Mary: An Awakening of Terror

by Nat Cassidy

For all her grumbling, she actually loves being a woman, pains and all.

The only thing that will prevent me from living out the rest of my days as a blind, pale, hairless, wall-licking lunatic will be when some charitably poisonous creature puts me out of my misery.

Boys usually get to keep that confidence, I think; girls have to give it back like it never really belonged to them.

Because the past is like the moon, isn’t it? It’s always there, but it shifts, it’s never the same when you revisit it.

Cleanse and expiate seem like lofty ways to describe serial murder. But I suppose murder and religion have always been old work buddies.

don’t call them beautiful. It’s not that they’re not beautiful—my God, they are—but that word has too much baggage. It’s an outsider’s word and it was weaponized to render these women invisible in the first place. They are full of so much more than beauty. I tell them they’re amazing. Powerful. I tell them they’re here.

They will always try to condense our complexities into something simple and dismissible, because that’s what being a woman is, being too much for definitions and being defined anyway, out of fear, and my God, will we be fearless!

I might never put clothes on again. This body has survived so much trauma and bloodletting—more than any man’s could have. It deserves to be celebrated.