“A 60-year-old man was charged Monday with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old developmentally disabled girl early Sunday after police allegedly caught him in the act — with his cowboy hat off and his pants around his knees under an apple tree… According to the complaint, the girlís mother said she thought her daughter was in bed. The girl told police that she went outside to tell people to save energy and turn off their lights. At St. Vincent Hospital, the girl told police that she met Perez at a gas station and he ‘walked her around town’ before they ended up in the yard off of Abrams Street. When officers asked the girl if Perez touched her, she replied ‘Yeah, but he wasnít nice to me.’” — Green Bay Press-Gazette (US)

Unfortunately, there are so many stories of this genre — old man rapes young girl — that after a while you can barely read them anymore. The thrill of the victimizer and the misery of the victim get lost in the formulaic repetition of events. Rape gets to be exceedingly monotonous, one of those things about which you can truly say, “Well, you had to be there…”

But then every once in a while a rape story stands out from the rest. Sometimes the rape itself is interesting — done in some distinctive or novel fashion — other times it’s not the rape but rather the telling of it that stands out, as in this case. Here the event itself is typical enough, but the story exhibits an unusually fine attention to absurdity of detail. Consider the details: the girl is retarded and went out — at night — to tell people to turn their lights off; the man, wearing his cowboy hat, met her at a gas station (what was he doing, putting gas in his horse?); then the cops discover them beneath an apple tree, that venerable symbol of temptation and sin. You can sense the tension here, the way in which the reporter’s professional objectivity conflicts with his natural eye for the absurd. It’s hard not to think David Lynch would appreciate the resulting combination of understatement and incongruity.

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