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.

Abuse is its own kind of reincarnation, isn’t it? We become the ones who made us.

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

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. I

We invest so much in certain objects, don’t we? More vessels, dipped into the waters of life, holding identity inside. Which I guess just goes to show how little of what we think of as identity is really real.