Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala

Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala

Author:Marcial Gala
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux


I’m in the schoolyard, it has been raining, that’s why the checkerboard floor is full of yellow almond-tree leaves and there’s a pleasant smell that makes its way into my nose and makes me want to sneeze, and the bust of Martí has a black butterfly resting on his bald spot that slowly opens and closes its wings as if it had all the time in the world. I am eleven years old and a classmate has decided to hit me because I was looking at his girlfriend. I didn’t particularly like his girlfriend, but it was nice to sit near her and watch how her skilled hand drew horses in her math notebook, horses with wings that took me back to Ilios and recalled the wide plains where my brother Hector taught me how to ride horseback, long before Paris turned up with Helen and brought us to our knees. The girl, svelte with swaying hips, a volleyball player, I thought, noticed me watching her and lifted the sheet to show me those palfreys running on the plains of the paper’s parallel lines, and when she smiled, I smiled, just that and nothing else. But that was enough for her boyfriend, hairy, with restless legs that never stopped moving as the teacher tried to get on with the class, and he sent me a sheet ripped from his notebook that said only, “I’ll see you at recess, Spineless, I’m gona cut off your dik.”

I was already pretty dickless before he threatened me.

The bell rings, abrupt as a train whistle moving through the western plains. The teenagers escape the room without waiting for the English teacher to read the Milton poem.

“And welcome thee, and wish thee long,” the teacher says only for me, looking at me with those deep-set eyes, too big for her face, and then she picks up her files from the desk and smiles at me with limitless patience, and since I am still sitting there, looking at her, she asks, in a serious tone, “Did you like the poem?”

“Yes, teacher,” I reply in English.

“You can go,” she says then.

I go out to recess. Athena has promised me that she will no longer be fickle, and that she will fight alongside me. The kid is waiting for me in the middle of the play area with his hands on his hips. He’s tall for his age. I’m the shortest in the class, just barely taller than a fifth grader, and we’re in seventh grade. I’m no match for him and he knows it, but he’s going to teach me a lesson, and the other kids, girls and boys, start to circle around us and one says, “The first one to go hits twice,” and another says, “Let it all out.”

“You hit him first, right there between the eyes,” urges Athena, who is transfigured into the body of Obatalá. “Go.”

I get close.

“Why were you looking at my girlfriend, Spineless, you piece of shit?” he asks, and his voice sounds childish, almost innocent.



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