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Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology Lockdown’s Over the Down in the Dirt May-August 2021 issues collection book		get the 420 page May-August 2021 Down in the Dirt 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

Victim

Lucy Anne Buckley

    I am the victim, but no one knows my name.
    My face, so disfigured by sharp metal, is a mess of ribbons and red. Finger prints, once unique to me, are burned to smooth flesh, like the plastic skin of a doll.
    Teeth, once straightened to perfection by metal bars were gone in seconds with the swing of a hammer. They now live at the bottom of the ocean as morbid entertainment for the fish.
    The name of my killer is known. His face is plastered across every newspaper in the world. He is the famous one. The one they all want to see.
    I am just a number on his kill list. Number 4 to be specific. Not the first, not the rejection that made him snap and reach his hands around her skinny neck. I’m not the last, the one he slid into a ditch under the multi-coloured flash of police car lights.
    We are not in competition, these women and I. We lived and died different lives, but we were forgotten the same.
    Because whilst he is plastered on t-shirts, fawned over by teenage girls and paraded by scholars as the end product of child-abuse, I am in the ground in an unmarked grave.
    They call me Jane, but it is not my name.
    And I float by these crowds outside the court, watching the reporters smile and jump wanting to know more.
    There is no crowd outside my grave, begging to find out who I am.
    I don’t understand. Here is the killer. Why is he celebrated?
    I thought I was the victim?

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