One night when Cassandra was six hundred miles away from home learning to be a grade school teacher she left her living room, her new boyfriend, Paul, her roommate, Cynthia, and the TV to look at the philodendron on the kitchen table.  Even though it was Cynthia's, she liked it and felt they were friends. 

             She went to get her Polaroid to take a picture of it, but it was out of film.  She got her tablet and red school pencil and drew it instead.  With shades of gray she tried to render the dark greens, the light greens, the shadows of the philodendron exactly.  It was taking a long time, long enough that Paul and Cynthia had begun talking, had turned off the TV, were getting out their guitars and playing.  Cassandra enjoyed shading each leaf softly, trying to make it pliant.

             Paul and Cynthia were singing Spanish love songs.  Cynthia, with her greasy dark hair and large breasts, was studying Spanish and loved the Latin culture.  She liked to click her fingers and kick up her black leather pumps, trying to reach the drooping pears of her rear end with her heels.  Cassandra was glad they were having a good time together.  That way she could draw.

             On the walls in place of Cynthia's Mexican hot pads and leather paintings, there were sprigs of ivy--short, nearly bare sprigs--in the dream kitchen she was drawing.  She would like running her hands through them.  She would like the way they flapped when she did and for a long time after she did.  She imagined that one day while Cynthia was spreading Cassandra's jelly on the table and her toast, the ivy vines, with their infinite power to grow and struggle and push ahead, would wrap themselves slowly around Cynthia's throat as she ate piece after piece of toast, and when the jelly was gone, Cynthia would be trapped at the kitchen table with nothing but dry bread.

             But then Paul and Cynthia said they were hungry.  They wanted popcorn and chips and Pepsi.  Cassandra said she would go to the store.  It was only a few blocks.  She could walk.  Paul told her to get dog food for his dog and plant food for the philodendron.  There was a special on dog food at her store, he had read in the paper.  It would be foolish for him to get it at his store.  And the plant was probably lacking nitrogen.  No amount of attention would improve it until the essential minerals were replaced in the soil.  

             Because she lived in the desert now, when Cassandra went on walks this was what she did: she looked for houses with lawns in front.  When she found one, she stopped and waved her hands--swish, swish--over the top of the grass.  It flapped when she did and was wet and green.  Often, like tonight, a dog would begin barking, and, not wanting anyone to see what she had done, she would leave.

             At the store she felt like a rodeo cowboy in her baggy butt overalls as she maneuvered her shopping cart down the aisles.  She remembered going down the streets, down the freeways, down the coast of California, over three thousand miles of driving last year trying to decide what to do next.

             "What are you looking for?" her mother had asked rhetorically. "Plant food, where the hell's the plant food," Cassandra told herself.  She found the dog food, the plant food, the popcorn, the chips, and the Pepsi.  Then she stared at the plants growing in the fluorescent light and the packages of seeds.

             At the checkout stand she watched an old woman crowd in at the check stand next to hers.  The woman looked up with a grin that pulled apart wrinkles like drapes across a window as she shook an apple at the cashier who refused to see.

             "Hee, hee, hee.  Here, here, my apple.  Got an apple," the old woman said and laid out a dime from the hollowness of her soft, frayed coin purse.

             The clerk shuffled through the charts to find the cost.  "Five and two-thirds ounces, baking apple," she read from the plastic card.

             "What's price?" the old woman said.  "What's price?"

              Cassandra could see the lines of the woman's face stretch all the way down her neck.  She envied her.  All she needed was an apple.  Cassandra would be glad when she was old and wrinkled and didn't have to be concerned with anyone anymore.  She wouldn't be expected to be.

             "I'm not going to bake it, I'm just going to eat it," the old woman confided to her hand as she flashed her dime around.

             "That will be thirty-five cents," the checker punched out.

             The old woman began to shout, "Dime!  Only have dime!"

             The checker started to take the apple.  The old woman would not let go. As Cassandra looked at her change, confused by the possibilities, she saw a man in line behind the old woman slip the checker a quarter.

             "Ee, ee," the old woman said as the checker handed the apple to her, and Cassandra was even more pleased that this, too, might be the ending of her future.

             As she walked home, she looked at an advertisement for bedding plants.  Bedding plants were going for a price she could afford.  But if she bought the plants, if she planted the plants, she couldn't go home to California for Christmas vacation.  The stalking sun would leave them lying dead at her doorstep.  Cynthia couldn't do the watering; she would get sun poisoning.

             When Cassandra realized this, she hurried home to draw more ivy for the kitchen walls because she wanted very much to go to the ocean, to stand alone in the space between the rock cliffs and the cold, crashing water.  There would be trees and soft, flowering bushes, and the water would be thick enough to hang in the air.  At the beach there would be fog, and if she reached her arms out far enough, she could wave her hands and not see them swish anything at all.

 

             The only way she could sleep now was to put her hand in her crotch.  It rounded her out, she felt.  After she arranged the ribbons down the front of her nightgown and across the bed, she folded her nightgown into a place for her hand between her legs.  When the chuckling in the living room stopped, and Paul came to bed, she turned her back to his crotch.

             In the morning, after she repacked her night things and straightened the bed and the long, white dog hairs that were on it, she went home.  Her impression of going home was this: trash.  This morning when she went home, the kitchen garbage can was in the bathtub.  Cynthia had put it there, underneath the faucet, on Friday.  It was Sunday.  Cassandra took the trashcan back to the kitchen then took a shower.  She walked out of the bathroom thinking her own name should be "Chinaberry"  today--something round and wrinkling.

             In her room she found two postcards from her mother who loved her from Hawaii; a note from a friend who enclosed the Zippy comics, ticket stubs, and mustache hairs he thought she needed; and a letter written from a purple sluish of diarrhea.  That's what it said: "I was driving up north when I was attacked by a purple sluish of diarrhea."  It was signed by the father of an old high school friend.  She put the letters inside a green Saks Fifth Avenue bag her mother had given her.

             She got out her textbook and class notes to write a lesson plan.  "Cassandra Corbin Cole: Sentence Structure for Fourth Graders," she typed then lay on her bed.  The friend wanted to tell her about Devo Teddy Bear he said right before he signed, "love."  She didn't know what he meant.  She put her hand in her crotch to reread his letter.  It made her feel round.

             She couldn't sleep now without her hand in her crotch, even though it was embarrassing, rolling over, bringing out the hand, red and crushed, when Cynthia opened her door, peeped in at her napping.  Cassandra would look at the red hand as it lay hot on the pillow then tried to support her, or to be useful, to indicate things, answer questions.

             If Cynthia came in today holding a pan of burnt spaghetti or a torn bra, the red hand would point and say, "I took the trash can out of the bathroom.  It's back in the kitchen now.  It's empty.  It's ready.  I'm sorry, I wanted to shower."  It would be a slapping hot fish, fingers stuck together into limbs, into a solid slapping body, red scales, red layers inside.

             Cassandra slept and dreamt she was standing at her green lab table in high school science class.  For their project everyone was given a fish, a small gold fish, but she got a chunk, seven inches long, of a big red fish placed in her hand.  As the others examined their fish, she measured her section noting that it was four inches thick.  She wrote and they wrote the external dimensions of their fish.  They searched and she searched for the line of digestive organs running through their fish.  She filled out her study sheet realizing that the others could know, but she could not know, what was on either side of a fish.

             Then in her dream she was the fish, swimming in a snow-melt lake.  People cheered as she swam past them then farther out until they stopped watching.  She was swimming fast, faster than she ever had.  But then she stopped swimming and was still going fast.  She was going toward the rocks and fallen trees that dammed one end of the lake before it fell over the edge and became a river.  She tried swimming strongly away from the branches of the trees and could not.  Finally she realized that though she could not move, if she stayed calm and kept swimming, it was peaceful in the little noises of the cold water and she felt strong.

             But then someone in the dream took the fish in his hand and lifted it.  He stroked the fish, chuckling, and in his hand the fish turned round and wrinkled into a ball.  Inside the ball were the secrets of the red fish.  Inside the ball was a dark space shaped by deep wrinkles, and the fish would not be a fish.  It would not lay flat and open in the hand.  It wrinkled around itself like a bug hiding its soft underside.

             The dream ended, and she woke up remembering herself in kindergarten during naptime when she lay by the open schoolroom door.  Little flat bugs walked by, and she stroked them into balls and kept them until recess when she put them back under the ivy where they could hide away.

                       

             One day Cassandra read in her mythology book about the Greek sea nymph Tyro.  One of three thousand daughters of a Titan sea god and goddess, Tyro had been immortal but had died along with the culture, which created her.  That was sad, Cassandra thought, sadder than a mortal death perhaps.  Mortals expect to die; they spend their lives preparing for it.  Tyro though--illusive, playing in the heaven underwater--was caught surprised.  Unselfishly acting her role, what could have prepared her for her end, even if she died slowly over the centuries, during the fall of the Greeks, the rise of the Romans, their fall to decadence and Christianity?

             She pictured Tyro's curving, sea-dancing body left dry by the water receding from the square farmlands of the Middle Ages.  There was nowhere for her to go.  Where do the immortal go when they die?  The mortal, they are made of energy, and that goes on.  It is nothing for them to die, especially in the abstract.  Death is only final for those who remember.  But the immortal, they are made of less.  Their death is permanent.

             She wanted to reach out to Tyro, to call her back.  Her stories would be those of sea pranks and innocence, the fears and flirtations of the pristine.  Hopelessly Tyro had pursued her beloved--a patient river god transformed by the jealous Poseidon into a restless, blue-gray horse.  Twice a day when the tide rose, she met him as he rushed toward her, nearly overwhelming her, before she was helplessly returned by the currents to the floor of the sea.

             She longed to tell her students the legend of Tyro.  Perhaps they, in their foreign culture, would cling and remember.  Perhaps they would imagine her, give her a fishtail body swimming out of their arms.  Perhaps Tyro's frail, immortal life could be sustained a few moments longer.

 

             One evening Cassandra stayed late at school taping the students' bright animal pictures on the milky green walls long after everyone had gone. 

             It used to be fun, she thought, sailing. 

             They used to sail to the tropics, the islands.  Once when they got to the Arctic Circle all the animals were there.  There was so much black and white and blue and green that it was almost colorful, though not like the jungle they went to.  They used to visit all the animals.           

             "What kind of day is it?" the children asked them.

             On a good day the fish answered, "Lightly slanting patterns.  Mild vertical drifting."

             Every night when she went home to her house by the wharf and sat at her kitchen window surrounded by red geraniums and red gingham curtains, the people went away and all the sea animals came, pelicans and sea gulls and sandpipers, seals and sea lions.  Sometimes fish came, fish from far out at sea, the colorful tropical fish.  The animals came to the edge of the water or sat quietly on the rails of the pier.  There was no sun.  It was cool and gray.  The fish talked among themselves. 

             "It's trying to be winter," they said.  "It wants to be winter, but it's not time yet, so we are here instead."

             The fish stayed calm against the drifting curves.

             But now the animals were unidentifiable.  They were a mishmash.  They had no shells.  The red crabs and the other animals surrounded her, but they had no shells.  Only the red meat remained.  She had wanted to live on the houseboat moored in the harbor, but now it was drifting away.  She could see its silver windows shining darkly, but it was drifting away.  The wood had gone gray, the gray was lost on the gray sea, in the clouds and the coming night.  Outside her window was the harbor, but she was inside and the boat was far away.

             She stopped staring at the pictures.  There was not time to finish putting them up today.  The pictures could wait.  The story could wait.  She could go home.  She turned off the light that shined on the pictures and the green walls, and then they looked black.

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