A bathrobe constructed of a shredded confession rises up from the ground,

ascending to the ceiling.  The discarded empty figure is the ghost of a memory,

one that is reconstructed in the senses merely by the act of revealing. 

 

I sat to write a victim’s impact statement to recount a rape I suffered and had

kept secret for nearly thirty years.  During the process, certain details were inaccessible

while others threw me instantly back into episodes of psychological and physical distress.  

 

The robe is the expression of how it felt to remember as I typed the words and selected

some details to blacken and hide from view, others to highlight in yellow.   

 

The story is revealed, yet obscured. The partial shredding of the pages captures the nature

of traumatic memory: intact yet broken. The strips of shredded text become my cover

up and the straws of hay that replaced my body that night.   

 

A straw woman, left on a bed of hay in a barn in 1991.  

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