Who’s the “Unidentified Woman?”

This summer, a Beach Book like no other—a story of rape, revenge, and redemption—will be published online, available throughout the Global E-reader Universe (see a short description of the novel by clicking the “WOMAN” page above). Be the first to read an excerpt, and have an initial clue on the road to solving the mystery: who is she, the Unidentified Woman, and what’s her story?      This is Post Two, with a short excerpt:

At the farm, the next day

We arrive at the farm the next morning. I don’t know where we are. All I know is, we drove almost the whole night. They stopped to eat and then slept in the car for maybe an hour or two. I didn’t eat or sleep at all. The man who grabbed me and held me also touched me in my private part. Nobody ever did that to me before. His fat finger went in there and hurt me so bad. They were laughing about it later but I kept crying. 

I’m crying now, too, when he gets out of the car and pulls me out with him. We’re inside this farmhouse, so I can’t see what the outside of it looks like. I don’t want to see it—I want to go back home to my Mami. I promised her in the morning, before leaving the house to school, that I won’t be late. More than anything else in this world I now want to help her in the kitchen and learn how to sew. But how can I explain to her why I’m so late? How can I tell her what this man did to me in the car? She would never believe me, I know her. It’s better for me to die right now.

“We found another girl for you, Big Mamá,” the man who drove the car tells a big fat woman who comes out of the house. She wears baggy pants and sloppy, thick shirt over her mountain belly. Not even a skirt or a dress like the women in my village wear.

“She’s not damaged,” says the ugly man who grabbed me and held me all night, when he hands me over to her. “But she keeps crying all the time like a baby.”

“I want to go home to my Mami,” I say, trying to control my cry.

These are the first words I say since they took me away from my home village. I think, maybe because she is a woman and a Big Mamá, she will understand and send me back home. But her arm, the way she holds me, is even stronger and more hurting than how the man held me.

“I’m your Mami now,” she tells me with a threatening voice, “so stop crying!”

I cry even louder when I hear her saying that. She is not my Mami. She is…

She slaps me. So hard that I see only dark skies and I lose my balance. I fall—but not on the ground. I’m falling and falling into an empty space. I’m going to die. Dios mio: please let me die.