Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories

by Gwen E. Kirby

I sometimes enjoy the sex—these men aren’t strangers anymore—but often I simply tolerate it. It never hurts to ha...

Whether we have sex or not, the evening usually ends with the man napping in front of my fire. I like to watch them sleep and wonder if they dream of home. When they wake, I do not inquire, because I would no...

All men are different, but what is true of all of the men of Cwm Hyfryd is that they are tired.

I love to be alone and I am never more alone than after a man leaves.

All the space he occupied—the chair, the cup, the looks my way that ask what I am thinking, the glance of the hand against my body, yet another question I have to answer—suddenly, he is out the door, and that chair is mine to sit in.

If I were always alone, though, I would start to glance my own way, to bother myself with foolishness. For example, sometimes, when I am chopping wood, I try to think of a word different from whore because whore is not a pretty word. That in itself is not bad, for I am not pretty and sex is not pretty....

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.

It makes me proud to write it and I like to think of my brother reading my letters by his fire, with his wife and his son nearby, telling them all what a woman can do. I miss him and I sign my letters love and hope every one will reach his door.

When I am melancholy, I write to my older sister, who is dead, and I burn the letters I write to her in my fire. She would not have liked to imagine the Andes, as my brother does. Too big. Too unlike home. She would have said, cariad, come back to bed. We have work in the morning. Why do you always make things harder? They are hard already.

I wonder if my sister would say the letters I write to her are a waste. No doubt she would. She had only the beginnings of cotton lung that summer, a small cough in the night, a tightness in her chest that made her sour and frightened, not like the sister I had known, who had helped me keep my hair so tidy, who had taught me the right songs to sing to make the bread rise. It would be four more years before she finished suffocating on her own breath. So many pieces of cotton inhaled, I imagine her lungs became pillows.

I would not watch that slow death again, or die it myself.

Sometimes I lie on the ground with the bushes, to feel as they do, a moment away from being plucked and tumbled.

I never forget that here I am rootless. I am careful to have no children and am every year less likely. It is a miracle to be this far from home, a blessing if I can remember to take it.

At least, when the men of Cwn Hyfryd come to visit me, I know exactly where I am. I am whole and warm and full of conversation. I am across the room. I a...

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.

Midwestern Girl goes to New York City, and she reminds the protagonist (of course she is not the protagonist) of everything he has left behind. He covets her innocence and also despises it. When she gives up and returns home, he is sad, but not surprised.

He and Midwestern Girl never speak, and the story leaves her to sip her beer in a corner.

She is pretty but never beautiful. She is silent but never mysterious.

From time to time, standing at the edge of a crowded room as the story moves away from her, she wonders about the Midwest. She has heard herself say that she misses its squeaky cheese curds, its deep snows, its particular kind of good people. Though she is from there, she has never been.

Rewind the scene. The man and Midwestern Girl talk over whiskey then walk back to her room; in the hall, they begin to kiss and she fumbles for her room key. She has been kissed before—it has been clear all night, in her bold eyes and suggestive top—yet she cannot remember it. Does a kiss always taste so half-hearted?

She leans into him, traces his jaw with her finger. She knows he’ll stop even before he places his hand on hers, the door just barely cracked. You should go back to your wife, she says, but what she wants to say is, Do it again, but mean it.

Surprised you’re still open, he says to Midwestern Girl. They’re working you too hard. I’m tired, she says, and she means it.

(Is this his way of saying he is a danger, or just the entire rest of the world?)

If every woman she has ever been were given a name, would there be a Midwestern Girl at all?

They breathe deep for the pleasure of it. They shake hands. They strut. They speak. It’s all bravado, a script we have read in novels and watched on stage. Is this how men speak?

They hold their swords high. Who should be the one to say en garde?

A blade through flesh is nothing like a needle pricking a finger. When I first cut open a cadaver, I expected the incision alone to crack the chest wide, to open the dead like a cabinet. But it takes strength to crack a sternum and will to get inside.

The duel is quick. The pale woman cuts the other’s nose with a wild, panicked swipe. She’s shocked at what she’s done. The other woman grins, blood on her teeth, and dances forward, cuts a deft slash across the pale woman’s arm. First blood to one, but the better hit to the other. Both look happy when I yell that it’s done. The women touch their wounds and lick their salty fingers and one of the seconds faints, but not at the blood—though that is what the paper will say—no, she faints at the pleasure on the duelists’ faces, the flush across their upper breasts, the strength of their arms, the desire she feels to strip her own clothes off and join them.

See how long it takes before they are whispering through the wall, grateful for the sound of another voice, willing to admit that they were both wrong, willing to admit anything if it will set them free.

The ugly fucking tile is only the beginning of what you’ll accomplish.

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.

Stupid seems better, because we are smart. But if we’re so smart, perhaps we can think most like the smart man. The stupid man—what to expect? The stupid man, as we imagine him, is slow and plodding but carries a cleaver and breaks down the door in the night, his act so senseless that we have no defense. We shiver, and as if we’ve called him, a pebble raps against the window, the sound short and sharp, and as we begin to think it’s nothing, something strikes the glass again. Lisa begins to cry. Not loud. We know bad things have happened to Lisa.

We bet he has a girlfriend somewhere. We bet he treats her badly, but she doesn’t leave him.

Instead, we will look to the sky and see that the rain he promised has not come. We will smile to see the clouds gone and our smiles will bare our teeth and we will feel our anger well up from our bones, a pressure beneath our skin that feels like power, anxious and hot, and we will hold this heat inside of us until he is close enough that we smell him too, gunpowder and exhaust.

The first sound he hears will be Becca’s laughter, as she realizes that what we feel is joy, and when we turn to face him, our hair will burst into flames and we will light up the empty road, our fire glinting off our knives, and we will see that we have struck him dumb, that he feels fear but, more importantly, awe, and when we stab him he will give, not like a potato, but an orange: a little resistance from the peel, but the flesh inside easy to divvy up, a bitter piece for each of us.