Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories

by Gwen E. Kirby

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.

And here is the best thing of all, the thing that makes Cassandra smile as the men storm her temple, exactly as she has always known they would: someday, Trojan will not be synonymous with bravery or failure, betrayal or endurance, or the most beautiful woman or the most foolish of men. A Trojan will be carried in every hopeful wallet, extracted with abashed confidence, slipped over the shaft, rolled to the base. Perhaps the Trojan men would laugh if they knew, or be humiliated, or pause to think about the indifference of history and the hubris of the man who hopes to be remembered.

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.

In the dark, arms full of groceries, the parking lot is beautiful in a way she’s never noticed before. A fine rain drifts across the weak lights. The asphalt shimmers, and the cars hide nothing.

Sometimes, late at night, she stands in the backyard and howls—not because she is sad, but because her lungs are strong and it is a joy to turn air into sound.

If her imagination were not occupied, she would notice a twenty-dollar bill on the final landing. She would pick up the money and spend it on a novel or a movie, maybe pay back a friend for lunch. Later that night, a sophomore man finds the money as he is walking calmly down the stairs. He thinks about a movie he’s going to make with his friends, which they will shoot in the park at night while getting high. He will enter it in the college film festival and place second. Years later, he is a director of indie films.

Now that she can pretend to be a cockroach, the woman with fangs considers having the teeth removed but, in the end, she has grown too used to feeling safe. What if the radioactive cockroaches prove not to be the answer? What if someone invents a special cockroach taser? What if the scientists who are hard at work discover a cure? She keeps her fangs and accepts that her mouth will always be a little sore.

they almost feel bad, because two wrongs don’t make a right. But one wrong after wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong does make a cockroach woman feel better, reckless, free.

A sign next to it says: “No One Feels Crabby with a Bud Light!” (You can definitely feel crabby with a Bud Light. I would argue, considering all the better beers out there in the world, that you should feel crabby with a Bud Light.

I may have snapped at Janet before going over to the bar, but that was kind of on her, since she knows how much I hate when people bother waitresses. (You know, Janet has a lot of good qualities. I want to say that right now. This is not a review of my wife.) If this were a review of my wife, I might review her based on: Supportiveness Empathy Stability Sense of humor Physical appearance Tolerance for me

They look across the dirt to the girl who has seen what they are afraid they will someday have to see, and in the face of this crying girl, winning seems wrong, and losing seems wrong, and playing seems wrong when the world around the game is so real.

I know knocking women up is a fetish, I’ve been on Reddit, so imagine me swelling and ripening and bursting with seed like a rotten melon thrown across a field by a trebuchet, spilling its guts across the grass, or whatever, I’m not here to tell anyone how to get their dick hard,

Whore, the ghost whispers, and damn, he knows what gets me off. Whore whore whore. I come so hard I get a foot cramp

After he comes, he holds me, murmurs in my ear that he’s sorry, that he loves me. He’s confused me, what we just did, for someone and something else. “I don’t love you,” I say.

in my ear I can still hear him whisper joyfully whore whore whore. And I say yes yes yes. Yes, I’m here, I’m here, a body, just a body, and it’s not promised to anyone, it’s mine, only mine, and I miss that, God, oh God, oh George, I miss it.

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.

do not know how Annie dies. As for me, it’s a bloody, violent death, and I fight bravely to the last. Yet when the coroner notes the cause of death, he writes childbirth, instead of the truth, that I died in battle against a daughter even stronger than myself, impatient to be free.

When they ask how it’s going, you tell the truest lie and say you’re learning a lot.

Already, you are trying to remember this differently. To frame it into the story you want to tell,

“Do you believe in love, Richard?” “Yes?” he said. “I don’t,” she said. “Because love doesn’t need to be believed in. It just is, without needing us. It doesn’t need us at all. That is what I don’t like about love.” “I figured you’d want me to say yes,” he said. “Then you don’t believe in love?” “No, I guess I still do. I mean, there isn’t love without people to be in love, right?” “But if we make it, shouldn’t it be like jungle gyms or pancakes? I can make a pancake, but when I do, I don’t need to believe in the pancake. And the pancake doesn’t poof turn into an omelet, or something you don’t like at all, like tuna fish salad.” “I like tuna fish salad,” he said.

When they walked into her bedroom, she put her hand on his chest. “I’m Megan,” she said, and she wished it was the confession of a secret identity, instead of a condition from which she might never recover.

I say to my sister with my last breath, you must cut off my head. Then I die, so she cannot argue.

I want her to keep looking at me exactly like this: calm and wild and like she sees exactly who I am, every hidden place. I want her look at me, to be my eyes, and to never, never stop.

Really, I sometimes think, it is not the word whore I mind so much. But I do have other occupations. I am a farmer. I am handy with a needle and thread, despite the missing finger. I do a good job patching clothes and wounds. I can read and I own a Bible. They might call me whore if they also call me surgeon and minister and friend.

They are dueling over a flower arrangement, who copied whom, and it would be easy to think them ridiculous. But I don’t. As if flowers are ever only flowers, words only words. As if men duel over anything better, shooting each other over the imaginary flowers we press between our legs.

Your Norwegian foremothers did not have fancy chalk liners. They laid tile using their eyes and their keen spatial reasoning. They sailed boats using the stars. Their forearms never tired when kneading dough or giving hand jobs. When their husbands fucked orthodontists, they killed them.

Worst of all, worst beyond anything, is that your husband is a mostly good man, as you are a mostly good woman. You want to call him and tell him you are glad he is gone, that you had been thinking about leaving him once the boys were out of the house. You want to call him to tell him to go fuck himself, you want to yell and scream and terrify him, not enough to make him come back, though perhaps that too, but just enough that he begins to wonder what you are capable of, if after all these years you have hidden depths. Do not do this. He will not believe you have hidden depths. You struggle to believe it yourself.

The way your husband stood, defiant and guilty, telling you he wanted to be happy. The way he said in love. The way he clutched those words to him like a kitten he was proud of saving, like you were the tree he’d pulled it from.

how different are waiting and continuing to be alive,

Say to your son, “Look. I did it.” Say, “I did it all by myself.” Let him think that you think that you did an amazing job.

Through his wet swim trunks, we think we can see the shape of his dick, though it may be how the fabric is bunching. We shouldn’t be looking at what we don’t want to see, but we can’t help ourselves, and once we look, we feel certain he’s noticed. We fear we have agreed to something and we want to look again.