A STORY by A.D.
The Vultures
‘I hear your brother is making waves with his new boyfriend,’ Cassandra tells me as she thumbs concealer onto a new purple mark that has blossomed on her neck.
‘He and Pylades are hardly news.’ I flip through the channels on cable, pretend to be engrossed with the newscast out of habit, even though there’s no longer anything that interests me now that the war is over. ‘It’s only that he’s just come out,’ I say. ‘Daddy isn’t pleased about it.’
‘Do you think Helen will judge me if I wear this to your uncle’s nostos party?’ Cassandra pivots to face me. She’s wearing the new dress Dad bought her, its saffron discordant with her pallid skin, her fair hair. ‘She’s always a bitch about other people’s fashion choices, just because she’s beautiful and can pull any shit off.’ She turns back towards the mirror before I have time to pronounce my verdict. Her scarlet priestess underwear stares garishly through the flimsy fabric.
‘You’re fine. And besides who cares what Helen thinks anyway. Dad says she’s just a slut.’
Cassandra starts loading her lower lashline with dabs of mascara. It makes her look like she’s constantly experiencing prophetic visions, even when she’s not. ‘I don’t think your mother likes me very much,’ she says.
‘Mom no longer likes anyone.’ I turn back to the news report and raise the volume up a notch. Some guy was shot and killed on a hunting trip after his friends mistook him for a stag. Another was blinded after a snake bit him in both eyes.
‘I think she blames me.’
‘For what?’ I ask without taking my eyes off the screen. A woman is on trial after murdering her two sons because her husband cheated on her.
‘My misfortune,’ she says, and shrugs. ‘I mean, I can sort of understand her. If my husband returned from a 10-year war with an orphan in place of the daughter he’s killed and imposes her on me, I also wouldn’t throb with joy.’
I give up on the news and turn the TV off, watch the remote bounce once on the bed and then settle. ‘But Daddy is good to you, no?’
‘Daddy.’ She sucks on the word like ache from a rotten tooth, then rubs at her throat as if easing down a lodged bone. She seems to have forgotten about the still-fresh make-up on her neck, which is now smeared with traces of tyrian screaming through. ‘Sure,’ she says, her meaning a hollow void.
Once again I catch her staring at the photo on my vanity table, of Dad on a fishing trip, wearing a net strewn red with fish guts that I had thrown on him, pretending to catch him. Cassandra grazes absently on her bottom lip like a numb lamb. ‘I saw a net like this in your mother’s bathtub the other day,’ she says. ‘It was threaded through with chains and had fish hooks all over.’
‘Probably a decoration for her next summer party,’ I say. I scrape at my ash-colored nail polish and watch the paint come off in flecks, nibble at a hangnail until I taste that metallic sting—it’s a discreet habit I’ve picked up ever since my therapist forbade cutting.
Cassandra makes a noncommittal sound while she dabs wound-colored chapstick onto her lips. ‘I think it was a fetish thing,’ she disagrees.
I try to block the image threatening to erupt within my cranium: manicured hands pushing a fine hook through Dad’s twitching urethra—too late.
‘Mom does like to be in control,’ I concede.
Cassandra picks up my bottle of Grave Dirt perfume and sprays copiously, then sets it down so it blocks the photo’s view of the room.
‘It’s weird that your father sacrificed both our sisters,’ she says.
‘Then it’s a good thing we found each other.’
Cassandra starts to shuffle her oracle deck, her expression growing slack and distant. I hope she’s not receding into one of her mad seizures, which are happening more and more frequently, especially after spending time in Dad’s office for her Greek lessons.
‘How’s the future looking?’ I ask, just to keep her out of it.
‘Bloody.’
The vultures have begun their nightly ritual on the roof again, their clawing getting every day more disconsolate, their screeching growing more strident, more insistent.
Cassandra lifts her eyes towards the noise like a tortured saint. ‘I wish they’d just go away.’
‘They can smell the meat braising in the kitchen,’ I say. ‘They know they’ll be feasting soon.’
A desperate shriek echoes in response to my insight. Cassandra responds with a shrill scream of her own. The scraping stops, then resumes, and she throws herself resignedly onto the bed.
The alarm clock reports there’s still an hour to go until dinner. I absently finger the laurel tattoo on her clavicle, poke the faded yellow spots peppering her breastbone.
‘Do you wanna play with the strap-on again until the guests start arriving?’
‘Only if I get to play your father this time,’ she says, hand already edging towards the nightstand. ‘I’m getting sick of your family always fucking me in the ass.’
a.d. is drawn to the sacred, the profane, the mysterious and the mythological, which provides inspiration for her work. She is an award-nominated bisexual poet, writer, and visual artist, with words published in HAD, Aôthen, Anti-Heroin Chic, REDAMANCY Mag, God's Cruel Joke, HAWKEYE, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, her visual art, mainly photography and self-portraiture, is featured in Occulum, Hominum Journal, Moonday Mag, Antler Velvet, Bleating Thing and other outlets. Tumblr & Twitter: @godstained.