- Olivia Brooks
- Oct 29
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 30
Victim Impact Statement
She is a bartender at a tapas spot downtown. Her nails are painted a deep maroon. She lives with a roommate, Stuart, who works at the climbing gym. She leaves things in their shared bathroom—her vibrator, a key with white residue, reams of long red hair.
She began writing the victim impact statement on the back of the Esquire interview with Philip Roth that Stuart printed out. It felt more authentic, coming to her like that on the toilet at 4 a.m., scribbling it down with a pen Stuart keeps by the matches on the tank cover. It felt less impact, it felt less statement.
She has seen the backsides of too many public defenders this week, their badly tapered suits. She studies their fraying seams while she sits in the audience, forgetting if she’s on a bench or in a pew, if the judge is wearing a church robe to taunt her, to make her see things that aren’t there. She coughs up too much bloody phlegm to make it through hot yoga. She’s asked her friend Emory to come with her, and even though Emory hates hot yoga, Emory shows up anyway. But she leaves Emory and the class during surya namaskar B because she can’t bear to bend in half anymore because of the phlegm when she’s inverted, and padahastasana was always her favorite, and now that’s one more thing he’s taken from her.
If she was given the chance to build a woman, she would build an armored car. And really, she guesses she’s just so angry these days, angry and she feels bad about it, angry and she feels sad about it, angry and she just wants it to stop.
She wishes she had sweeter and nicer and calmer things to say. She wishes the words “impact statement” weren’t followed by “attached the PDF here” when she sends the email ahead of the sentencing. The public defender writes back, “This is an interview with Philip Roth. Just checking if you sent the wrong document?”
And anyway, she’s not sure what else she could add to the conversation by saying how she’s been impacted because she really can’t see into the future to gauge full and complete level of impact. Can we sentence him with a punishment that is commensurate with her shedding hair, with her bandaged face, with her unknown and unpredictable grief that has not yet finished unraveling? Maybe if she were to estimate the amount of closed and locked rooms she will ever be inside for the rest of her life, rooms that will make her scared of drunk men with a distinct blood itch in her fingernails that she’s never known before, can we then multiply that by something, and then that can be the proposed sentence she provides?
But she knows you just want a statement, not an impact sentence, and so she’ll say whatever you want, and she’ll write whatever you want, because maybe, someday, it’ll stop.
TAYLER HANXI BUNGE is a transracial adoptee who was born in China and raised in Arvada, Colorado. She is a writer, teacher, and student. Her work often centers the body, abandonment, and in-betweenness, and can be found in McSweeney's, Isele Magazine, Barrelhouse, Zaum, Mochi Mag, Vagabond City Lit, Ghost City Review, and others. She is an Assistant Fiction Editor at The Offing, and a current MFA Candidate in Fiction at the University of Virginia.