#dok.

raised beneath the glow of a nuclear power plant, dawn's attraction to faith was not one provoked by her parents, but of an internal search for guidance. her father was gentle but passive, her mother fervent but frail, and dawn quickly learned that obedience and purity were the safest forms of survival. she grew into the image of chastity: the poster girl for the promise, a christian abstinence group. her voice rang out at rallies. smiling, sure of herself. the ideal vessel. but even there were fractures in her perfect surface, like how brad, her stepbrother, leered at her hungrily. still, innocence was her armor, never naming the shadows inside her own house. when she met tobey, a fellow believer, a fellow voice of restraint, she thought she found safety. but desire and violence converged by the swimming hole. his aggression split her head against rock, and his betrayal sparking a defense older than doctrine. teeth, hidden and biting and terrible, tore him apart. dawn fled with blood on her hands, the purity ring she once treasured dropped into the abyss. in the aftermath she sought answers, found only exploitation by a licentious gynecologist. violation carved the notion into her mind that men, if nothing else, sought to take advantage of her. still, dawn searched for tenderness. with ryan she thought she found it — sedated into softness, coaxed into believing that there was a hero of this story. someone who could bear the brunt of her curse. for a moment, there was one. betrayal arrived quickly, the form of laughter and a wager on her body declared through a phone call. rage closed its jaws around him, just as it had the others. dawn was learning: this power obeyed no vow, no sermon. it obeyed her anger. loss drove her further down a spiral. her mother collapsed and never rose again, hapless cries out ignored by brad's lechery. leering and taunting and certain of his entitlement to the girl who sourced his psychosexual fixation. so: she paints her lips, walks into his room, and allowed the teeth to answer the questions he had remaining. in adulthood, dawn retreated further inward before she reached outward. college gave her anonymity, and in that anonymity she began to study. biology textbooks piled beside feminist theory, mythology and trauma studies marked up with meticulous notes. her essays spoke what her soft voice could not, incisive and searching, a vivisection of herself on the page. purity rhetoric was reformed into a quiet devotion to knowledge, clawing back control from the chaos of her adolescence. by twenty-five, her life bore the look of ascetic ritual. pale walls and chipped porcelain tea cups / not outwardly remarkable, but an arsenal of principles inwardly.