Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories

by Gwen E. Kirby

You touch the ceramic angel with the broken wing for good luck and feel a little better. Your superstition is getting worse.

And maybe that is why you have never been kissed. Maybe this scared little girl is who you will be for the rest of your life.

As you sit, the pressure behind your eyes slowly eases. None of this matters. It isn’t even real. Tomorrow it will be gone. And you are afraid that may be true. Soon, you’ll be able to head back to the group. Pretend you are fine until you are.

Ramón takes your suitcase from the trunk and surprises you with flowers. You blush, say gracias, and wonder if you ought to kiss him again, if once you have kissed someone you are obliged to continue, if he expects you to, and once you frame it this way, like a chore, you cannot remember if you wanted to kiss him again.

You give him a hug. Then you hug María, then Gabi, who is crying loudly and saying she will miss you. You wonder who will have to dust the angels now.

It isn’t until you are on the plane that you find the crushed head of a purple lilac slipped into your pocket.

There were some people who were like that—people to whom things came easily.

“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.”

“What are we going to do?” he said after the waiter took away their plates. “Fuck?” “No, about the bill.” “Oh. I guess we’ll split it.”

“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 imagine her slipping and falling, her arms and legs slapping the water the below.

our fingers still entwined.

I take the note Josh left, some bullshit about wanting to avoid a scene but he’ll call me later, soon, he promises, and I put it in the garbage disposal, grinding it to pulp, pouring the gallon of skim milk in after it, the kind of milk he likes, horrible, thin, tinted blue like the skin over a vein.

The one-bedroom apartment feels empty without Josh but also lighter, room in the closet where the towels were, room on the coffee table where the television was, room in my chest now that the bad thing I knew would happen has happened. I make a piece of cinnamon sugar toast and microwave some old coffee.

My mother thinks she’s very funny so, as a punishment for her and a treat to myself, I don’t tell her that Josh has left me.

Fine fine fine, I hum to myself. Everything is fine fine fine.

The damp spot is all in my head.

I put it in a cardboard box on which I’ve written SHIT WEIGHING YOU DOWN!!!! in Sharpie, which everyone knows is the pen you use when you mean business.

The juicer is technically Josh’s, so that one feels good.

A wineglass shatters on the kitchen tile and I stand still for a moment, an island surrounded by an ocean of glass, sure I’ll cut myself, wishing there was someone to hear me call for help.

how u doin babe still okay? Janice is a very good friend. soooo good! I reply. cleaned out kitchen going to tackle bedroom. stopped looking for damp spot!! That last one is a bit of a lie. Janice texts me back a face with its brain exploding out the top. Janice knows when I’m full of shit.

I admit, I lose a bit of steam in the bedroom. Bedrooms are harder. I know what Anette would say. She’d tell me that pushing through this feeling shows I’m serious about the process. Steve would say that I deserve to be loved despite my imperfections, which isn’t as helpful, but I’ll take it. I imperfectly stuff a bunch of clothes into a trash bag. A little black dress that hasn’t fit in a few years. A T-shirt that rides up too high, exposing the tops of my hips. A jaunty cap that has never looked good on me, not even in the store, but I bought it anyway and I didn’t know why I was doing it even then. A gray turtleneck that makes my tits look enormous, but at least it hides your stomach.

That is exactly the kind of shit I need to get rid of. I pull the ties on the trash bag so hard that one tears off.

Anette looks at me with disapproval. This is a meditative process, she says. Stop b...

Even though my bedroom is by no means stripped down to essentials, I add three more items to my nonessential shelf. First, a blue vase my college boyfriend made me in a ceramics class, the glaze done to look like the vase had been broken and then glued back together. My stuffed animal Heather the narwhal, who, with Josh gone, will sleep under my arm again.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it’s like I am not sure I exist. It’s like I need to see myself in the mirror to be sure I’m still here.”

I turn the mirror to face the wall. When I’m a new person, looking at myself in the mirror is exactly the kind of thing I’ll like to do.

Mom has never been one to fill a silence. It’s her superpower, and so I blurt out, “Josh broke up with me,” even though I’d planned to roll it out at the very end of the meal when she’d have no time to comment. I always do this. Speak before I want to, admit what I don’t want to.

I hope she knows that sometimes she’s a bitch.

I’d expected to feel happy as I dropped my bags off at the Goodwill, but lunch has ruined my moment of triumph.

And it will be great, because by then I’ll be a different person.

I pour a glass of water on the carpet to make a wet spot and I rub it hard over and over with a towel until I soak up every drop, until you can barely tell it’s there. I smell it and it smells like damp carpet. Nothing sinister. Somehow, the apartment doesn’t look noticeably more empty, even after all that work.

I am going to do a little more cleaning, straighten things up, and instead I lie down on the couch and open my laptop and take a sip of that beer after all.

“That’s a great question,” Steve says. He’d say that no matter what. “As we get older, items we purchase begin to have less meaning. They’re functional rather than sentimental. I’d say, as a young person just starting out, buy only what you really, really plan to keep. Would you be willing to move with it? Because you’ll have to. Again and again. But I’ll also say, if you do own something you love, that you can tell a story about, don’t let anyone tell you to get rid of it or tell you it’s trash. Hold on to it.”

I would be too embarrassed to stay home if I knew Josh was getting off work in an hour. I would know that if I did crawl under the covers, Josh would come sit beside me on the bed and stroke my hair and ask if I was feeling okay.

It seems wrong in the middle of this mess that my skin remains unmarked. It seems wrong to leave so much of what is still wrong with me there, out in the open, when I could carve myself away, carve myself into something truly good and new.

I put the scissors on the bed and walk back to the living room. My phone is on the table. I have a text from Janice. where r u???? I turn off my phone.

You know what’s holding you back? Anette asks. I pick up the vase with the beautiful cracked glaze and drop it to the ground. I e...

There is something about ugliness that demands more ugliness.

Why be a girl with an average face when I can be a wolfman? A creature from the black lagoon?

I eat another chip and don’t even feel bad because I know I’m going to eat the whole bag; it was decided the moment I opened it.

I look at my strange pussy with ruffled labia like a bed duster.

My mother’s nose and my father’s chin and my brown-green-muddled eyes that refuse to blink because if I look away for a moment I’ll look away...

Is this the wet spot I made or the one I’ve been looking for?

I press the edge of the shard against my stomach and realize I have no idea how hard to press. What would be enough? What would hurt in exactly that right way, enough to distract, never enough to be seen.

Maybe I can glue the vase back together. The best thing about it was that it already looked broken.

I don’t ask if she can see what I’ve done, what an incredible mess I’ve made. I don’t want to ever speak again. 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.

I have sex with the men of Cwm Hyfryd so their wives don’t have to. Wives, for the most part, are grateful; this is a hard place for new life. The town is barely that, a collection of cabins spread apart by miles, no general store or midwife. The men are grateful too; I never tell their secrets. Ask anyone if I can be trusted. If a man enjoys my company and some other man wants to know what we did, I’ll say, that man?

Women, whores in particular, are less disposable when we are scarce.

I am willing to suck a man’s prick if I know he’s a good man, if I consider him a friend, because a good man will be grateful but a bad one will think a prick suck means he owns you.