The Cassandra: A Novel by Sharma Shields

Author:Sharma Shields [Shields, Sharma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Fairy Tales; Folk Tales; Legends & Mythology, War & Military
ISBN: 9781250197443
Google: Z59aDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07CRDCC1C
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2019-02-11T23:00:00+00:00

1945

WEDDING DRESS

The holidays came and went, and those of us who stayed at Hanford, the vast majority, as it turned out, worked long, twelve-hour shifts but were then treated to exciting events by the commissary, boxing matches and variety shows and even a circus troupe. On New Year’s Eve they fattened us with endless flowing beer and heaping plates of food, ham and biscuits and gravy. I ate so much that the top button of my skirt popped off, and I had to hurry back to the barracks and repair it before the dancing began. When I returned, I danced with Tom Cat. I tried flirting, but I wasn’t very good at it, and neither was he. He seemed distant and sad. He was, unlike me, homesick. He said he wasn’t feeling well and when he left early I decided to leave, too.

That evening I dreamed I was in a chapel, standing next to Tom Cat in a dark wedding dress; it dripped with a wet, heavy liquid. Tom Cat briefly put his hands on my hips and they came away stained with blood. He lifted his palms to show me and beamed proudly. It’s wonderful to have our child right here, he said, and the audience watching us broke into applause. I looked for our child but there was only a dark spider on the floor, circling a pool of blood near my feet. In the front pew sat Gordon, and next to him, radiantly beautiful, was Beth. She dabbed at her misty eyes and mouthed, Lover’s leap.

I woke remembering that red was the color of love. It wasn’t necessarily a nightmare, I told myself, although the unease of it dug into my bones, swelling my joints. It seemed inevitable to me now that Tom Cat and I would be married. Think of it as a good thing. This is what upstanding young women do, marry, have children, domesticate. I’ve been told so my whole life. He would be as good a husband as any.

Later that day, when I saw him at the mess hall, we shook hands in a jocose manner and my right hand came away wet. I turned it over. My palm was smeared with blood.

“Mildred,” Tom Cat exclaimed. “You’re hurt!”

His own hands were as clean as a newly washed sheet. He retrieved a wet rag from a waitress and used it to wipe the blood from my palm. There was a gash across the entire pad of my thumb, shallow but long.

“I must have cut it,” I said. “I must have sliced it on something.”

On my dream, I thought, and I shivered.

“Must have been my own bones,” he said, and laughed, and I laughed, too, because there was something true to that, really. He pressed the rag to my palm and went with me to the clinic, where they wrapped my hand in gauze.

Beth walked by as one of her colleagues attended to my hand. She carried a pile of clean sheets.

“What happened?” she asked, pausing in the doorway of our examination room.

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