The Woman in the Basement
It is still up. It has been up for seven years. There are eleven copies that I know of and two of them are on services I could not compel if I hired every lawyer in Tennessee, and one is hosted in a jurisdiction Ronald describes with a word I will not write down.
The original has nine hundred and forty thousand plays.
Three minutes and eleven seconds. Russell saying the matter would be settled in private. Gwendolyn’s soft, reasonable pleading. My silence, which the commentary at the time described as dignity and which was in fact a woman deciding whether to say something that would make it worse.
And a child screaming.
That is the part I had never allowed myself to describe accurately, in seven years, to anyone, including myself. It is not Phoebe’s cries, which is the phrase I used.
It is a five-year-old screaming for her mother in a basement, for approximately forty seconds, in high fidelity, on the internet, forever.