Cassandra Voices

Author: Nance Harding

  • La Petite Mort

    Hannah sat deep in thought waiting for the reception room’s red light to turn green indicating she could open the door to Dr. Dysart’s interior space. She was trying to decide what to talk about – the love bombing or green. Green was her favorite color and had been ever since she had learned the word verdant was a variety of green. As in lush. She was feeling lush and new and full of herself this sunny spring day.

    She had built her vocabulary by acquiring a new word or term every day, employing them with anyone she wanted to impress, and was determined to make an impression on her psychiatrist. Because she was in love. When the light turned green, Hannah inhaled, and turning the door handle, entered his office on the exhale.

    Smoking a Dunhill, Dr. Dysart sat behind the desk he had bought from a New Orleans antique dealer. He smiled and then pursed his lips releasing a ring of smoke that rose and settled above his head like a nimbus. And why not. He was her god. Hadn’t he performed miracles much like Jesus had done for Mary Magdalene, his most beloved disciple?

    “Why you look like a specter today, Dr. Dysart.”

    “I see we’ve learned another word, Hannah. Where did you find this one?”

    Sauntering over to her designated place on the couch directly across from him, she replied, “In some research for my Victorian lit class.”

    “What were you reading?”

    Hannah stood up from her seat and after an exaggerated curtsey, launched into a short recitation of a poem she had located in a nineteenth-century Ladies Home Journal called The Difference:

    Cried the grim spectre Death:
    “Time is a thief,
    Who, with each passing breath,
    Lightening grief,
    Takes from men all their fears.”
    Love merrily
    Laughed, “In a thousand years
    Time robs not me.”

    Imagining herself one of the literati, Hannah reversed her steps toward the couch with an unceasing stare. She might not be rich, but like any woman in her family, she was a reader. So, when she felt his sofa’s dark green damask caress the back of her calves, she asked, “What do you think about that, Doctor?“

    The psychiatrist took a long look at his precocious patient and snuffed out the cigarette in a crystal ashtray. Without leaving her gaze, he walked from behind the desk to take his place on a wingback chair adjacent to the couch. This was one of his strategies for disarming an ego defense.

    He examined Hannah at close range. She was blonde and brilliant. Dangerous only to herself. He knew she was in love. This too was part of his strategy with histrionic patients. Especially a female one.

    Except this time, she did not giggle as she had done before. She stared back at him. And while the doctor settled in for their prescribed fifty-minute rendezvous, Hannah began to fidget with her shoulder bag, which he noticed she placed not beside her, but in her lap.

    “What’s going on, Hannah?”

    “Nothing special.”

    “What’s the fidgeting about, then.”

    Startled, Hannah willed her hands to stop, slipping the right one into the bag on her lap. Her eyes dropped down to fix on the various shades of green spirals in the damask upholstery. Verdant she thought, now letting her eyelids flutter closed.

    “Hannah…,” he whispered into her left ear. On the couch next to her now, Dysart had been waiting for this moment. She was calm enough and would permit him to say,

    “Come back to your body, Hannah.” As he spoke Dysart placed his hand on her thigh. “Come back to the present, Hannah.” She opened her eyes. Looking straight ahead and not at him, Hannah’s hidden hand tightened around the handle of a box cutter. A gift from her brother.

    Dysart’s hand moved up her thigh. Hannah closed her eyes and began counting her breaths as he had coached her to do when anxious. Inhale . . . one . . .two . . .three. . .four.  Exhale . . .one . . .two . . . three . . .four . . .five.  When his fingers reached the sweet spot, he felt her involuntary shudder. Dysart’s warm breath was on her throat before his lips landed there. He kissed the neck, making his way up to the cheek, and she turned toward him, her hand exiting from the bag to embrace him.

    His final kiss landed in full on her mouth. A vital force energy traveled up from Hannah’s second chakra to the third flying right by the fourth. Filling her throat, it formed and then released two words, petite mort.

    This experience of tantric love bombing startled both doctor and patient. Now drowning in Hannah’s wide open green eyes, Dysart did not move a muscle. A nanosecond into it, he could feel the cold sharpness of a box cutter’s blade penetrating flesh just above his carotid artery. “Hannah,” he whispered. “You don’t want to do this.”

    Deep in thought about where she might have heard petite mort, Hannah put the box cutter back into its hiding place without reply. Dysart’s apparent astonishment left her feeling like a mature woman. Casting one last look at the damask’s green spirals, she rose from the couch and strode for the door.

    Heading out of his office, Hannah reminded herself that she must go look up petite mort, and its meaning, in her French dictionary. She also wondered, Should I tell Mama about Dr. Dysart? About the love bomb and how much I love him. Or wait… to bring up in our next session? In the end, Hannah waited.

  • White Woman Brown Heart

    Even the color of my skin belies who I really am.
    Always on the outside looking in . . . even with my own kin.
    Blonde and blue-eyed born into a brown world,
    I came to see myself through their eyes, their skin, their pain.

    White woman brown heart, I am.

     

    I didn’t understand when sister girl said it wasn’t fair
    that beauty and smarts went to someone like me.
    Doors so freely opened were closed to her, I could not see.
    Because sister girl, she looked the same to me.

    White woman brown heart, I am.

     

    Yankee white daddy my mama said is how I came to be.
    They spoke his name first on that fateful sixth year.
    My names were nothing then and they are nothing now.
    Cause I’m a nobody traveling through life on an inner dark sea.

    White woman brown heart, I am.

     

    Tethered by psychic roots running so deep that
    it matters not where I stand on the grid of space and time.
    I’ll never understand the difference between them and me,
    or why we only see what we see in the face of humanity.

    White woman brown heart, I am.

     

    The soul is what bends and shapes what we’re supposed to be . . .
    And that difficult repentance the poet confessed long ago.
    That’s what kept my days from always ending in that dark inner sea.
    And a whispered thank you for all that ever was and ever will be.

    White woman brown heart, I am.

    Nance Harding is a Texan living in New Orleans. As a psychoanalytically oriented consultant, she uses archetypal pattern analysis and creative mentoring to assist adults during critical transitions requiring transformative change.  She writes poetry and flash fiction.

    Feature Image: Marina Azzaro

    If you enjoyed this article you might consider purchasing our new hard copy Cassandra Voices II.

    Become a part of the Cassandra Voices community through a monthly donation on Patreon.

     

  • The Wrong End of Gun Karma

    In the time it took him to close the three yards of separation between us, a well-dressed young man with a Saints ballcap pulled down low was holding a Glock 19 semi-automatic to my head.  I’d been hypervigilant for three weeks after a New Orleans tarot card reader at the Golden Leaves Bookstore divined bad juju all around me.  Misreading the bleeps on my psychic radar, by the time I realized what was happening, it was too late.

    A scant ten minutes earlier, I’d been in a meeting and now was pretending to listen to a Vietnam Vet turned lawyer who fancied himself a lady’s man.  Instead I was assessing each pedestrian on Napoleon Avenue.  It was a self-soothing technique used when on high alert.  Each person was quickly categorized as to safe or unsafe mostly based on their dress and posture.  This inner detection system had been honed on the New Orleans streets for over fifteen years and had never failed; but that was before I understood how easy it is for some to disguise evil as good.

    As I assured myself all was well, I felt a vibration much like the distortion in the audio when a speaker’s volume is turned up too high.  In the nanosecond it took for me to register consciously what was happening, the dapper dressed demon had already closed the space between us loaded and locked and was now shifting his gun from my head to the Vet/Lawyer’s face.  I knew they were both talking because their lips were moving but the information was lost in translation.

    That’s when I panicked.  Clutching my purse close to my chest, I started running away from the lighted street into the darkness of the poorer neighborhoods that exist behind all the old-world charm of uptown avenues.  Hiding behind a parked car, I watched and waited for him to come and find me.  When he did, he put me on my knees with the gun to my forehead so that I was looking up into dark blank eyes.  Smiling, he growled through clenched teeth, “give me your purse, you stupid bitch.”

    Two weeks later he killed a tourist who refused him his wallet.  Two weeks after that he was caught and later tried and convicted for murder and armed robbery.  I’ll never know why he killed the man and not me.  What I do understand is that in the time it would have taken to retrieve a gun from my purse, he would have shot me.  This was the catalyst for the slow and painful process of opening my heart and then changing my mind regarding gun ownership and gun control.

    I suffer no illusions about using guns.  My early life was wild and chaotic, filled with mean and nasty characters much like the ones found in any of Flannery O’Connor’s gothic depictions of the antebellum South.  As a Gulf Coast Navy brat born to poor circumstances, guns were the norm.  The maintenance of the big anti-aircraft guns mounted on the aircraft carriers used in WWII was my father’s responsibility.  Along with the 1950s baby sitter, the television set, those images shape shifted my baby boomer imagination.  My first heroes were President Eisenhower, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers – the good guys with guns.  Mounted firmly on my stick pony firing my toy guns, I passed days of creative play fighting the Russians and other bad guys.

    On my first hunting trip, we came across a mama raccoon and her babies hanging out on a limb.  Encouraged by the taunts of my teenage friends, I took aim and fired again and again and again.  Eight times.  Suddenly, I could hear the high-pitched squeal of a not quite dead rabbit as my grandfather slid a knife beneath its skin.  This Silence of the Bunnies memory mixed with my slaughter made death real and tangible leaving a metal taste in my mouth.  I never hunted again.

    As an adult, working my way through undergraduate school tending bar and waiting tables in 1970s New Orleans, I often found myself in the French Quarter after midnight mixing and mingling with the nightcrawlers and the tourists.  An uncle with mob connections had given me my first handgun, a hammerless, double-action derringer.  His only instructions were if you pull it, you better be ready to use it.

    A New Orleans cop gave me a better idea.  One evening as I stood outside the same Howard Johnson’s where just three years earlier Mark Essex, a dishonorably discharged Navy man had shot and killed seven people, two men approached trying to coax me to their car.  Hey there Baby, need a ride?  With my muff pistol safely hidden in a cheap purse with finger on the trigger, I pointed it toward the two men and firmly said GO AWAY!   As they slithered back into the dark night, they looked back at me saying, Hey now pretty girl.  We just wanted to party.   

    At twenty-six, I already knew killing someone would drive me over the edge.  The lingering guilt of having left that derringer loaded and unattended had been enough to make me rethink my fake bravado.  To be the cause of the fear in my son’s eyes as I watched his seven-year-old friend point it at him, shames me to this day.  As it should.  Just as ignorance is no defense under the law, neither is it with me when taking my own actions into account.

    My progun opinions didn’t change then nor when my cousin used a handgun to shoot herself in the heart after chain smoking crack cocaine for a week.  My uncle had given her a gun too.  I can still hear the hum and hollow whooshing sound of the ventilator in her ICU suite.  In real life, gunshot victims don’t look like they do in the movies.  There is no make-up, no weak smiles, no last confessions; just a physical body doing its best to stay alive with medical assistance.

    There were tubes coming in and out of every orifice plus one for feeding.  Barely conscious with the intubation tube pushing air into her lungs, she stared out of tear-filled slits for eyes.  Looking like she was about to crack wide open like a split tomato left on the vine too long, her body clung to life long enough to recover.  That’s how biological life is – it goes on pitted against death whether the consciousness inhabiting the form is up to the task or not.

    Several years later, I sold my last gun in 1995 after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  I still don’t know why this terrorist act got my attention when a Glock 19 held to my head failed to do so.   What I do know is that for me the differences between owning a handgun, a rifle or a military weapon like an AR-15 are painfully obvious:

    One is for protection.

    One is for hunting.

    One is for killing as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time.

  • Who Needs a Healing?

    In the inner world, time has a way of standing still long enough so you can come to your senses.  Then you can have eyes that see and ears that hear. My Aunt Jewel taught me this more by example than with words. She had no use for words and she wasn’t really my aunt. Mama, a divorcée from Mississippi, had married into Auntie’s Choctaw Indian family one-day shy of my first birthday. At four feet eleven with a heart as big as Texas, I could always count on her for a kind word and a tender voice.  Learning some of the old ways with her taught me that cause and effect can’t always be foretold much less recognized and controlled.

    My earliest memory of Auntie is the first time she took me to her one room church near the Little Cypress Bayou that flows through the Blue Elbow Swamp, eventually entering the Sabine River near I-10 in Orange, Texas.  The church, a tiny clapboard painted white with a piney wood floor and a few benches, was where the beleaguered believers felt they belonged.

    “Who needs a HEALING” screamed Preacher, a red-faced man in black pants and a cheap white, sweat-soaked shirt that encased his gut, revealing a life time of buttery biscuits and sausage gravy.

    “Nancy Ann, I think ya got a fever” Auntie said aloud as her brown hand felt my white face.

    “No mam – I ain’t got no fever!

    “Yes, you do” she whispered as she firmly took me by the arm and guided me to the homemade dais.  Down on my knees I went with the weight of Auntie’s hand on my right shoulder.

    When Preacher caught his breath long enough to notice he had a child to work on, he began crying and wailed, “unless you change and become like this little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  He held up a small bottle of Jerusalem Holy Oil, so all could behold the glorious healing about to occur.  As I looked up at Preacher, heartburn from that morning’s breakfast caused me mistakenly to believe it needed to be healed.

    “Child, do you want to be healed,” he asked while kneeling to better look me in the eye.

    “I think so.”

    The fears that bumped around in my already wizened seven-year-old psyche were very real.   I didn’t have the faith in the old ways like Auntie did.  My pagan mother had taught me to believe in the evil eye and being cursed and such, but not in the hell that Preacher and Auntie did.  To Mama, heaven was a piece of land, a good scotch with a good screw; something that made this life a little easier to bare.  Hell was in between your ears, right here, right now.

    “Child are you ready to confess your sins,” Preacher asked.

    “I think so.”

    “You think so,” he said with a faint smile.

    “Yes Sir.  I think so.”

    “Do you repent of all your sins, so you can be healed?”

    “Y e s . . . sir” slowly slipped from my lips and with that, I was suddenly looking up at the ceiling as Preacher held the back of my head, while making the sign of the cross on my third eye with his oily finger.  Auntie, already filled with the Holy Ghost, was speaking in tongues. My skinny little body began to swoon as it filled with the divine energy.   The room began to swirl, and I fell back on Aunt Jewel who slowly lowered me to the floor.

    “Praise God” she wailed.

    “Praise God” cried the congregants who were no longer quietly singing and humming along with the makeshift band.  Now they were making a loud and glorious music unto the Lord singing I’ll Fly Away as loud as possible:

    When the shadows of this life have gone
    I’ll fly away
    Like a bird from these prison walls I’ll fly
    I’ll fly away.

    As I lay there on the floor unable to get up and surrounded by all the wonderful beleaguered believers, my heart filled with joy and my nose filled with the scent of the myrrh and sweet-smelling cinnamon used to make the Jerusalem Holy Oil Preacher had used to heal me.  The singing was muffled as if far away,

    I’ll fly away, oh glory
    I’ll fly away in the morning
    When I die, Hallelujah by and by
    I’ll fly away.

    After what felt like an eternity, I was helped to my feet.  Everyone was beaming at me.  Auntie, grinning ear to ear, was hugging me up close and whispering now we got to git ya baptized baby girl.  Now we got to git ya baptized.

    “Yes Lord… I know Lord… Thank you Lord…” Preacher prayed while still on his knees.  His voice just loud enough so everyone could hear he was still conversing with Jesus.

    There was a static electricity in the room.  Every time someone came to hug me, there was a shock.  My hair was sticking out on end the way it does when you pull a sweater over your head in the winter.  But my stomach wasn’t burning anymore, and Auntie was so pleased with me she was promising a Dairy Queen double dip.

    While she was saying her goodbyes, I went outside to stand in the October chill.  It was a clear day with a slight breeze.  Looking up at the sun, I wondered if my heart got healed.  I wondered if a healing was the same as a protection. Mostly, I wondered what if Mama was right?  What if hell really is between your ears, right here, right now?  What then?