by Nicola Maye Goldberg
You were pregnant at thirteen and spent the last twelve years of your life on death row. America loves symmetry – red, white and the blue lips of a teenage girl living in the Michigan woods.
It feels so good to imagine a woman on the side of the road as something other than a corpse in a miniskirt. Men love to tell us to get back in the kitchen, like that’s not where we keep our knives. They love to put their cocks in our mouths, like that’s not where we keep our teeth.
There really are feminists who believe you killed and died for us, that you did what we couldn’t, because we weren’t brave enough, because we had too much to lose: homes, families, tenure.
In court you screamed at the judge: shame on you for sentencing a raped woman to death! I see where you’re coming from, Aileen, but they can’t just let every raped woman kill seven guys. There would be no men left.
What would you make of this new world? “Believe women.” Well, you said that Richard Mallory raped you, and that you killed him in self-defense. Eleven years later, you said that he didn’t. Does it matter that by then, you were trying to hasten your execution, because you were so sick of death row? Does it matter that Mallory was a convicted sex offender? Does it matter that you were diagnosed with pretty much every personality disorder there is? Which woman should we believe – Aileen or Aileen?
Fuck all of that, anyway. I don’t want to be believed because I’m a woman. It’s a tautological bear trap – I want to be believed because I’m telling the truth.
When she visited me in the hospital, my sister said: maybe you should stop trying to kill yourself and just kill him instead.
Aileen, I disagree with you about Jesus, but I really hope you were right. I hope he comes back soon and brings you with him. There’s so much I want to say to you. There’s so much left for us to do.
about the author
Nicola Maye Goldberg is the author of Other Women (Sad Spell Press) and Nothing Can Hurt You (Bloomsbury). She lives in New York City.