(btw I know that I Totally bite Chuck Palahniuk’s style in paragraph 4; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery)
My mom used to watch horror movies when I was a kid. Very loudly. We were poor, so we always lived in either a really small house, or a really big trailer with paper thin walls. I used to always go to sleep with a pillow over my head to keep the screams and growls and moans to a minimum, so that I could function at school the next day. Luckily, I made it out of that totally unscarred, and a huge horror movie fan myself. One movie, though, managed to have a more profound effect on me.
It was called Jagged Edge. It was from 1985 and starred Glen Close and Jeff Bridges. I never actually watched the movie, I was in the other room and never sought it out as an adult, but I know it was a murder mystery. When I was a kid, probably around 8 or so, I also knew, somehow, that the “jagged edge” in question referred to a knife. I also knew that there was a word in there that I didn’t understand. The word “rape.”
I can’t remember if it happened in this specific situation, but whenever I would ask my mom what something meant and she didn’t want to answer me, she’d say “I’ll tell you when you’re older.” Looking back, I really wish I had written down all of those words. I would love to see those now.
Regardless, I did not get an answer to my query, so my young, yet insightful brain drew it’s own conclusions: knife + the screaming I could hear through my bedroom walls meant that rape = peeling off someone’s skin with a knife. Rape wasn’t the right word. But it did for then.
See also: flaying
See also: scalp
See also: excoriate
Obviously, I know what rape means now, and I really wasn’t all that far off…
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