2 stories by Cassandra Caverhill
THE SPOILS
Nobody likes a drunk crying into their beer, my mom says. She’s upset with herself for getting emotional in front of friends over Coronas, when she’s inundated by so much shit my sisters’ sling I want to be her Life Bouncer. The problem with being a strong person is that people mistake you for being unaffected. My grandfather used to weep, lachrymose while drinking, playing the saddest Hank Williams songs you’ve ever heard on repeat, drawling, Graaaaaace, you need to hear this, to my grandmother who’d snap, Shut that shit off! Mom’s angry because my father sucks the joy out of life; he always says no,
he argues to resist. She’s adamant he must’ve been a pouty child. Dad sits in front of the TV with a furrowed brow, answering Jeopardy! questions long after I’ve already shouted a response. He is both here & not here. Mom’s childhood dog, Tiny, a beige mutt, disappeared one day with my Great Aunt Vicky. Got driven out to the county & let loose. Nearly 60 years after the fact, Mom does not know if Tiny went to a literal farm or if it’s euphemistic. Grandma has dubbed Mom the Aunt Vicky of the family & I will follow in that lineage. Just the other day, Mom picked up Brea’s dead cat in a shoebox & brought it to the vet for ash. As the makeshift coffin sat in our mother’s backseat,
Brea’s dog sniffed at the window & shook. From my own picture window, I watch a woman carry an abstract canvas down the snowy street. I send off a gratitude letter to an employer that’s “not moving forward with [my] application.” My psychoanalyst wishes to drop me because our sessions don’t have enough heat. I’m healthy, not depressed, anxious, or in crisis and he doesn’t recommend I invent
problems to keep our sessions afloat. I don’t write my dreams & when I do they baffle me. My analyst asks what I desire & don’t have an answer. Maybe I’m afraid of envisioning more than I already have, the guilt of blessings bestowed, while family suffers. Stray cats shit on my lawn, sniff & leave. I dick around with divination cards instead of boots-on-the-ground searching for work, the hours ahead unspooling.
SENTENTIA
At 4 a.m., right on schedule, he drives me, cross-border, to Detroit’s airport for my flight. We pass my coffee thermos between the center console & he sips, quizzing me on stumpers from last night’s trivia match (topic: female singer-songwriters) & I answer them all, handedly. He helps lift my luggage from his hatchback trunk. I stand chilled, my winter coat sloughed off in his passenger seat, & I tell him, for the first time, that I love him. Amanda had wondered if that would be the best moment—before I boarded two planes, alone for a week—knowing my tendency toward aerial views, clouds of overthought. This precise
anticipation: the man I love who’s not a word guy (his words), unless, that is, they fit neatly into numbered boxes, matrices of rows & columns, unscrambling anagrams, riddles. Inside the airport, too-loud pop is an axe splicing my skull. Whitney Houston rhapsodizes, How will I knoooooooooow? & I’m affronted. Mocked. Sprinting from Word Guy’s stunned silence. Did I kiss him goodbye after describing my impending fiery, catastrophic death? The deliriousness of departure sheds details. United assigns me a seat between a couple twenty years my senior; the man offers to take middle, leaving me the aisle. For the entirety of
flight, the woman chatters to herself, to her partner, to anyone in earshot really, like a hyperactive parakeet with a guidebook, noting all they will do & see in Mérida. Noise-cancelling headphones cocoon Radiohead’s “The Tourist” around my soft segments, where it melds moody, Thom Yorke admonishing: Idiot, slow down, slow down. Later, when I land in the Yucatán & send my Word Guy a requisite text, a full moon rises with the sunset shift, as the van cab jumps skittish against narrow, cobbled streets. Graffiti on a crumbling plaster wall imparts in passing, without need for translation, This life is meant for lovers.
Cassandra Caverhill is a Canadian-American poet, editor, and creative writing instructor. She’s the author of Mayflies (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and her prose and poetry have appeared internationally in journals across the US, Canada, and UK. A karaoke and cycling enthusiast, Cassandra lives in the borderlands of Windsor, Ontario. More at http://www.cassandracaverhill.com/
