Online Exclusive: “Let’s Call It Deliverance” by Kelly Lynn Thomas

Kelly Lynn Thomas

Let’s Call It Deliverance

 

One

I know it’s cliché to start with the face in the mirror, but Cassiopeia, how can we begin any other way? Your high cheekbones, arched eyebrows shading ochre eyes, stately nose, and strong chin. Your hair, sometimes blonde, sometimes chestnut, coiled atop your head or framing your face in wavy ringlets. Your small, pert breasts, half covered by diaphanous robes.

            But that isn’t quite right, is it? You, born of Greece, with fair skin and blonde hair? Surely the classical painters got it wrong.

            Back to the mirror: Your high cheekbones, arched eyebrows shading ochre eyes, stately nose, and strong chin. Your hair, raven black, coiled atop your head or framing your face in thick ringlets. Your skin, smooth and dark. Your small, pert breasts, half covered by diaphanous robes. Every detail reflected in the glass, perfect because it was you, and no one else.

            For the sins of arrogance and daring, Poseidon sent the sea monster Cetus to punish you, then cast you to the sky, where you circle the pole star, shackled to your throne. Was it vanity that led you to declare yourself the world’s greatest beauty, or is vanity simply another name for radical self-love and acceptance? Is it hubris to be certain of your own worth, your own value, your own body?

            I cannot imagine Poseidon’s rage surprising you. You were a woman, after all. You walked the earth like the rest of us. You loved and hated and cursed and laughed and raged. You showed tenderness and cruelty and sometimes, indifference. You longed and sighed and dreamed. You made mistakes. You made decisions.

            Tell me, queen of the night, did you mean all along to escape this planet, broken even then, to live among the stars?

 

Two

And here I am in my own mirror, tired eyes and sallow cheeks, unkempt hair and furrowed brow. What do you think of us now? Did you hope for change when you challenged the Nereids? Did you foresee an army of raging women toppling the gods in your honor? Are you disappointed in what we haven’t become?

            I awake every morning in a land where the rule of law means the rule of men, hard-hearted and cruel. They exert control in a thousand ways. They break our hearts and our bodies and tell us it’s our own fault, our own selfishness. They demand and take and want and want. Don’t they see we have nothing left to give?

            But sometimes I dream, Cassiopeia. I dream I could join you in the sky, become a pinprick of cold white light, burning in the dark.

 

Three

What did it feel like to be ripped from this mortal coil and thrust into the heavens? To be torn apart and spread wide, broken into fragments? Do you miss the pleasures of the flesh? Do you miss pain?

            In the dark of my bedroom, I repeat the names of your stars: Alpha Cassiopeiae, Beta Cassiopeiae, Gamma Cassiopeiae, Delta Cassiopeiae, Epsilon Cassiopeiae. But you are more than these five bright balls of burning gas, oh yes. You contain multitudes. The Heart Nebula. The Soul Nebula. Faint stars we cannot see with our insufficient human eyes. Binary stars, pulsars, dwarf stars, even galaxies. What life might those galaxies contain? What coalesces even now in the thick of those nebulae?

            I remember the first night I saw you, blazing in the heavens. My mother pointed out the Big Dipper, and the Little Dipper, and you, the queen on her W-shaped throne. I believed her when she told me the stars could always help me find my way home if I were lost.

            Believe me when I say I am lost now.

 

Four

The sun erases you during the day. We call the sun “he,” declare him a god, name him Apollo, accept that his light is the strongest, the brightest. The stars, farther away, more delicate, have more flexibility. But is the sun not also a star? The metaphor breaks down under the scrutiny of science.

            When you are invisible, I write poems on scraps of paper. I burn them and blow the ashes skyward, but lightyears separate us. Do they reach you? Can you see my lips shaping these words? Can you hear my voice across the vacuum? Can you guide me to a home that doesn’t exist yet?

            Surely you had bards and minstrels in your court, once. You were a queen, Cassiopeia, and your kingdom bent to your whim. You commanded armies. Now you circle the sky, night after night. I know this is an illusion, a matter of perspective. When viewed from the star Alpha Centauri, our own sun, that god of light, would appear as part of your constellation. Science, again.

            I write poems full of broken metaphors in the day, and when Apollo dips beneath the horizon, I wonder. What if you could break free from your revolutions, the endless cycle of turning? What if you had a choice? What if we all did?

 

Five

Revenge and blood and destruction and rage and violence and fire. Vengeance. Do you ever think about these things?

            If I could break the ones who broke me, who left me a stranger in my own mind, a squatter in my own body, would I? Would that rifting make me whole again? Or would it fracture my body into molecules of pain and beauty and potential—a swirling nebula of everything I ever was and could have been? What, then, would I become?

            I know you understand, Cassiopeia, the before and the after. The rending of your being, the singularity. Our lives are made up of these moments, tiny explosions that repeat, some larger than others. Some are supernovas, more luminous than the moon, sharper than cruelty.

If I declare my supreme beauty, will the gods make my nebula body into a star? Do I have to believe the lie for the trick to work?

 

Six

When Poseidon sent Cetus after your kingdom, he forced you to make a choice: sacrifice your daughter Andromeda to mollify the monster or sacrifice your kingdom entire to his rage.

            My philosophy professor—a man—once asked me the same thing. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and combed his beard before each class. He asked, if you could save ten people by killing one, would you do it? To say yes means you are willing to kill. To say no means you are willing to commit the greater sin of moral superiority, with ten people paying the price. To refuse the choice is to show weakness.

            But why ask the question? Why ponder unlikely hypotheticals when we could remake the world? Why not ask, instead, how we can rescue ourselves from ourselves? Our pollution and overpopulation and violence and corruption and greed and shortsightedness?

            Poseidon did not believe in your beauty, Cassiopeia. Your confidence angered him. Of course, his wife, one of the Nereids, was the most beautiful! He could have ignored your declaration, content that his wife was beautiful, that you were beautiful, that beauty is not a finite resource. But he did not, and here we are, singing the same song night after night, day after day.

 

 

Seven

How can I accept my own beauty, when the world tells me I am not enough?

            It’s back to the mirror, isn’t it? The wrinkles around my eyes, the little scars on my cheeks, the gash I keep chewing open on my lower lip. I think of all the men who said they loved me, and meant it, perhaps, but told me too, in a thousand ways, that I wasn’t worthy, not yet. I wasn’t a good enough person, a good enough writer, a good enough woman. But I didn’t change, Cassiopeia. I refused.

            I grip the pen in my hand, hold it to the page. I need to remind myself of the crimson river that rushes through me, the pulsing rhythm of my heart. The fault wasn’t with me—I can see that now, feel it in the air that gives me breath, the earth beneath my feet, the stars above my head. When I see the ink spread on the page, I know this as intimately as I know you.

            Let’s not call it beauty then. Let’s call it deliverance.

 

 

Eight

Of course, there’s one possibility I haven’t considered yet. I can hear my philosophy professor, my ex-lovers, saying, “I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but what if…”

So. What if. What if you proclaimed your absolute beauty out of a sense of insecurity? What if you felt threatened by the Nereids and their connection to the gods?

            I understand why you might have felt this way, and I can’t blame you for it. I’ve felt it too: pangs of jealousy, jolts of shame. Maybe society tricked you into believing the same lie: women only have value if we have beauty.

            We must be beautiful, but not too beautiful. We must be chaste, but not too prudish. We must be sensitive, but if we show too much emotion, we are hysterical. We must be what they want us to be, when they want us to be.

            You, Cassiopeia, rejected these ideas of staid femininity. Even if they paint you now with blonde hair and pale skin, you stood for yourself, and yourself alone. You were willing to pay the price of your refusal, and now you shine in the heavens each night, blazing and brilliant.

 

Nine

I choose to believe in your strength, Cassiopeia. Your strength, your beauty, your vanity, your flaws, your whole self.

            I know what you would say if you were here. You would stand behind me, and I would look at both our faces in that mirror. You would say, “Good. Now choose to believe in your strength. Your beauty.”

            What can I do but listen? I am here, after all, each breath a choice to carry on. To believe in my own beauty and my own strength and the power of deliverance that only comes from within. I choose over and over, until it becomes a truth so heavy it folds in on itself and explodes outward: the first star in a new constellation.

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Kelly Lynn Thomas reads a lot and writes strange fiction in Pittsburgh, PA. She lives with her spouse, one dog, a cat, and a constant migraine. Her work has appeared in Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), Permafrost, Sou’wester, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other journals. Queer, nonbinary, she/they. Read more at http://kellylynnthomas.com.