Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories

by Gwen E. Kirby

“You speak like a heroine,” said Montoni, contemptuously; “we shall see whether you can suffer like one.”

Colors she can eat with her eyes.

Cassandra is tired of running at wooden horses with nothing but the flame of the smallest match.

She is tired of speaking to listening ears. The listening ears of the men who think her mad drive her to madness.

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.

Instead, she picks up her remote control, given to her by a witch.

A woman goes on a date with a man and while they are walking to the restaurant, they see another woman bite off another man’s hand.

The same man from before takes his dick out on the subway. He is sitting next to the woman with a mouthful of fangs. She freezes for a moment in disbelief, but it’s really happening, it’s really happening, and so she leans over and bites off his dick. She spits it out. No bones in it to break. She leaves it, harmless, on the floor and gets off at the next stop. She keeps her face calm—she is accustomed to ignoring the screams and the blood—but the taste lingers in her mouth all the way home.

Werewolf-woman has never before loved being in her body, but now she shakes her fur out whenever she is home. She’s at her most powerful when she’s naked.

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. Her husband sees how happy she is and he asks her to scratch him, to turn him too. She wants to want to. She tries to explain to him that this is kind of her thing, that she needs this thing for herself. What she can’t find the courage to say is that she needs it to not be for him. He says he understands, but she knows he’ll never quite forgive her.

The fanged woman eats a donut on a park bench, although the fangs make it difficult. She is in a bad mood. Her tongue is sore, her cheeks nipped raw, and her blazer is dusted in powdered sugar. She wishes a man would make some comment so she could bite him, but nobody does. The fangs, after all, are easy to see.

A woman walks down the street and absolutely no one bothers her. She smiles at the other women she passes. They smile back. Something is different.

A woman wears a pair of fake antennae to take out the trash to the alley behind her building, where she’s always been too afraid to go at night. No one bothers her, except for a large rat, who is plump and resentful.

But one wrong after wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong does make a cockroach woman feel better, reckless, free.

A man cuts off the head of his cockroach girlfriend while she’s sleeping. She staggers upward, attacks and kills him, and still has a whole week left to live. She walks down the city streets holding her head under her arm so that she can see where she’s going. She writes an article for BuzzFeed about embracing the time she has left, but the truth is, her severed throat is tight with terror. She wishes she had died three days ago, that she’d never become a cockroach to begin with. 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.

They smile at each other, not evil smiles, but not nice ones, either. They feel good and safe, but not as good and safe as they’d imagined they would. They are distracted from the stars and the cool night air by the places on their bodies that burn and pull and pinch, the itching that never stops. They are proud of what they’ve done. But still, sometimes, they wish they could be smooth and whole, some softer version of themselves.

Some people don’t know how to separate their feelings about a thing from the thing itself, but I do. That is why I am willing to admit that even if I did not enjoy the sensation that is Avatar in 3-D, and even if I do not understand the appeal of jogging, they both have value independent of me.

Just because hard-boiled eggs make everything in the refrigerator smell like hard-boiled eggs and that smell triggers my sensitive gag reflex, I understand why some people might feel differently and would want to eat them for breakfast every day. Different strokes, etc.

We were expecting more of a “restaurant restaurant” (my wife’s words), and less of a “bar with some tables” (also my wife).

My wife is perhaps a little less forgiving, a little prone to complain when food comes out cold or I forget to buy milk at the store even when I promised I would remember, but she really only complains when it is warranted. She does not let people “walk all over her,” and I “shouldn’t either.”

(You know, Janet has a lot of good qualities. I want to say that right now. This is not a review of my wife.)

Unlike the bartender, I am not so insecure about my sexuality that I have to resort to inappropriate homophobic name-calling. It did not make me feel good to be called “faggy” in front of my wife. It made me feel shitty. I do not like that bartender’s comment repeating in my head.

I actually do have a problem talking about sex sometimes. I could say that I used a euphemism for sex because I didn’t want to shock more conservative Yelp users by talking about the beast with two backs, but the truth is, there are moments (like right now) when being a person in a body seems impossible.

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

yes, killing, but even to stop all of that I could not wish to be a man, I will not wish to be a man, no matter how many lives it saves, because it is not fair that I should change to suit the desires of others.

So I go to the plate as a woman, I wear my armor when I step up to the plate for the San Diego Padres and the crowd shouts Boooooooo and Boooooooodicca and I hit a home run and shock them all, because I am a practical hitter, a contact hitter, I play for the glory of the team, I’m willing to get hit by the pitch to get on base, but today I’ve risked it all, swung big and hard and I run the bases screaming a battle cry until my throat is raw.

The Mt. Adams varsity softball team warms up in right field, throwing yellow balls back and forth in sunny arcs. They try to be quiet, but they cannot stop their chatter as their shoulders loosen. The field is a good one. The grass is close cut, the bases bright, and the brick dugouts painted red and navy, the home team’s colors. It is nicer than the Mt. Adams ballpark, with its dugout full of weeds and half-eaten sunflower seeds. The girls like to see how far they can spit the uncracked shells, sucking off the salt first and then aiming them through the diamonds of the fence.

It is a perfect day for a game except that everything is wrong. All week, adults have plagued them. How do you feel about playing Mar Vista? Do you want to talk about it? It’s so soon—and in this pause fall all the words they don’t say. Shooting, death. Ms. Matheson, the Mt. Adams AP chemistry teacher, gets teary-eyed and looks at her students too hard, like she is trying to preserve them in amber with her stare. Mr. Grater, the eleventh-grade English teacher, tells them they will understand it more, and differently, when they are older, which they suppose must be true, but also must be true of everything. What they understand right now is that these conversations are warnings as much as anything else. How the girls should feel, the adults convey with every softened syllable, is sensitive to the tragedy. And they should be on their best behavior. They should feel respectful and aware and appreciative of the other team’s courage. The fact that those girls are even playing, it is made clear, is a victory for them. Everyone is a winner on this field today, said Coach Jeff as the girls unpacked their gear in the dugout, hanging bats and knocking dirt out of their helmets. And while this is true before the game starts, it cannot be true by the time the game ends.

How do the girls of Mt. Adams varsity softball actually feel? Molly feels sympathy but nothing stronger. This shooting was closer to her school than the one in Philadelphia or the one in Ohio, but in the end, it still wasn’t at her school. When she tries to make herself feel upset, nothing will really come until she thinks about her grandmother dying. That is as close as Molly has been to tragedy and she is embarrassed but grateful. Lisa worries that her parents are fighting a lot lately. Simone feels too much when she looks at the picture of the dead student, a freshman who looks like her own freshman brother. She looks at the picture often. She cries well and easily and this means that when she is not looking at the picture, she feels fine. Anna feels like she has been hitting badly and, though she knows it’s wrong, she is upset right now not because of the shooting but because she’s been moved in the lineup from second to sixth. If she keeps playing like this, Coach Jeff will start Becky at third base. Anna hates Becky because Becky has a long blond ponytail and wears mascara during practice. Worst of all, Anna is sure that Becky doesn’t like her.

When Becky was eight, her older brother died in a car accident. It’s not a thing she tells people because it’s a thing people never forget.

She keeps looking over to them to see if they understand, as she does, that life is unfair. How could they not? And not even that, because unfair suggests a standard of fairness, something to hope for. Life is unrelated to such standards. Life is a physical activity achieved by the body—until it isn’t anymore.

She’s got a big arm, Coach says. Big is, of course, t...

Lisa thinks about getting a hit and begins to pray for that but, abashed, instead thinks, I’m sorry. I hope it’s all okay. I know it isn’t okay. I’m sorry.

Simone feels like she could cry but does not because that would be horrifying, attention seeking. Anna and Becky stand next to each other and feel at odds with each other and with themselves. Molly is dry-eyed and watching. She will grow up to be good in a moment of crisis but always a little distant, a little withheld, especially when she does not want to be.

Molly is the first person to notice when a girl on the other team begins to cry. Not sloppily, but a few tears and then more, until the other girls on that team circle around her and hide her from view. The girls of Mt. Adams know, at this moment, that something real and horrible and true has happened, something that cannot be changed or even understood, and the right fielder and left fielder grasp hands, and the left fielder holds hands with Simone who holds hands with Lisa, and on down the line, in a gesture that relieves the adults, so respectful and thoughtful, but the girls are doing it for themselves, to feel a part o...

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 ...

My husband and I should be making a baby but instead we argue about whether to go out for Mexican or order pizza, each taking our standard positions: he likes the neighborhood Mexican place, damning it as good enough, and me, I know the Mexican place is fine but good enough is not enough when we could get mediocre pizza at home and, while we’re waiting, oh, that’s right, I’m ovulating, let’s go; I take off my bra to show I mean business but he puts on a shoe because lately my husband needs to be in the mood, he needs to feel like sex is about love and us and not just about knocking me up—to which I say, what, is meaningless sex not hot anymore?, and 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, but I do know I’m losing wood while my husband sits on the couch, one shoe off, one shoe on, saying that we should get out more, to which I say the Mexican restaurant down the street doesn’t count as “getting out more” and you know what, you know what, you only want to go out because you don’t want to fuck me and he says that isn’t true but also do I have to put it like that?

and this is when I lose it because it isn’t as though sex has always been about love, about us, about anything other than getting my husband’s rocks off, so I wave his other shoe at him and I say, now it’s your turn to suck it up like a big girl, and he says, how the fuck am I supposed to get a boner when I’m sucking it up like a big girl and I say, imagine I’m someone else, obviously, like, do you even know what sex is?, and that is apparently unacceptable even though, as I said, my egg is on the fucking move like Wile E. Coyote ten feet past the edge of the cliff, gravity about to ruin his day, and my husband leaves the room and slams the door and I can hear him say goddamit,

The first time I see the ghost of George Whitefield, I’m fucking my neighbor Karl. We’re going at it with more enthusiasm than finesse, the way you do when things are new.

Karl lacks imagination. It’s one of his best qualities.

I’ve never seen a ghost before, but then I’ve never had an affair before either.

And I don’t mean the affair, though that’s a secret too. No, the secret I’ve just learned is that I can fuck without caring for the other person at all.

life. Do you have to call it fucking? Karl will sometimes ask and I say, Isn’t the fact that it’s fucking what makes it fun? Sometimes he laughs.

“I’m sorry,” I say to him even though I’m not, and before he distracts me with a kiss, I wonder why I’m risking so much just to have another person to apologize to.

When I’m not teaching, coaching the varsity soccer team, or having an affair, I am busy worrying about my daughter Emmy.

She loves pink and princesses, which I was prepared for, but she also makes friends easily and never seems to bully or be bullied. I don’t see myself in her, which is good, but now I fear that a happy, well-adjusted child will be even more wounded by the world than an anxious, angry child with a large gap between her two front teeth. My daughter does not know what it is to hesitate. When she comes home from school, she throws herself into my arms. When she gets out of the car in the morning, she throws herself into the playground, scattering her classmates like crows. At swimming lessons, she doesn’t notice that the water is different than the air—she leaps. My husband tells me that I am literally making trouble out of happiness. I tell him he’s a man and doesn’t know any better and then we fight. My best friend, Suze, agrees with me, of course. She knows the world is hard for girls who haven’t learned to be cautious.

You’re never going to win a header by asking permission, I tell them. But they refuse to attack the ball.

They’d rather lose than look like they’re trying to win.

It’s a feeling I remember, though as a teenager I preempted failu...

Baggy shirts, scuffed sneakers, thick black eyeliner, a belly-button piercing. I didn’t know if I wanted boys to look at me—men had already been looking for a while—and so I made sure if the...