The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  I could write, I found, and I enjoyed writing, but my narratives were only figments, never visions. I could write pages and pages and never uncover the future. But I wrote, anyway.

  I didn’t start this. I’m a part of it now but it’s not my fault. This is the plot of men.

  * * *

  In my wing there were only women. The doctors appeared with their devices and threats and we hated them openly. The nurses were even worse. Women treating women horribly is perhaps the most humiliating punishment of all. Compared to the others, I was left mostly alone. The pretty ones, the loud ones, the impossible ones, were prodded and bedded and beaten. Some complained of the rats and of the food, which looked and tasted like vomit. I tried not to frown at these bellyachers or appear too condescending.

  What do you expect? This is womanhood, boiled down.

  Some of the patients believed in their improvement, that they still had a chance at a normal life. They spoke wistfully of a boyfriend on the outside, or of a job they hoped to return to, as if any employer would have them after this.

  There is no normal life.

  The treatments, mundane, sometimes horrifying, served only to distract us from the hopelessness of it all.

  Even then, surrounded by blank white walls, my mind wandered to the people lost across the sea, rivers I helped vanquish, the carcasses immolated. If I settled my ear against the thinnest flesh of my wrist I could hear the hollowness of those dry creek beds. Don’t worry, I mouthed soundlessly into my veins. My death will come, too.

  Some of the women nodded at me respectfully when I passed. More than one asked for permission to touch my knuckles or my shoulders or my short dark hair, as if prodding my features might transfer protection to them.

  Witch, they took to calling me, and there was reverence in their voices, even desire.

  They read my silence and glowering as a sort of power in and of itself. They were envious of the even way I handled the prosaic wretchedness of this place.

  Only now, encased in silence and ignorance, did people accept me for what I truly was.

  * * *

  How long was I there? Three years? Five? I stopped keeping track of time. I’d learned to be fully present. It didn’t matter what was happening. A doctor fingering my cunt, grunting as he peered into me. A nurse smacking me across my throat with a ruler, ridiculing me for my dark expression. The sight of an over-drugged patient slipping into a coma, and then into death. I stared at everything, observing, not judging, this miracle and tragedy, this pain and beauty. I moved slowly down the hallways so that everything liquefied and there was no more than the weight of my bones, the small white ghost of my nose constantly floating before me, such an unappreciated loyal companion, the sound of my breath, the ice of inhalation, the fire of exhalation, the support of the dirty pine floor beneath my slippered feet, firm and forgiving.

  I awoke one morning in my cell, realizing that one of my roommates, a girl no more than seventeen, lay moaning at my feet. I half-rose and absently stroked her hair. Dawn was peaceful now. My mind was preternaturally quiet, my sleep undisturbed. Without a proper tributary, my prophecies dried up and perished.

  I loved the women here because of their collective innocence.

  My roommate mumbled into my knees about what they’d done to her. I comforted her as best as I could, with pats and humming. If I could speak to her, I would tell her not to fight, to curl up, to wait and stay small.

  When the wall of man’s watery hatred hits you, don’t struggle. Go limp.

  Float like the dead.

  Let yourself wash up wherever it takes you.

  I tried to push these thoughts from my palms into her skull and the girl fell silent under the pressure of my hands.

  The door scraped open then, and a raspy nurse’s voice said, “Mildred Groves. Someone’s come for you.”

  The girl started whimpering again, upset with my departure, but I brought a finger to my lips and she quieted.

  I rose and put on my robe and slippers and went into the dim hallway. I had no things I cared about, so I left them behind. I figured they were transferring me to a different place. Or maybe to a clinic where there would be new shots, a different procedure. They liked to experiment on us. I was indifferent. The nurse motioned for me to follow.

  “You have a visitor,” the nurse said. “Hurry up.”

  I was surprised. I cracked my knuckles. No one had ever visited me here. I worried it would be Beth, maybe with Gordon oh God not Gordon not him I’ll kill him, maybe with their child. A few years ago (two? three?), she’d written to say she was pregnant. After that, the letters stopped. I suspected why but I hoped I was wrong: that Gordon had revealed his true self to her. I remembered what the heron had said to me, Eventually we must become who we are. Once Gordon fully owned her, there would be no reason to hide his sadism. She was now too ashamed, I worried, or too beleaguered (too injured?), to reach out to me. I hoped she’d gathered enough strength to get out of there before his wrath affected the baby.

  What if Gordon’s here?

  I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I walked so slowly that the nurse turned to yell at me, “Stop dawdling, Mute! I haven’t got all day!”

  I nodded but did not quicken my pace. I waded through the liquid cement of dread.

  We went down two flights of stairs and through a locked gate, then down the long hallway that led to the building’s foyer. There she stopped, gesturing at a sitting room off to one side, a room I’d never before entered.

  “Go on,” she said. “Your guest is waiting.”

  She turned and left, and I thought, Unsupervised? They hadn’t let me do anything without being watched.

  I went into the little room.

  It wasn’t Beth.

  It’s not Gordon.

  But I was shocked, anyway.

  It was Mother.

  I hesitated, standing in the doorway, staring at the thinning hair of the small woman seated before me, a woman who I’d never before thought of as small. She’d lost a fair amount of weight. She hadn’t heard me enter. She stood primly with her hands clutching the patent leather purse on her lap. She wore her driving gloves. I could make out her thick thighs in their simple dress, the sagging, deeply wrinkled skin of her arms. I smelled the clean scent of the chipped soaps she used for the laundry, and I fought the urge to embrace her, to bury my face in her neck.

  I came forward and put a hand on her shoulder.

  She jumped, and then half-turned in the chair. Her eyes saw me and softened. She made no movement to rise, but she reached up and squeezed my hand tautly, with such strength that tears sprang up in my eyes. I sank into a chair beside her and we entwined hands.

  “Mildred, you swamp rat, you look awful.”

  I reached up and touched my short hair. I hadn’t looked in a mirror in years; they didn’t allow mirrors in our wing, because of the ways we women hurt ourselves with them, but I saw myself then as Mother saw me: pale, turgid, mussy-haired, riddled with lice, a bloated beast with one swollen, bloodshot eye.

  I shrugged at her as if to say, What does it matter?

  “You need a haircut. I’ll see if Mrs. Brown has a good lipstick for you. You could use some color on your cheeks. Here, try dragging this through that bird’s nest.” She opened the latch on her purse and took out a comb. I accepted it and then pulled it through my hair, reluctantly, wincing at the tiny shrieks of the tendrils tearing.

  Mother watched me, satisfied.

  “You’ll look like ten bucks in no time.”

  When I finished, I handed the comb back to her. She considered it a moment, holding it away from her with thumb and forefinger, and then dropped it into a wastebasket.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  My eyebrows raised in horror.

  “I’ve already signed the paperwork, Mildred. I asked for your things but they said you have very little, except for these shoes.” She motioned below the chair, and there they were, as if they’d been wa
iting for me all of these long years, my sensible shoes, the ones I’d purchased during my final, failed attempt at a normal life in Hanford. “Put them on. It’s time to leave.”

  I shook my head. I made the motion of a pen writing on paper, and my mother sighed.

  “What now, Mildred? Can’t you leave well enough alone?”

  But she rummaged around in her handbag once more, bringing out an envelope and a pen. She handed them to me and I could feel the warmth of her curiosity spread as I scribbled. It took me a good few minutes to write it all down. I could hear the cuckoo clock ticking on the wall in the small room, the room with only soft chairs and no hard-edged surfaces. They couldn’t trust us with anything.

  Finally I finished, read it over once, and handed it to her with a look of entreaty.

  Mother read the letter, her lips forming the words in a whispery way I’d forgotten about in the time I’d been gone. The sound of it filled me with memories, a sudden rush of love dazed me. I leaned against her shoulder as she read. It, too, was thinner than I’d remembered. Is she ill? The cuckoo clock burped out a little wooden bird. It chimed the hour and stiffly swatted its wooden tail, reveling in its freedom before being sucked back into its coffin.

  When Mother finished reading, she pushed me gently off her and groaned to her feet. She rose clumsily, her knees clacking. She was aging, she was shrinking, she was turning into a delicate cricket.

  “Well,” she said, tearing up the letter into tiny shreds, “time to go.”

  She eyeballed the wastebasket where the comb lay but then seemed to think better of it and shoved the jagged pieces of envelope into her purse instead.

  I winced. Those little shreds of paper were all miniature white tongues. If they flew back together they would form the bulk of my own truth.

  I could no longer cry out in terror. I pursed my lips and steeled my gaze.

  “Up and at ’em,” she said, as if my words meant nothing.

  She plucked at the sleeve of my robe, trying and failing to tug me to my feet.

  I huffed through my nose and folded my arms over my chest. I wasn’t going to budge for her, not now.

  “This is your one chance at leaving. I’ve been negotiating this for months. If you refuse, God help you.”

  God help me, I thought, and I closed my eyes.

  I heard a shuffling noise, the clatter of purse and keys. I opened my eyes, thinking I’d find Mother with her arm cocked back, ready to swing her purse at my head like a mace, but to my astonishment she was on the floor before me, kneeling with her hands stitched together in prayer.

  “Please. Mildred, get up. Come with me. We want to take you home.”

  I blinked at her, rattled, embarrassed. I had never before imagined my mother in this position, beseeching me in any earnest manner. This had to be an imposter, a wolf in her own clothing, maybe even Gordon in disguise. I wiped a hand over my face.

  “Whatever that note was, Mildred—a confession, an apology, a fart written in ink—forget it. You need to come with me now.”

  I pointed at myself, widening my eyes for emphasis, and I mouthed at her emphatically, MUR. DER. ER.

  I wanted her to understand fully what she wanted, who it was she wanted to ferry home to Omak.

  She flung her arms up in frustration. “Every mother is a murderer, if you think about it. For the love of Lucifer, get up, you dimwit. We’re heading home.”

  I rose to my feet, mountainous, cumbersome, heavy with all of my long years of loss, and she half-dragged me, half-limped with me, out the door of that little room. She carried my sensible shoes beneath one arm, pulling me along with the other.

  If I hadn’t been so stunned, so confused, I’m sure I would have refused her and stayed. But Mother had sprung this on me so suddenly that I wasn’t sure what was up or what was down. Omak now seemed as good of a place as any to spend my remaining days. It was her plan, of course, to startle me into obedience. She knew me too well.

  We passed the front desk with its frowning long-faced nurse and its bizarre statuette of a girl kissing a satyr. The morning light streamed in through the foyer’s east-facing windows, and the effect was inviting if overwhelming.

  When one of the orderlies attempted to assist Mother with the door, reaching for the small of her back as though to press her through the portal, she snapped at him,”Keep your hands to yourself, Bub. We’re murderers. You don’t want to mess with us.”

  He gave an uneasy laugh and swiftly backed away.

  Walter’s car waited in the long, circular driveway, and, of course, Martha waited in it, too, the engine humming. She waved at me nonchalantly from the driver’s seat, as if I was just returning from a quick trip to the hair salon.

  When Mother pulled open the front passenger door, Martha said, “Took you two long enough.”

  I raised a hand in greeting, mouthing with difficulty, Hi Marthie.

  She was fatter, more handsome, and calmer-looking than I remembered. It was a relief to see her. My eyes watered with emotion.

  “You sit in front,” Mother told me, standing back and gesturing at the roomier chair.

  I ignored her and snapped open the back door.

  “Suit yourself, Ferret Face,” she said, and I could tell from her voice that she was grateful for the better seat. Maybe she even thought I’d given it to her out of kindness, out of a sense of daughterly duty, and it was fine with me if she cherished the gesture.

  But it was the backseat I wanted. From there I could watch the world spin to us, I could witness whatever was coming next, the suffocating greenery of Western Washington, the spindly waterfalls striping the Cascades, the opening up of the prairie lands, the muscled, burnished fists of the canyon, the disinterested gray serpent of the Columbia River, the dry, colorless sagebrush steppe, the dip into the valley of my hometown with its neat square houses and its sunsets the color of shame. I could watch and watch and watch with no visions unspooling, only the landscape, the future as unknowable as the meaning of it all.

  From the backseat, I could watch, silently, without terror or judgment.

  I could watch without anyone watching me.

  REFERENCES

  Voices of the Manhattan Project, http://manhattanprojectvoices.org/.

  Daughters of Hanford, http://www.daughtersofhanford.org/.

  “Native Americans Begin ‘Ceremony of Tears’ for Kettle Falls on June 14, 1940,” by Cassandra Tate, HistoryLink.org, Essay 7276.

  “Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) (ca. 1884–1936),” by Jack and Claire Nisbet, 8/07/2010, HistoryLink.org. Essay 9512.

  Hiroshima, by John Hersey, published originally in 1946, available to read on the New Yorker website.

  “Exhibit Chronicles Hard Life for Blacks at WWII Hanford,” by Annette Cary, published in the Tri-City Herald, February 27, 2016.

  “It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” Statement by President Harry S. Truman Announcing the Use of the A-Bomb, August 6, 1945.

  Atomic Frontier Days, by John M. Findlay and Bruce W. Hevly (University of Washington Press, 2011).

  “The Night the ‘Little Demons’ Were Born,” Spokesman-Review article, July 28, 1985, by environmental investigative journalist Karen Dorn Steele, who cracked open the secrets of Hanford’s deleterious effects on the local environment.

  Also by Sharma Shields

  The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac

  Favorite Monster

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SHARMA SHIELDS holds an MFA from the University of Montana. She is the author of the short-story collection Favorite Monster, winner of the Autumn House Fiction Prize, and the novel The Sasquatch Hunters’ Almanac, winner of the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in Slice, Catapult, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, and more. Shields has worked in independent bookstores and public librari
es throughout Washington State. She lives in Spokane with her husband and children. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  1944

  To Make Men Free

  Off to the Movies

  Perfect Women

  Glass Booth

  Termination Winds

  Big Dog

  Your New Girl

  Routines and Dreams

  Skulls

  The Bell, the Lark

  The Green Nightgown

  Save Me from These Cretins

  Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Head

  Jump

  Merry and Bright

  Night of Demons

  1945

  Wedding Dress

  Lovebirds

  Dark Twin

  Speed Up

  Trinity

  King and Queen

  Protection for All

  Rain of Ruin

  Underworld

  Headlines

  Fiendship

  Authorities

  Paralysis

  1946

  An Unexpected Gift

  Congratulations

  Push Off

  Endlessness

  True Love

  The Wall

  The Basic Power of the Universe

  Atomic Shadows

  Afterlife

  Western State

  References

  Also by Sharma Shields

  About the Author

  Copyright