Cassandra
Photo by Elina Krima from Pexels
Nov. 11, 2020
Cassandra came back tonight.
I stopped writing early because my hand was acting up again. The doctors warned me before I came out here the damp from the ocean might cause all the old breaks from 13 years ago to hurt again, and so far they’ve been right.
I transcribed an hour-long interview I did with an expert on gender presentation in America, but I had to stop for the day afterward.
“I’m surprised you have service out there Edward,” she said to me at the end of the interview. “I read that story about how you’re writing this book from a rock off the coast of Washington in the cockpit of that old blimp.”
I assured her I had cell phone service and internet access in the blimp. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to now has brought up the whole best-selling-author-moves-to-isolated-tiny-home-made-from-blimp headline. Morrison loved the idea of me pulling a publicity stunt like this. I needed to do it for myself.
I didn’t actually see Cassandra tonight but I sensed her and heard her. Citrus shampoo and the click-clack of high heels on the blimp’s metal floor outside my office.
I didn’t go looking for her. She’s just a ghost who comes back sometimes, nothing more.
I took a sleeping pill tonight and it’s starting to kick in. The doctors also told me lack of sleep could be dangerous.
Nov. 14, 2020
Morrison sent me a few old newspaper clippings about the blimp and reminded me to give updates on Twitter, like the agent he is. Nothing is certain except death and public relations.
The newspaper clips he sent were interesting though. The blimp had gone missing during a mission for the Navy in 1943, looking for Japanese submarines. No one ever found the bodies of the officers piloting it, and, for a while, no one found the blimp either.
It showed up a year later and made a perfect landing at the base it left from. No one was on board.
The Navy wasn’t quite sure what to do with it at the time, an airship they thought would never come back and had written off as lost. It came back unbidden. The Seattle Times ran more than a few stories on it, apparently.
Cassandra left some eyeliner and a mascara brush on the bathroom sink. I wanted to touch them but I knew I shouldn’t.
My hand was hurting again today.
I took two sleeping pills tonight.
Nov. 19, 2020
I woke up last night to Cassandra’s knee in my chest and her fingers in my throat. She wanted to possess me, to have my body, to be me. She’d done this before.
I thrashed at her and came up against the silk and lace of a dress I remembered from 13 years ago. My fingers snagged a new hole in the dress, something I hadn’t remembered from when I’d worn it. In the blackness, I clawed against her nose, her hair, her bared teeth.
I needed to get her off of me, away from me.
I was able to roll out of bed in a tangle of sheets and hit the light switch.
She was gone.
Went to the bathroom for a glass of water.
In lipstick, on the mirror, she’d written I DID NOT DIE ON 5/25/2008.
She did though. I killed her.
Nov. 21, 2020
Had to nail down a panel on the blimp’s cockpit after last night’s storm. I used a claw hammer and I didn’t like it.
I still remember my dad, drunk, hammering my hand 13 years ago, on May 25, 2008 with a claw hammer. I was 15. He broke a few of Cassandra’s bracelets because, after a while, he was just pounding away at my arm, the words “faggot sissy bitch” dropping from his lips, slurred and whiskey-soaked.
He told me to kill that part of myself.
I lied to the doctors about the breaks and I think I’ve lied to everyone else about it too.
Cassandra took some photos of me while I slept. I found them on my phone this morning. She does shit like this.
Faggot sissy bitch ghost.
Nov. 24, 2020
Cassandra’s getting closer. I finished work for the day, turned off the laptop, and saw her in the dark screen behind me, just over my shoulder. She still had that choker necklace, which was always my favorite part of what she wore.
She’s still 15; I can see it. I sucked at makeup back then, and you can tell, looking at her.
She still wants to be me, and a part of me still wants to be her.
She’d vanished by the time I turned around.
I popped a sleeping pill and I’m starting to feel better.
Nov. 25, 2020
I really need help. I didn’t think Cassandra would come back, but she did and she’s in the hallway outside my office and has been for hours. I can hear her pacing back and forth.
Click, click, click in those heels.
The doorknob just turned —
Nov. 26, 2020
My name is Cassandra Evans. I did not die on May 25, 2008 despite my dad telling me to kill myself.
Sometimes I go by Edward.
Ethan Szarleta isn’t a starving artist, but he does need food badly. He lives in Boise, but grew up north of Denver, was doomed to be a writer from a young age and has been on the losing end of that tumultuous relationship ever since. While he wants to examine the American criminal justice system through the lens of science fiction and horror, he understands other people do that as well, and is ready to quit writing about it at a moment’s notice if the concept becomes too popular.