Rapist Cheetohs

Cleaning up after a crime.

I’ve been sitting on this short piece for a bit—letting the snow settle inside the snowglobe—but the subpoena came, the trial date is set, and I’m not a named witness.

Other people will help tell the story to the court.

I am a witness of another kind. I will tell a smaller story of a moment back in summer of 2022.

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Rapist Cheetohs

I had a wild week—work, kids, solar flares, Mercury in retrograde, Jupiter in opposition. I saw a black cat, spilled a shaker of salt, and finally found the bad luck I felt swirling like a tornado.

On Thursday, my employee of three years was arrested—for rape, kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking. He’s in jail for the foreseeable future and is, unsurprisingly, no longer employed by us.

I needed to remove him from our lives, so I asked the whole family if they could help me clean out his apartment. I figured five people hustling with boxes and tape for two hours could do the job. When necessary, my family is like a SEAL team. Sometimes we really know how to get a job done.

Cleaning a rapist’s apartment is a strange thing as a family. My hubs and I had to explain what happened. Just try saying out loud what rape, kidnapping, extortion, and human trafficking are to teenagers. Then try to explain why the guy they’d known for three years did it—for which there is no good answer. Power, money, and ego…aren’t very good answers. We all moved through uncomfortable silences and stunned belief as we processed. It’s one thing to read about people who do this in the newspaper, it’s another to have shared meals and time with them. To know them. To even like them.

And of course we all bring our own private terrors to a job like this. At first, I was scared it might throw me into a retrospective of my own traumas, forcing me to relive every abuse I’d ever endured. Then, I was vexed and angry—Why do I have to do this? Why are people like this? a sort of foot stomping indignation. But then I got into it. Really into it. That life retrospective sat off to the side, like spectators at a soccer match cheering me on as I systematically removed this person from my life.

There were dirty dishes in the sink; I washed them. His clothes filled my bureaus, and I tossed them willy-nilly into banana boxes. The picture of Jesus on the wall and the prayer book by his bed—I put them in a box with his passport, Viagra, and Metoprolol, and banished it all to the very wet basement where I imagined mold would swallow his posessions within weeks. Buh-bye.

My fifteen-year-old daughter stood in front of the open refrigerator and pondered aloud, “He has really beautiful food.” She said it as though the quality of his food was at odds with his crimes, as though rapists only eat rare prime rib washed down with pints of blood—or maybe 7-Eleven hot dogs and Little Debbie snacks.

“Stay away from steak-loving convenience store men,” we’d tell our daughters (loved ones)…if only rapists were that easy to identify.

But I knew what she meant. She was witnessing his humanity. The fridge was filled with beautiful sweet peppers from the farmer’s market, fresh ginger, spinach, eggs, oxtails, goji berries, whole tilapia, sandwich cookies, V-8, overnight oats, washed grapes, and homemade boiled dumplings. He cared deeply about what he ate.

Huh!?

It seemed ironic—to value food but not this young woman’s body. He took time to coax flavors, knead dough, and peel ginger. He did the hard work of understanding his meals and the importance of eating well—and then he raped her. in my apartment. beneath a picture of Jesus printed on an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper, stapled to the plaster wall.

I asked my daughter if she wanted any of the snacks.

“I don’t want anything of his. No.” She said it like his badness might infect her, like eating his food would mean ingesting his crime. A party to it.

I packed it all up like a good haus frau. Nothing wasted. My grandmother would have been proud. I gave the dry goods to the other employees. I kept the beautiful foods and the snacks. On top of my box were the Ritz crackers, the individually wrapped Crunchy Cheetos, and the organic eggs.

As I walked out, I opened a little bag of Cheetos. Rapist Cheetos. I ate them one by one, savoring the thought that I was eating them—and he never would.

Tomorrow, for breakfast, I thought, I’ll have rapist eggs and toast. For lunch, I’ll have rapist tuna on rapist Ritz. With each bite I take, I’ll know there’s one rapist not eating this beautiful food, and I’ll be happy about it.

Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano on Unsplash