Mary: An Awakening of Terror

by Nat Cassidy

Why was she so weird? Why was she always such an easy target? Because people could sense it, smell it on her. That weirdness. That wrongness. And wasn’t it at least partially her fault? She didn’t try hard enough to be normal. And then all those years of isolation and loneliness, like dirt, like smog, they accumulated, layer by layer, into an invisible film. A protective shell. Like the body of an ant.

Poor Death! Such a sad, small, silly thing. Death never wins. There is always more life. Always. In the baseboards of every dingy basement. Within tunnels plunging through the earth. At the bottom of the deepest ocean. Life goes on and on and on. It Changes. Death can’t win against an adversary like that. It’s so easy to think of life as short, but no, that’s not right, life is very long—the longest thing there is—it simply moves in one direction. It makes hairpin turns. Life goes this way and that, swings and roundabouts, as natural as the moon tugging on the tides. The moon moves. The moon Changes.