Banshee by Rachel DeWoskin

Author:Rachel DeWoskin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dottir Press
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

I WOKE SHELLACKED IN MY OWN freeze. Pure black. Nothing from outside, so night, still night. The sound of wind oozing, slow and cold, branches against the skylight. I took more stock, groped around in my mind: Charles?

I scrambled to remember where he was, why not in bed. Yes, because Leah, because my whatever-this-was leading up to my surgery. Surgery! I sat up. Cancer! What! Something—terror, maybe—was puppeteering me.

It drove me from bed and out onto our deck. It was nighttime, those hours so long that fear made me prowl them, looking for something that wouldn’t be visible even if it were lit. Unable to bear the blank dark, I opened my phone and fell again into links, following one meaningless dot to the next until I felt full and sick, as if I’d devoured straight fast food, fat, and flour into my brain.

I wanted to try to be more like men, or some men—my colleagues maybe, or Charles or his father. In other words, to care less who thought what of me. Here, you hate me? Fuck off. You think it’s shameful that I’m sleeping with one of my students, that I ran the clock out on patience and affection and appreciation for my husband? That once I thought I might be dying any minute, dutiful love seemed suddenly not enough, not exclusively anyway, not forever? You think I’m shallow, merciless, ruined, vain, a shadow of some other, better version of myself? I’ve thought so first. There is nothing anyone can think or say about me that will be crueler than what I’ve thought, whispered, even repeated like mantras. Try to criticize me more harshly than I criticize myself—I dare you. You can’t possibly succeed.

I used to believe in the fundamental empathy of all people and to think that empathy was the most important ingredient, not only for a decent life, but also for any reasonable writing. But what if I’ve been wrong, and brutality works too, in both life and writing? Maybe all the mansplaining I’ve endured over a career of being dutiful has paid off; I’ve learned to be more entitled and selfish. I am working on unapologetic.

A fingernail of moon was scratching at the sky. I said the word stop over and over until it filled my mind and drowned out both my thinking and the night noise.

Once my mind was quiet, I decided to climb over the wrought-iron railing of the balcony to see what it felt like—a trapeze, maybe. I lifted my legs up carefully and sat, then swung my legs, after which I turned onto my stomach, feeling the wet bar across my hips and imagining I was an aerial artist, high above a ring with people applauding below. I let my legs dangle, now behind me, over the two stories of our house.

If I fell, I’d probably break some bones, but not die. Our bedroom was only on the second floor, although we had high ceilings, so I might have been twenty feet above the ground.

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