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Cassandra has not noticed a lack of men telling women what to do. Perhaps this will be a pleasure of the future, a male desire that goes unspoken. A desire that is only a desire, and not a command.
She is tired of speaking to listening ears. The listening ears of the men who think her mad drive her to madness.
A virgin the same as a seduced woman the same as a violated woman the same as a willing woman, all women opening their mouths to watch snakes slither out and away.
They know that Cassandra’s curse is their curse as well. That Apollo spit in her mouth, but it was only spit.
A woman walks down the street and a man tells her to smile. When she smiles, she reveals a mouthful of fangs. She bites off the man’s hand, cracks the bones and spits them out, and accidentally swallows his wedding ring, which gives her indigestion.
They get very drunk on the beer that their cockroach bodies love, and walk home under the stars, and when they see a man they hiss and the man runs away and they laugh and laugh. “Can’t you take a joke?”
There is nothing worse than knowing that the man she loved cut off her head, except the fact that killing him has not made her whole again.
Kidding! My tits never get in the way when I’m stabbing Romans.
It isn’t that I want to be a man, except for the obvious other advantages. For example, when my husband King Prasutagus left our kingdom to me and my daughters, the Romans looked for the elephant trunk between my legs and, missing that, seeing in its place a more complicated piece of machinery, they decided to express their insecurity by killing
She knows the world is hard for girls who haven’t learned to be cautious.
Why bother killing her if he didn’t love her? I say.
“Sorry,” Amy Sue said to the customer, and gave the guy a big smile because she enjoyed being beautiful.
She imagined the glass exploding toward her. It’s because I have an amazing imagination, she told herself.
it was so rare to hold a moment in your hand, to be the one to make a finite amount of time last forever.
I thank her for the lesson, well-learned, that if the world will give money to a dead boy and not a live girl, then I will stay a daughter inside a son, a sister inside a brother, the man my sheath, the woman my blade.
I knew I was being a bitch, acting crazy, and I watched me watch myself, thinking, why aren’t you stepping in to calm yourself down? but I didn’t want to,
That’s the thing about places you know too well, and people—there’s an old-self waiting to take you back, to sneak up behind you and clap a formaldehyde-soaked cloth to your mouth before you know to scream. When I am home, I keep a lookout; I keep my back to the wall.
She waits for me to say more, and I want to, but that stubbornness rises in me that I call being private, but is mostly fear that if I express what I want I’ll jinx it, or almost as bad, be embarrassed.
in Sharpie, which everyone knows is the pen you use when you mean business.
And it will be great, because by then I’ll be a different person.
They might call me whore if they also call me surgeon and minister and friend.
So I am contented. And on the nights when my missing finger throbs and aches, I hold the stump tight and tell my body that the finger is gone, that all this protest will not bring it back.
