adventures of a tired bookwyrm
thoughts on Subway Canyon
Some places don’t feel real.
Somewhere on the steep hillside, as you scrambled down rocky ledges and slid a little in the red sand and followed the tight little switchbacks of the trail back and forth and back and forth through the scrubby trees, you stepped or scrambled or slid right out of the normal world and into a painting.
The end of the world came as a relief. Like summer breaking, the first crisp wind. For long months now, Mary had despaired of ever having another day off; day after day, week after week, never enough people or time at work and they always needed her. Despite spending her days in the walking nightmare that was retail, so consuming that her own laundry piled up, emails languished, and spider-plant wilted, there was still never enough money to pay bills. Everything was always rolling faster these days, and the only way to hang on at all was to close her eyes and plunge blindly on and on into every morning.
God-touched Cassandra is too far removed from the human race. She watches the Furies flock like birds of prey, whirl like the winds of war, circle the house like a hurricane – and there is nothing she can do. She is burning up with that touch of divinity. She sees the past in ghastly shades, the children’s blood crying out from the ground; she sees the present in vivid hue, her own blood splashed across the altar, the bestial horror of Clytemnestra’s hunger tearing like a dog at the carcass of her lord; she sees the future not so far away, the young man bringing anger and justice. Cassandra, Cassandra, you see too much. The very power has set you, dream-like, just outside the mortal veil. You couldn’t walk away from that altar, from that future, from the death you already felt – the last mortal thing left for you to do.
