– CONTENT WARNING: Animal Abuse –
In the mornings — before school — there was always tea. China cups, whistling kettle, hot metal stove. Warm smell of butane, blackened matches, crunch of buttered things. Now there is only steam. It pools on every surface and spit-trickles down black windowpanes, shiny tears.
Since I moved away to a bigger city, I seldom come back home. Only for holidays and the anniversaries of a few people’s deaths.
On dark days, days when she thought there was really nothing important to be done, she had the impression that for women like herself, the world might just keep shrinking down until it was small enough to fit into a shopping list. And then everything would seem to contract, to the point where she couldn’t breathe any more, as if the walls and the ceiling were closing in on her…
There’s nothing less than a relationship at stake, when one opens a package of LED white star lights on green wire from Target, and another opens an identical package, and both get frustrated trying to untangle the strings.
The first casting call was a genesis. I’m sure of it now. I walked into a warehouse on the southeast side of town.
On a whitewashed island in Greece, where the brass church bells chime out into the sea
every evening, there is a slender old woman in a red head scarf who yells out, “Soup! A scoop of
soup!” while banging her tin drum with a ladle and wandering the cobblestoned alleyways.
When it’s my turn to sleep, I dream of a wolf. It follows me around the rooms of the house. I have no idea what it wants with me, nor who is hiding beneath that fur. I wake up with my heart beating in its ribcage; it’s weird, it seems almost like it intends to take flight as if it were a hummingbird. And unfortunately, it’s a heart instead.
“Women can never be emancipated from the stupidity of men.” For MAYDAY, Angelina Mazza reviews Gwen E. Kirby’s remarkable, dark, biting feminist project, Shit Cassandra Saw.
I am lying flat on the ground in a quiet living room in a quiet home in the kind of quiet suburb everyone’s at least driven through, if not lived in. I am breathing deeply, from my diaphragm, like the VHS instructed.
Mr. Z opened the door to a preacher of the One Truth: the man in a hat looked around the room.
