Pink Teddy

Aud says rape is rape, and I don’t know, really, but the idea that a guy in Philadelphia raped a 92-year-old, that seems like something else. We’re eating Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough cones in Rittenhouse Square. Gold balls hang from all the trees, some arts festival or something. It’s dusk.

And then we see her, this elderly woman carrying a bright pink teddy bear. Where's she going? She’s in bedclothes, irises on a white background, slippers, a nighttime mask on her forehead.

“I bet she’s the one,” I say. I bite the final triangle of cone. The woman stops, ten, fifteen yards away. She looks up at the trees, the gold balls. Her arms hang down; she’s got the teddy bear by the ear, and his feet dangle on the walkway.

“What are the odds?” Aud asks. She’s still got cone, forgotten cone, dripping all over her as she watches the elderly woman. “How could anyone—”

I’m not sure if rape’s still rape, if she means how could anyone rape, or anyone rape an old woman. I think she means my god, she deserves better than this. But who doesn’t?

“We should help her,” Aud says. I think of us taking her home to the suburbs, putting pictures up throughout the Square: Lost. One elderly woman with pink teddy bear. Please call.

She walks toward us. The web of blue veins on her legs, a roadmap of sorts, of riverways, of blue blood rising ever close to the surface. Look what’s become of her; he snapped her in two, and somewhere walks the unraped old woman, made-up, entering the beauty parlor or bagel shop.

Aud moves over, to make room. Begins to pat the seat. A man walking up the other way—navy suit, briefcase, loosened red tie—says, “Here she comes. Same time, all the time. Takin’ Teddy for his nightly walk.” He puts some change in her pocket. “See ya in the morning.’”

Aud stops her patting of the seat, begins to lick the ice cream from her fingers and hands, around the cone. So, she wasn’t the elderly woman raped. What a difference it makes.

The elderly woman clutches the bear close to her with both arms, walks past us, staring at the gold balls still. She looks down at us. What are we to her? The past—ice cream, entangled limbs—and she to us, some future to avoid.