ISSN 1758-6488
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The Slap Fiction |
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SUCCESS AND FAILURE. As the slaps began to recede, as even their echo in our minds was becoming fainter and fainter, we wondered whether we had emerged successfully from our ordeal. To call it an ordeal was of course something of an exaggeration. After all, we hadn’t been murdered. We hadn’t been raped, or beaten, or stabbed, or robbed. We had only been slapped. Even so, we had been invaded, had we not, we had felt threatened in our streets and homes, we had been violated in some definite though enigmatic way. Therefore, when the attacks appeared to be over, we felt that we had emerged from an ordeal, though we were still uncertain how we felt. Sometimes it seemed to us that the stranger with his angry eyes had known something about us that we ourselves did not know. Sometimes we wondered whether he was right about us, even though we did not know what it was that he was right about. More often we dismissed such thoughts and reproached ourselves for our failure to catch him, our failure to prevent him from repeatedly attacking us. At about this time an editorial appeared in the Daily Observer. Signed the editors, the article discussed the episode of the stranger and concluded by saying that it was over now and that we ought to “learn from it and move on.” The editors did not tell us what we might learn, unless it was that we needed a larger police force in our town, nor did they tell us in which direction we should think of moving. Therefore our sense of relief, when the attacks appeared to have ended, was also a sense of unrelief; our feeling of success was also a feeling of failure. Now, that is not the way things are, in our town. Here, success is success, failure failure. There is no confusion between the two. Success that is also failure is nothing at all. We don’t know how to take hold of it. And so we wonder: What have we learned from it all? We know only that something has happened in our town that can never unhappen. On a fine spring day, when all this is far behind us, we may be walking down a street, under branches of budding maples and lindens. On the porches, reflections of porch posts and tree branches show in the glass front doors, which haven’t yet been changed to screens. The thought comes: He could be standing behind that tree. Then we look more carefully at the root rippling toward the sidewalk, at the place where the bark-edge stands clear against the background of grass, street, and houses, and where, at any moment, a shoulder might emerge, an arm rise, a hand swing violently toward our face we walk along, under the budding branches, with their yellow-green flowers against the blue sky.
