The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  I half-listened, half-levitated. Her anger filled me with power and she couldn’t even see it, how my feet floated a few inches above the river rock. In the sky, the gathering clouds were the same absent gray color as the stones. She turned away from me, disgusted. I recalled the faraway look in Father’s eyes when Mother mocked him. When she finally left him alone, he would glance at me, smile, offer a sour joke.

  I missed him.

  It was not intentional when I did it, when I lifted the flowers overhead and then brought the blossoms down—smack—hard across the back of her skull, but the gesture was heavy with import. She reached up with a yell, clutching her head, teetering there on the patchy rocks that fell in a drunken stairwell toward the water’s edge, and for a moment I clutched her shoulders and sensed how I cradled her very well-being in my hands, and how, if I pulled her to me, she could continue mostly uninterrupted in her tirade, and how we might still be able to laugh this mess off one day—the time crazy Mildred ruined everything and hit Mother with flowers, ha-ha!—and I held her steady for a full moment, considering, but it was so painfully obvious to me that nothing would change if I didn’t let her fall, and Push her, push her, even the wind through the aspens whispered it, and I acquiesced, not with a violent shove, but with a gentle letting go.

  Yes, that’s what I did; I gentled her into the water. Gravity finished the job for me; she toppled down the bank. Tangled into a senseless knot of noise were the splashes, the hollers, the groans, the cracking open of bone, the struggling, and I scurried away from the river even as my sister, unlikely heroine, came sprinting over the lip of the shadowy hillside—her silhouette bleared by my own terror—and raced, shouting, down the slope, shooting past me into the shallows with more speed and grace than she’d ever before exhibited. Now I could only sit and watch as my sister and mother wrestled each other onto the shore. I lowered myself onto the rocks, hugging my legs, and made myself very small. I waited.

  I didn’t mean to hurt her, I babbled into my knees. They were good-smelling knees, dreamy with baking soda baths, and so smooth, like an innocent girl’s. I only wanted something to change.

  SKULLS

  Beth told me later: I fell to the ground, thrashing. She put her comb in my mouth to keep me from biting my tongue, but I thrashed and wept and stammered in what felt to her like a scarlet rage. Kathy shouted, She’s lost it, she’s possessed, and Beth screamed at her to shut up. Other women had poured into our barrack, summoned by my bloodcurdling shriek, and they stood over us, mesmerized, while Beth urged them away.

  “She’s seizing! Give her room.”

  When I returned to my senses, Beth had a cold compress to my head, one of her own blouses dipped in icy water, and my lips felt dry and cracked, my gums sore from gritting the comb.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I managed, and Beth stroked my hair and hushed me.

  “You need to sleep,” she said. “You’re spent.”

  “And Kathy?”

  “I’ve sent her away. She won’t bother you tonight.” She waited a moment, then asked, gently, “Is this like the sleepwalking, Milly? Has this happened before?”

  I was baby-weak, snuggled up against my friend. I shook my head and closed my eyes. Nasty fits, I remembered my classmates saying, but that was long ago. Beth leaned over me and pressed her lips to my forehead.

  “Rest, sweet girl,” she said.

  I had a memory of Mother then, bringing me chicken broth in bed when I was a sick child. The rattle of the saucer on the plate, the salty meatiness of the soup; I tasted that good, warm liquid as it coated my sore throat. Mother sat with me on the bed while I sipped the broth, gently raising the saucer to my mouth. She, too, had stroked my hair and kissed my forehead, and then she’d departed with an affectionate look, urging me, as Beth did, to rest.

  It was possible it had never happened, that I was imagining it wistfully or in reverse, that maybe I was the one who had brought broth to her, that I had been the one to nourish and succor. I was confused. Beth wrapped me up in blankets.

  I was nearly asleep when I heard a voice say, “Is she all right now?”

  “Kathy, I don’t want you here. You trouble her.”

  “Is she sleeping?”

  “Are you deaf? Please leave.”

  “If you knew what was good for her, you’d send her home.”

  If Beth communicated anything to Kathy then, it was silent: a look or a gesture or a push out the door. Starlight and comets streaked across the fabric of my eyelids; a warm summery darkness cushioned me. Other women shuffled in and I listened half-present to the sounds of undressing, the bodies sliding in between the sheets and pressing onto the cots. People whispered to one another, a gentle wild noise, wind through the aspens, and I fell asleep with the feeling that they weren’t talking about me at all but of some other wretched soul.

  * * *

  Later—an hour? several hours?—the vision prodded me awake and urged me to rise. The same swampy, heady sensation fell over me, the one I always had during a vision, the sound of invisible wings in my ears. The weight of it took hold of me by the armpits and pulled me outdoors. I floated obediently east, through the dimmest shadows of the sleeping barracks.

  I traveled the short distance to the western bank of the Columbia River, where the water whorled along the northeastern corner of the Hanford camp.

  Over the river and through the woods, but there were no woods here, and my consciousness blinked in and out. I stumbled forward lazily, drunkenly.

  The wings shuddered and the pressure around my chest released. A great blue heron materialized on the steppe—huge, nearly five feet tall—her thick throat like a rope, her shoulders hunched, her legs two pale orange stalks with high ankles like contorted knees. She stared at me ferociously with a round yellow eye and then squawked, trembling, and collapsed into another creature, a pocket mouse. The mouse raced forward and sniffed anxiously at my slippered feet. Then it stretched, accordion-like, squeaking and hissing, now a rattlesnake, firm and sleek in brown and ivory scales.

  Aufhocker, my German grandmother would have said. Shape-shifter.

  The snake rattled its tail but I felt no fear: My visions made me impenetrable. Perhaps sensing my disinterest, the heron returned to her natural form. She preened for me, and I longed to show off my own powers. I ignored the creature and glanced around me, instead, waiting for the stage curtain to draw open and reveal the future.

  The wind, knotted in her dark shawl of glittering stars, crouched with her strong thighs all around us. A few yards away lay the disembodied head of a mule deer buck. His purple tongue hung from his mouth, the heavy antlers and neck mottled with blood. Killed by coyotes, no doubt, or perhaps by a lone mountain lion. When I turned, there was the heron, grooming her feathers with the whetted orange spear of her beak.

  I hunkered on a precipice overlooking the Columbia. The water coursed indifferently toward the ocean, gripped in its basin by the rocky fist of cliffs on the eastern side.

  The heron’s black plumes stirred in the wind. I turned to her, waiting.

  Her beak remained closed, but she spoke to me as loud as a branch breaking.

  Watch the river.

  I watched.

  The water drained away, so slowly at first I wondered if I was imagining it, but then, yes, certainly, the water was leaving for good, as though the basin were no more than a long serpentine bathtub from which an invisible hand had pulled the plug. The shoulders of rocks appeared like dark scabs, thousands of them, and I fought the urge to run down the side of the basin and dance across them.

  The heron lifted her speckled throat and the long feathers on her neck jutted like thorns. Then she cowered and in a deft movement lifted away the hill’s summit, beating her large wings ponderously, swooping toward the desolate river basin.

  I beetled down the hillside after her, recalling how, when I was a girl, I would plunge down the bouldered embankment into the aching cold of the Okanogan River.

  Do
n’t think of Mother, don’t even let yourself, stop now—

  On the rocky beach the heron waited for me. She pointed her beak toward the belly of the riverbed. I ambled atop the black rocks, skipping from one to another, but they shifted beneath my feet. I slipped again and again, trying to gain purchase and failing. I wasn’t annoyed. It was a game, no more, a fun game to play atop the rocks, and when I tripped into the small puddles of water—all that remained of the Columbia—I laughed and splashed. I put my hand against a round stone and was surprised to find it wet, not with water but with something soft and fleshy; algae, I assumed, moss. I drew the substance away like it were the top of a mushroom and it came off in my palm easily, with a little pop.

  The smell was both terrible and good, a burning, like over-roasted meat. I turned the thing over in my hand and stared for a moment, disbelieving, before dropping it at my feet.

  It was the skin of a child’s face.

  The black stone was no stone but a skull, grinning at me fiendishly.

  I examined the other stones, the ones I’d danced across so clumsily and merrily, and they, too, were skulls, and beneath them, trapped in the mud of the riverbed, were the bodies. People of all ages, small children, others stooped and aged. A high-pitched whining started up in my left ear, the tinnitus I suffered during a vision or if I grew too exhausted. I found a woman with her breasts blackened and burned, pockets of flesh half-melted. Around her some of the skulls’ mouths screamed; others were pinned tight, addressing their end calmly as though struck dumb by its arrival.

  “Who are they?” I cried. “What’s happened to them?”

  The wind whipped at me, scolding me, and some of the skulls crumbled into dust beneath her words.

  When I turned, there was the heron, picking awkwardly at the bones with her nightmarish toes. She lifted her head and gazed at me with the gold death-coin of her eye.

  Eventually we must become who we are.

  The heron’s face became a coyote’s, her bright beak a dull brown snout, and the canine face snarled and barked, but the long-necked body remained, a horrific creature winged and feral, a dog-faced bird of hell. My vision blurred. I thought, agonized, Maybe it’s almost over, maybe the dream is ending now, but then the coyote’s features sharpened and receded and the heron’s face reemerged, the black plumes and the death eye and the killing beak. Her voice like a dagger in my ear,

  There is more than one kind of predator.

  The entire breadth of the river was covered in dead bodies. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Another child lay at my feet, cooked and cooled into an onyx stone.

  “So many children,” I said, and the wind whipped at me so that my eyes stung and teared. “How could anyone let this happen?”

  The heron stalked over the empty bed, hunting.

  They are the doomed. They will perish at the hands of the product.

  I shook my head in disgust.

  Better them than you.

  “There must be something we can do?”

  Only the wind answered, throwing sand into my eyes.

  When I blinked and wiped the blindness away, the heron was gone.

  A voice then, sharp, angry. My eyes ached, my body. I was up to my neck in the Columbia, its water, in a thunderclap, returned all at once to the basin. Near me floated the rotting buck’s head, stinking horribly of death, gazing through me with its hollowed eyes. The river took hold of it and washed it swiftly south. It would soon curl west toward the ocean.

  A man stood on the shoreline, waving his hands. “Hey, lady,” he shouted. “What are you, crazy?”

  My gingham nightgown swirled around me in the water. The wind howled at the man on the shore, telling him to leave us alone.

  “Christ,” he hollered. “Hang on!”

  The current pressed against me with a menacing force. I paddled just enough to stay afloat. Beneath me swam thousands of ghosts-to-be. If I swam too vigorously I would stir them awake. Hungry for life, they would grab my ankles, my wrists, and pull me down.

  The current tugged on me, whining. Enough. Come with me, Mildred.

  I was not suicidal, not as far as I knew, but it occurred to me how wonderful it would be to stop thinking, to stop worrying. My muscles involuntarily relaxed.

  There was a splash then, the man plunging into the water.

  “Fight the current,” he shouted, and then he swam hard toward me, big, looping strokes, a much stronger swimmer than I was.

  His arm wrapped around my waist.

  He pulled me back to shore, cursing.

  “Be still. You’ll kill us both!”

  He dragged me from the water and released me to the ground. Panting, kneeling over, he said he’d been walking along the campsite road, heading to an early shift at one of the mess halls, when he heard me calling out from the river.

  “Calling out?” I said. Water ran out of my nose, my eyes.

  I tried to remember doing such a thing but could not.

  He asked me again what the hell was wrong with me. “You gave me a goddamn scare, lady.” Then, more gently, “You okay? You wasn’t drowning?”

  My nightgown, huge, wet, weighed a hundred pounds. I shivered uncontrollably.

  “Sleepwalking,” I said.

  The man threw back his head and laughed.

  “You’re kidding! In your bare feet? I can’t wait to tell my wife about this. She won’t believe it.”

  He pointed to my ankles and I shrank with humiliation, acknowledging I was barefoot, in my nightgown, the fabric clinging to my breasts and the plumpness of my waist and legs, revealing far too much of myself. I folded my arms over my chest.

  I glimpsed the soles of my feet. They were bleeding and blistered as though they’d been burned.

  THE BELL, THE LARK

  If what Kathy said was true, that Beth was friends with me only for selfish, vain reasons, Beth’s behavior over the next few weeks suggested otherwise.

  She doted on me, embracing me whenever we’d been apart for longer than an hour, exclaiming over my general wonderfulness whenever she introduced me to anyone new. She described me as the only honest person she’d ever met (aside from her sister, of course), the only pure and decent soul. I blushed when she spoke this way—Mother would have laughed in Beth’s lovely face, and my sister would have given a dozen examples to the contrary—but it felt miraculous that someone saw me in this way and chose to present me as such to the other good people of Hanford.

  Privately, she worried about me.

  “This sleepwalking,” she said one evening as we sat together in the barracks, each on our own cot, facing each other with our knees almost touching, waiting our turn for supper. “You could have died, Milly.”

  I demurred. I tried to explain it to her, but how do you explain such invigoration, such power?

  “We have to make it stop,” Beth said.

  I didn’t like hearing this. She thought what was right about me was what was broken. “It’s like a gift,” I said. “When I was a girl, things like this happened all the time. I woke up in the morning with such awareness. I see these amazing things, things waiting for us.” I had a habit of picking at my chin as I spoke, and I did this now, but Beth reached forward and stilled my hand. “I thought I lost that part of myself, Beth. The only part of myself that felt magical. But now it’s back.”

  The future chooses me. Warns me.

  “Milly,” Beth said, the light-brown agates of her eyes flashing with doubt. “People can’t predict the future.”

  “But I can,” I said.

  Beth tucked a loose strand of my hair behind my ear. “Please don’t talk about this to anyone else, okay, Milly? Now. Let’s change the subject. I’m famished.”

  She didn’t believe me. I was used to such disbelief; I knew when to stop talking. I used to wonder if eloquence would help me convince someone else, but I was beyond that now. Such attempts were useless.

  Still, I’d never shared a friendship like ours. I held out hope that if any
one were to one day believe me and support me, it would be Beth.

  But that night, after eating, after we combed our hair and put on our nightgowns and drew back the covers, she presented me with a gift.

  It was a pretty silver bell. She tied it to a green ribbon.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Just let me do this, Milly. It’s because I worry for you.”

  I allowed her to knot it around my ankle. She instructed me to wear it nightly, and I agreed because I loved her. I ignored the feeling it gave me, of being a studied animal, trapped. Some nights later, when I stood mid-slumber and slipped from the room, the clear sound of the bell woke her, and she came after me and put me back to bed. This happened again and again. One night she slept through it, but the sound of the bell penetrated my dream, and I awoke outside of the barracks, surprised to find myself walking with my hands raised clear up over my head, as though I were sinking into deep water. I gathered my senses quickly and hurried back to the barracks, aware of my bare feet and throat. I tried to remember if I’d had any vision like the one I’d had of the dead bodies in the Columbia, but there was nothing, only the feel of the sagebrush and sand scratching at my feet and ankles, the persistent alarm of the bell, the smell of the dry air. I didn’t tell Beth about this; she would have grown angry with herself for not rescuing me sooner, and I cared about her too much to serve her even the smallest portion of despair.

  I tried not to feel resentment about the bell. I tried not to loathe the way it quieted my dreams. I didn’t mind the danger. Danger was the necessary ingredient, I sensed, for the vivid visions that ensued. While waking in the middle of the ponderous Columbia had been a shock, certainly, it was far more frightening for the man who had saved me than it was for me. I had tried to explain this to Beth the day after I’d been rescued, but she’d only wrung her hands anxiously.

  “You could have drowned, Milly,” she said. “No, we can’t have this. We need a solution. I can’t have you drowning, too.”