Excessively Melodramatic First Draft of Prose Poem with Heavy Ovidian References

[ursula]

If that title didn't scare you off, nothing ever will.

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Cassandra kneels by the altar and pulls the pins from her hair. It slips from its coil and falls heavy across her back.

In a thousand years, a young man will set a wide flat wine-cup down with a thud and rise from the couch, extracting the folds of his toga from underneath the woman lying beside him. He will pull a poem from his sleeve and read it, laughing: how he slapped his lover and disarranged her perfectly curled hair, how she is still as beautiful as Atalanta, or Ariadne, or Cassandra. Then the girl beside him will yank on his toga, and he will knock over the wine-cup as he falls back to the couch.

Cassandra hears the cup breaking and the company screaming, "Forfeit!" and the girl laughing. Atalanta and Ariadne and me, she thinks. Ariadne abandoned, Atalanta nearly raped by centaurs, and me—- someday, she knows, a hand will seize her shining hair and pull her backward, the altar will crash to the stone floor, she will scream. She sees her open mouth, and behind her the altar tipping, oil falling out of the lamp, silver hairpins rolling into the dust . . . But in a thousand years a poet will stain his second-best tunic with thick red wine because she has beautiful hair.

A thousand years, Cassandra thinks, till anyone can laugh. Why are people so slow to understand?

Comments

[eva-c.livejournal.com]

I rather liked it, actually.

I like all the references to the future mixed with the present (well, past) and although I am pretty ignorant of any deeper meaning, the melodrama is impressive. :)

[glowing-fish.livejournal.com]

I just finished a story about a girl named Cassandra.