When we held our annual Feats of Physiques award ceremony just before summer break, volunteer Julia Velasco raked in a slew of medals—a CR version of the Olympic kind, only ours were fashioned out of office supplies and shipping tape. Anyway, Julia walked away with at least a pound of paperclips, staplers, and Media Mail stamps hanging from her neck. Turns out she can wiggle her ears better than anyone in the office. She can remove her own tooth, then stick it back in quick-like without even bleeding too much (Matt McBride did not fare so well in this event. He now talks with a lisp and weeps over all the pretty white smiles in Colgate commercials). She has control over individual eyelashes. She claimed she could do the splits, and because of the creepy eyelash thing, we believed her and simply handed over the medal (which was constructed of thumbtacks and no one else wanted anyway). Moreover, she writes blog posts the way leaves transpire. Which means she’s a natural, as this post on Emma Torzs’s story in our current issue attests.
Julia Velasco: Like all good stories, “Safe Word” is about human nature, telling us something about ourselves that we didn’t know but can easily recognize. When I started reading, my curiosity was caught immediately. This story is a fascinating new view on the sensitive topic of sexual violence against women, but what I found most interesting, what kept me reading, was Emma Torzs’s take on the consequences of this kind of violence for a man, not only in his relationship to victims—his sympathy for them—but the horror he feels in seeing himself as a potential aggressor.
It is ultimately the narrator’s fear of himself—the dread under all the layers of what he wants to be, a certain something escaping his control—that makes this piece so engaging. The story of the victim has been told often and well, but rarely has the story of the predator been presented in such a nuanced way. “Safe Word” invites us to take a look of what a “nice guy” can hide, even from himself.
I like it because it is dark and disturbing, because it made me grimace in captivated disbelief. Because it taught me why I should cross the street when approaching a stranger in the dark, but also how easily that stranger could be me.
