips as she spoke in an attempt to diagnose where the accent was coming from and what she could adjust to get rid of it. It never worked. She’d speak for hours to herself, reciting whatever childhood fairytales came to mind while Jenni and I played in the backyard, having what she wanted so desperately come completely naturally to us.
I have prepared my whole life for monsters outside of our home. Code switching for years, making myself as small as possible while becoming the first person in my family to go to college. I got into USC but chose to go to SF State, nervous about tuition money and even more nervous about what it would be like on my own. And now? Now I don’t know how to breathe. I don’t know how to go on. My mother sits at our kitchen table going through receipts. We were normal. We were fine.
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The classroom reeks today. We’re dealing with a carcass and formaldehyde permeates every corner. We can’t open windows because it’s pouring rain. It’s pouring rain and my uncle raped my sister, and I haven’t showered in days. Actually, maybe part of the stink is me. I smell almost as bad as a dead body. But worse, I’m actively in the process of decaying even as I continue to interact with living people. Living people who smell like Olay and Axe and Old Spice. Bath and Body Works sugar cookie body mist from the white girl next to me who will be a bitchy nurse one day intermixing with the sweat I’ve accumulated from going up and down the hills in this stupid city. The feeling as stinging as the memory of kissing my first boy after having eaten a burritos with jalapeños in it. He reacted like I’d bit him and the next day everyone taunted me saying I had the kiss of death. If only.
Randy sidles up next to me as the instructor cuts into the dead man’s chest. There is a proper way to dissect a dead body. An ethical way to treat it because we are meant to honor the fact that it was at one point a living person. We can’t desecrate it, definitely not in the way men desecrate the bodies of living women.
I feel a quick but gentle jab in my forearm; I turn, and Randy is again handing me his phone:
you look nice today
I scoff. “Did you prewrite that to show to multiple girls you see today?” He looks like he wants to whimper in response, staring at me with and his amber puppy dog eyes. Whatever.
He takes a moment to type up what I can already tell is a much longer chunk of text: No. I don’t flirt with a bunch of girls every day. I like you. You seem really confident, and I know you’re smart. Much smarter than me. And you’re pretty, but I already mentioned that.
When I look at Randy¬, I see my uncle. And I see the boy from freshman year who walked me to his dorm room and shoved his hand up my shirt and – it doesn’t matter. My uncle is guilty. I’ve been raped. My sister’s been raped. Every fucking female friend I’ve ever had has been raped. I don’t even know what happened to that boy whose name I never knew. Did he graduate? Did he rape someone else? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
But Randy is here. And he likes me and he’s nice. I smile through the formaldehyde and my own stickiness and say “Right. Sorry, Randy. I’m just feeling a little off today. Probably due to the dead body.” I laugh a little. He smiles a little. Okay. We’re okay.
Then he puts his hand in the right back pocket of my jeans and squeezes. I start to look over, time moving slow like a horror movie. My neck not on a swivel but on a hand crank, not wanting to see what I know is there. What’s there is Randy smiling and proud. Proud of putting his hand on my ass in the middle of class with a dead body in front of us. I smile I smile I smile I smile I smile.
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I had never spoken to a man and had him stay utterly silent in response. But. These were odd times in San Francisco.
I texted Randy the following day and asked to meet up with him at a local bar. He suggested his place so we could have an easier time communicating. At his place there was no one for me to shout over and plenty of lighting for him to show me whatever he wrote on his phone screen. I agreed, his desperation to fuck me making it easier than I had ever dreamed to do what I had planned.
Twenty minutes later, he opened the door, again with that sheepish grin we have been taught, incorrectly, to be a sign of innocence in men. He brought me a glass of wine. Before I could lose my nerve, before the Catholic guilt could set in, I threw the glass against the wall. It shattered. Loudly. And I had the briefest of distracted moments to begin.
I punch his face. And then again, over and over, my body aching more than I thought capable for the person not on the receiving end of a beating. He didn’t beg me to stop; he couldn’t. He didn’t make any move at all to stop me; he probably could have after recovering from the initial shock of the first few punches. He just took it, eventually falling to his knees. I kept going. Because I couldn’t kill my Tío. That was going to require so much nuance and navigating. And walking on fucking eggshells so that neither my grandma or Tía or mother panicked. Punching Randy. Was easy. I had no confirmation that he had raped somebody. But the likelihood was strong. Right? It was fine. It would all be fine. He was a bad person. Just like my Tío. Just like all the men who had lost their voices. He deserved at least this beating and likely much more. There was a more than zero chance he was the one who had attacked that girl in the spring. Right? He was a frat boy. Or I think he was. I could’ve been wrong. Oh god. What was I doing here? No. Fuck. It’s fine. If that wasn’t him last spring. Or if he wasn’t a rapist. He might be. He fit the mold of men who committed violence. My Tío didn’t fit the mold. A nice borderline sickly old man. He would die in the near future. And my sister. My sister with her whole life still in her palms. My sister who maybe wasn’t even at her full height yet. My sister whose lifelines on her palms would always have this mark. The mark of my uncle. He took her from me. The mark of men who took. They took. And Randy. He was a giver of violence and it wasn’t going to kill him to take it for once. He was a creep. He only cared about me after he lost his voice. And he could pay. Or his parents could pay. For all the therapy he needed after this. I punched. And I thought. Of that high school boyfriend. Who wouldn’t. Take no. For an answer. So I said yes finally. Convinced myself the next day. That I had been saying yes the whole time i mean he was my bf i love dhim and he kloved me and men who loved you didn’t hurt you except my Tío had hurt my sister and now here i was with the anger of a million + 1 women in my fists and randy was going to fight back at any moment or mb he wasnt going to and i would keep punching him until the end of one of our lives and and and and i would go back home and my sister would be sitting in the room we share the room where she was raped and i am going to hold her and tell her what i did to randy and she is going to be soooooo proud of me and i will have fixed everything tonight will cancel out my Tío and she will go to college and get a job and we will live 2gether and i will put her back 2gether and i will be everuthing she needs and no one will ever hurt her or me ever again
Angelica Cabral is in her second year of the Women and Gender Studies Master’s program at San Francisco State University, with a focus on studying internet culture and social media as they intersect with gender and sexuality. In February she presented at the 2024 Southwest Popular/American Culture Association; her paper was titled “Hot Girls Have IBS: An analysis of the use of meme culture to cope with an illness primarily affecting women.” Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Slate, The Objective, and more.