Cassandra

by Kathryn Gossow

  The grass has grown over the path to the back fence. The long grass swishes past her legs. She flicks the lighter, holds it at her knee, wondering if a strand, a leaf, a blade will catch. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Russian roulette. She understands the attraction. Hold a gun to your head and see what trick you can play on death.

  Maybe she will stay in the house. Stay with the cards and notebooks. See what happens. Watch the flames from the inside.

  The back fence has become like a fortress. She stops in her tracks and almost drops the box. She’s never seen a fence like it—chicken wire, barbed wire like a prison fence. Her father built it to keep her mother in. It didn’t work. She chuckles and marvels at the evil sound coming from her.

  ‘You can’t fence Fate, Father,’ she says aloud.

  She searches along the fence and finds a hole, neatly cut, the sharp wires bent back to make one’s passage smooth. How chivalrous. She has no doubt the escape hatch was executed by Athena’s father. It almost has an artist’s flair. She uses it, pushes the box through first, and climbs through the gap.

  To the other side.

  Twilight has all but extinguished. The first rays of darkness creep alongside her. They smooth out the bumps and edges. The bushes around the house are black, the shadows flow out of the shed doors, from between the leaves in the trees, across the grass. There’s no light in the windows. But that is how they are. The sort of people to sit in the darkness, to feel it come on while normal human beings turn on the lights, the television, try to shield it out. She imagines her mother, staring out through the window, smiling a tiny smile. The bile of the Anger ignites again and she flicks the lighter.

  Too loud.

  The grit of the sandstone stairs crunches until her feet. She climbs, lets the noise quiet before she takes another step. Slow, quiet, sneaky. Leaves litter the veranda. She slides the box into a dark shadow. The house extends its creaky fingers towards her. It has no idea! She backs down the stairs, grinning.

  Ducking between the shadows, she runs to the shed. The shed creaks and groans, the dust swirling around the emptiness. No sculpture in progress. The mower sits along the wall, with ancient tools hanging above it and a shelf lined with old bottles filled with nails congealed together with rust and age. They’ve been there forever, before they moved in. Athena said her father talked about turning them into a ‘piece’. He hadn’t decided what. A homage to the land and toil perhaps. She laughs. Poppy would say he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic if he heard him say that. She feels around in the darkness until her hand meets the cool smooth metal of the jerry can. The petrol sloshes when she swirls it. Almost full, she calculates.

  Outside the shed she considers the house. It is still dark, or maybe—that could be the flicker of candlelight. Coming from the bedroom window. The master bedroom. She breathes heavily, the petrol can a burden. She lugs it to the house, banging it against her shins. At the top of the stairs, she takes time to listen. A footstep maybe, at the back, in the kitchen. A light could flick on at any minute. Her heart thumps inside her chest and her ears fill with the gushing noise of her blood. She is going to do this.

  Her tarot cards, scattered over the top of the notebooks, seem to shine with a light of their own. They look at her pleading, accusing.

  ‘I don’t care,’ she whispers.

  She turns the lid of the jerry can. The contents hiss. Like a snake. She splashes a heavy dose into the box.

  A sound comes from the house. A creak? She stops, she stoops, still, her back aching. Someone come to turn on a light? Have they heard her? Who cares? She stands. What can they do? She pours a line of petrol along the wall where it meets the veranda boards. The fumes burn her nose. Splashes soak her shoes and the hem of her jeans. Her skin feels cool and airless where the petrol touches her.

  The can empties just as she turns the corner to the side veranda. They never used this side much. She steps closer to the French door, drops to her hands and knees and peers through the glass. She can’t see anything. The room is too dark. She stands again and reaches across to the door handle. It turns and unlatches. She stops. Waits. No one heard. They are probably in the dining room. That might be the candlelight she saw. Candlelight suppers. Bitch. Bastard. She pushes the door open. The hinges scrape and scream like an alley cat. So it seems. She steps over the threshold. Into the house. Into the room.

  The room swirls around her like the kaleidoscope Alex used to have. Reds, blues, oranges. Patterns upon patterns, mirrors to each other, then the kaleidoscope turns and the patterns change, more angular, and it turns again and the colours settle into shapes like knives spread from the centre of the circle. Her head pounds. She clutches the sides of her head and closes her eyes. The patterns turn and trip inside her head. What sort of trick? Her head expands to the size of the house, full of air and growing, floating, throbbing.

  Empty.

  Not a piece of furniture. Not a book.

  Not a person. Not a mother. Not a lover. Not a friend.

  Not a word spoken.

  They have gone.

  No one told her they were gone.

  When she lights the pages in the box, the cards shriek. She hears them. The Sisters of Destiny, the Fool, the Kings, the Wands, the Knights, the Queens. The Lovers. They shriek and she covers her ears. The noise stabs, a blade in her brain. The old curtains she draped from the box and across the veranda boards burn slowly at first. Simmer. Then the flame finds the petrol and it races. Sprints. It seems to sprint to nothing. She thinks it will go out. Then she notices the wall by the curtains. The flame nibbling at the weatherboards. Eating the paint. Its mouth spreads across the wall, it licks around the edge of the open door, tastes the air inside.

  Halfway down the hill she looks back. An unfamiliar glow lights the hillside. She never saw it coming. She never dreamed it. It is of her own making.

  She turns her back on the glow and trudges towards her home.

  ~ 35 ~

  The War

  Cassie turns the letter in her hands, begins to rip distractedly at the folded crease. At the bottom of the stairs a frog trills from within the weeds and overgrown shrubs. Ida would be disappointed at the state of the garden. Cassie couldn’t keep up with it. Soon tomorrow in fact—it will no longer be Cassie’s garden to keep.

  She rests her head on the veranda rail. Behind her is the emptiness of her poppy’s cane chair, the silent presence of his crackling radio. He won’t be able to say goodbye to his home. The cancer had travelled; it wasn’t beaten as they thought, just hiding and teasing them. He will come out of hospital and move in with them, into the new house Cassie found for them to rent. Later, sometime in the future, he will go back to hospital, and they will drip morphine into his veins, and he will lose coherence, lose himself, and the final Sister will sever his hold on life. She has seen it in dreams, the fight evaporating from him, his bright shining light fading. That is how it will go.

  They have lost the farm. How do you lose a farm? She laughs quietly to herself. Do you put it down in a safe place and then forget where you put it? No. You put all your eggs in one basket. You follow a boy with a gift for the weather and then spend too much time grieving his loss to notice the land around you disappearing. The final straw, the granite face of the bank wanting payments on underinsured chook sheds that lie in a mangled wreck. She had seen it coming. She had spent her whole childhood watching it approach, like a speeding car, and had stood in the middle of the road unable to move, unable to change places with the driver. There was nothing she could do.

  They didn’t come after her when she burned Athena’s house down. A rumour went around town, blamed the weird artist with the bushy beard who hid away his teenage daughter who should have been in school. He ran off with the Shultz woman. He was trying to hide his tracks. Hide what in particular; no one seemed able to say. It suited Cassie. No one suspected her.

  She
turns the letter again, clockwise, anti-clockwise, around and around, her mother’s handwriting looping and swirling.

  Poppy told her about Ida’s baby. The biggest family secret even Cassie’s father didn’t know. He and Ida visited the boy once a year on his birthday, until the day he died, only a young man. They don’t live long when they are affected like that, Poppy said. The boy didn’t know who they were or why they were there. He had nothing to look forward to and nothing to regret. But he laughed. Poppy remembered him with chocolate cake in his mouth, the sun on his face, a mind that never grew, and always happy as Larry.

  Her mother’s letter begs Cassie to visit her. Forgive her. When they leave the farm her mother will not know where to find them.

  The first star of the night waves from between the trees. Cassie remembers Athena telling her about how stars are born. Little bundles of dust-like egg sacs. Just like a spider might send into the world. Everything created in the making of stars—the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen are the same as what she is made of too. The bony lumps on her wrists, the scar tissue built over her snakebite, the fine hairs above her lip. All living and non-living beings, made of the same stuff. We are all stardust, she muses. The sun is a star. We walk around every night and every day in starlight. All connected. Maybe that is how her gift works.

  The screen door screeches and Cassie edges along the step to make room for her father. He sits, his lanky legs all knees and angles, like hers, like Alex’s might have been had he got taller.

  ‘All packed?’ He tries to smile at her. He is so broken she wants to cry. She can’t see what is ahead for him. She takes this to mean his fate hasn’t been decided yet. She puts down the letter, holds it on the step below her with her foot, and reaches for his hand. She feels him stiffen, unaccustomed to her touch.

  ‘I’m all packed,’ she says.

  He nods and looks down at the letter. ‘What does she want?’

  ‘She wants me to go and visit.’

  His hand twitches and she senses retreat in him—he wants to go back inside the house and stare at their possessions all packed up in boxes. She holds his hand tighter.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ she says.

  He turns towards her, shakes his head, half a smile on his face. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘of course we will.’

  The sky is tinged mauve. The leaves of the gum trees play in the twilight breeze. The same soothing breeze brushes her skin. Her father reaches up and strokes her hair

  Cassie moves closer to him and rests her head on his shoulder. She won’t visit her mother. The pain is too acute. She might write back. She hasn’t decided yet. Once, she would have consulted her cards, waited for a dream to tell her what to do. But, now, whatever happens will happen.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to the Australian Society of Authors who through its Mentorship Program gave me the wonderful Judith Lukin- Amundsen to work with. The ASA Mentorship Program is supported by the Copyright Agency through its Cultural Fund which is awesome. Writing is a solitary task and writers band together like desperate travellers. Thank you to the members of Writers and Critters and Joyce Finn our mother hen. Thank you to Cathy McLennan and Flo Bridger for coffee dates and writing support over the years. Thank you to my biggest fans the Pocket Book Club who will finally get to read my book. Last but not least, thank you to my family who were never really sure what I was up to when I disappeared into my head.

  About the Author

  Kathryn Gossow is a writer and sometimes gardener living in a two-acre garden in a pocket of the Brisbane River. When she is writing, her garden is a mess. When she is gardening, she forgets to write. It seems she cannot have both. She writes for that elusive feeling when she gets into the zone and there is nothing else in the world but her and the words that tumble onto the page. Kathryn has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won a commendation in the Australian Horror Writers’ Association Flash Fiction Competition and has a number of published stories out in the world.

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