Consecration to Mary

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments 
Chapter: A Minor Figure pg.32

I envisioned her not as tragic or as ruined but as an ordinary black girl. For her, the state of emergency was the norm, not the exception. The only difference between this girl and all the others who crossed her path or followed in her wake was that there was a photograph that hinted that something had happened, that enabled everyday violence to acquire the status of an event, a forensic picture of an act of sexual violence that was not deemed a crime at all.