Ralph Yarl is home from the hospital and recovering, “a miracle” considering he was shot in the head before the “terrified” gun-owner shot him a second time as he lay bleeding on his front porch. He’d come to the porch to pick up siblings but rang the bell on a Street instead of an Avenue—or was it the other way around? The shooter fired through the glass in the door. Ralph is 5’8″ and weighs 140 pounds. Perhaps he weighs a little less after hospitalization.

A fifteen year old girl in Georgia is taking birth control despite being a virgin because abortion rights have been ended in her state. She is scared to death that the law might require her to carry a rapist’s baby to term.

This month I have been thinking about whether a better world might be possible? I thought, maybe yes, and wrote a book to find out how. And I did not intend to write any of this post today. But there you are. We never know.

Tell me which is the sadder story. [Please don’t choose. You don’t need to choose. Who would seriously undertake such a comparison? Both stories make me cry, but as a woman, it is the fear of that unnamed girl that made me cringe from recognition.]

Three years ago, I read My Dark Vanessa until four in the morning, desperate to complete this incredible novel. Vanessa is an intelligent and lonely girl of fifteen when she meets the man who will play on her inexperience and insecurities and youth. At fifteen “Vanessa” understands fear. She knows about rape because a few years before one of her musical heroes wrote about it.

Fiona Apple was raped when she was twelve years old . . . I had no reason to care about rape then—I was a lucky kid, safe and securely loved—but that story hit me hard. Somehow I sensed what was coming to me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen (192).

—Kate Elizabeth Russell, in My Dark Vanessa

I related to this passage though I had never thought about violation in this way before. Girls are warned and warned. It does begin to feel less like an “if” and more like a “when” it happens.

Rape scenes have always gone over badly for me. It is a frequent dramatic device, killing off girls or raping them in the dark. For the record: Most murder victims are men, and overwhelmingly the killer is a man. Most murders of women are committed by someone who is supposed to love them—a husband or boyfriend or recent male ex. Agatha Christie liked women as the killers, but she had issues. Maybe that’s another reason I prefer Dorothy Sayers’s mysteries.

A few years ago, I seriously reviewed my life experiences, surveying exchanges involving sex, unrequested sex. I have never been raped, though I came closest in grade school. What has happened to me were mostly comments and catcalls, exposure to men exposing themselves to me and men masturbating. A police officer’s comments looking down my shirt. The man who looked at Gary and said, “Can’t you control your woman?” [Gary—bless him—laughed.] Most of the worst experiences took place before I was even eighteen. When I walked across the University of Washington campus to a night class, I splayed keys between my fingers. When Ted Bundy was killing women in and around the city where I lived, I fit his profile: young, white, long hair, small. Female. Later, after the book came out, I realized how often I walked past where Ted Bundy lived in the U District, that friends knew and worked with him while he was in the state capital. Through Gary, I even knew the woman he married and with whom he fathered a child.

In my forties I took graduate courses at Portland State University. I had written a story about a woman who fears she is being followed across the dark campus. It turns out she is being followed. I commented to the professor that all woman I knew were concerned about walking alone in the dark. He said he felt the same way. I thought: No. No, you don’t. Sexual violence is something personal, threatening, and in-our-face for women.

One of the Robin Hood films plays the attempted rape of Maid Marion for laughs, and I do not forgive that. There have been plenty of films that use rape in precisely the way an invading army does—as cruelty used to distract and foster fear. Threats to and violence against women raise tension in the plot. For some viewers, this sexual violence is likely arousing. There is an entire thriving political party devoted to the view that women exist to provide sex for them whether we want to or not.

It might be why I am writing the novel I am writing. I don’t need to imagine the holocaust or the tragedy of global warming and poverty and starvation, drought and invasion. I know already about what private enterprise will do to make a profit, about what governments will do to gain more power, about what men do when they cannot have what they believe they are entitled to.

My novel is about the harder stuff to imagine. What is left of humanity if thirst for power and sexual satisfaction, and pursuit of military supremacy and money are all removed from the equation, ambition exists without competition, creativity and striving for excellence persist without fear and disappointment? I thought, It’s possible. I thought about a better world and maybe yes, and wrote a book to find out how. We cannot create what we fail to value enough to imagine.

And I did not intend to write any of this post today.

Only this morning I looked up that boy Ralph Yarl because I hoped he was going to survive. (The shooter needs to be braver, which is what I think every time I hear about some fool carrying a gun around. Be braver!) In the early photos Ralph looked like one of my students. I could see he was not one of those boys who find themselves abruptly towering over classmates and recruited by the football coach. He weighs in at about what I did until a couple of years ago, a skinny boy at 140 pounds and 5’8″. I am happy to learn he’s gone home from the hospital. Sometimes we get so caught up with the criminal, we forget the injured party.

Be well, Ralph.