I should be writing a play right now, but due to the pandemic, deadlines feel superfluous.
For a very long time I’ve had this story in my head, in order to make sense of some terrible dreams I’d been having since childhood. I started writing Cassidy Must Die (previously titled ‘Killswitch) in 2014 with the intention of finishing it in 2 years. I also thought I’d run a full marathon by my 40th birthday and that never happened. The reason I’m putting this out now is we’re living in some very interesting times that have echoes in my incomplete novel. The pitch is: As the apocalypse hurtles towards towards us, facilitated by misogyny and hubris, the only person that can save the world is a little, uncoordinated black girl who’s convinced she’s going to die before her 30th birthday; besides death, what’s the worst that could happen?
So, I’m going to upload tiny excerpts every few days until I reach the end of what I wrote 6 years ago. If nothing else, it’s a break from the bleak reality that has become our lives, right? Enjoy.
She’d been killed so many times in her dreams, Cassidy wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. It’s not true, you know? The idea that if you die in your dreams, then you die in real life. She was living proof. And she felt the deaths, felt herself being taken out of the life she was living. Sometimes they stayed in her body hours after waking up, but the worst ones revisited her for months and she’d run her fingers across the place where the wounds left their wispy mark unseen by everyone.
As a kid she’d stand on her head in order to feel the blood rush in and feel slightly altered and not of this banal, boring world. She didn’t hate her environment, she merely found it…empty of real life. She loved to spin and spin and spin until she was so dizzy focusing felt like an impossible task. A sudden collision with the corner of a living room wall followed by twelve stitches to her forehead ended those dervish trips and she was reduced to imagining what it would be like to fly. The half centimeter scar sloped above her left eye and she barely remembered it was there until she caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Her left hand was covered in keloid scars after an airborne hill jump gone wrong in the small forest behind her house when she was 10. She remembers cresting the hill with speed, flying in the air and then nothing as her bike angled funny and she hit the ground losing consciousness. A loner, she woke up to the breathlessness of the forest, full body pain, and a mangled, bloodied hand. It didn’t heal pretty and her hypothetical future as a hand model was destroyed before it started. The scars all over her body raised eyebrows but no questions as people would observe them and wait for an explanation that was never forthcoming. Cassidy always wanted to tell people she’d been in a bar fight, or fallen down a well, but nobody asked. People in her hometown of Parsley are very polite.