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First, the shawl of her mother. Dull green, tattered and torn from the countless summers and winters resting on shoulders bearing too much, bowing under the weight of the world and two daughters and loss. The weary fabric now soiled and crimson.
Cassandra drowns the shawl in the sea. Her nails catch and break on the rough stones she dashes the fabric on, the skin of her palms cut and bleeding. The salt stings but the pain is dulled by her frenzied mind. When she pulls the garment out from the water, it drips red. The diluted blood stains her shaking hands pink. She sets it aside, laying the shawl out like the fragile corpse of a seabird.
Next, her sister's beloved cotton dress. She spent hours in front of the mirror twirling and admiring the way the pleats moved. The men adored her, whistling and tripping over themselves to greet her whenever she went into town. Even after her love abandoned her, even when the whistling and adoration ran dry when she came into town rocking an infant, she continued wearing the dress. She ignored what marked her until she lay dying, and those stains finally surfaced.
Clumsy loops and swirls of flowers thrash like cut veins as Cassandra washes. She throws her entire weight into each frantic push and pull. Her body screams, her spine threatening to saw its way out from the flesh of her back. Her arms feel heavy, barely managing to haul the soaked dress up from the water. The stains remain. She whimpers, balling up the mangled corpse of her sister’s pride and depositing it roughly behind her.
The last item in her basket is the hardest sight to bear: a quilt she’d worked on over the nine months her sister carried her niece, and tucked around the girl every night for the six years she'd had her. The thick material sags under the weight of the blood saturating it. Each carefully stitched square weeps blood.
With a choked sob, Cassandra plunges the quilt into the grimy water. The blood won't come out no matter how hard she scrubs, no matter how violently she wrings and repeats. Her hands are numb from the effort and the biting cold of the water. She can't wash away the stains no more than she can sponge away the wounds marring the bodies lying dead inside the old log cabin; The home her father built for his family now their tomb.
Colors swirl under the water. All the shades of red she can name thicken around her raw hands and wrists until it feels like she’s trying to wash clothes in paint. The sun shimmers across the surface, her family's blood shaped and smoothed into precious rubies and garnets. Precious beyond imagination, irreplaceable; the playthings of men far more powerful than some poor girl could ever hope to hold onto.
Jonathan’s flushed face, angry and shouting and betrayed comes unbidden to her mind. His blazing eyes burn hot, the anger coloring his face not the same shade as the water – hungrier than that. The vibrant hue of rose petals left out to wither on the doorstep or the inner core of the inferno which razes the sleeping village and turns bones to ash.
She thought she could contain his rage on the bruises he wrote on her skin. She thought she would bear his marks with her head held high like Mother’s shawl or Annalee’s dress.
Oh, how wrong she was.
How unbearably stupid to think he would leave that which was most precious to her untouched.
If he could not have her love, nobody could.
If he could not have her hand, he would take her blood.
An animal screams off beyond the treeline. The hunter must've caught the creature and begun skinning it while it thrashed and howled within the steel jaws of the trap. It’s only when Cassandra runs out of air that she realizes it was her. She coughs, body heaving as she rips her throat open and wails for her mother, her sister, for her niece who died for another’s petty grievance.
Tears slide down her face and disturb the surface of the water. Cassandra watches the disheveled creature reflected in the red mirror before her distort and reform. Bile stings the back of her mutilated throat. She closes her eyes, unable to bear the sight.
When she forces herself to look again, she finds her reflection isn’t alone.
An unfamiliar woman looms above her. With the gray pallor of her dark skin, Cassandra might’ve mistaken her for a statue or a corpse. Seawater drips off the ends of her hair bound into several tight braids, collecting in the deep well of her collarbone and sliding along the curve of her bare breasts. The stern expression carved on her face holds an unnerving serenity, the passive interest an elephant might show an ant. Eyes like flint spark something low in her stomach.
Something cold trickles down her spine and Cassandra whips around. There is nobody but her. Her breath hitches as she searches the thin trees, scrutinizing every shadow and whisper of wind. The woman isn’t there.
Cassandra doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She’s seeing things now. Her mind was well and truly gone and that almost softened the overwhelming grief.
Almost.
She shakes her head, she turns back and finds herself staring at a pair of knobby knees. The legs attached to them seem to form out of the water, the flesh flowing seamlessly into the dark red sea. Cassandra lets her gaze travel past the rough cloth tied around the woman’s waist and finds again those otherworldly black eyes.
The woman casts a long, cold shadow that settles on Cassandra’s heaving shoulders. Cassandra shivers. She feels like a child – helpless and wandering alone through dark woods. Yet, once the chill settles, it becomes a comforting weight. The winter nights when the fire burned low and her mother gathered her and her sister under all the blankets and held them tight, murmuring ghost stories until they fell asleep.
“Please,” whimpers Cassandra. Her soul speaks for her, a whining thing which claws at the confines of her bones like a dog outside its master’s door. It knows this woman even if Cassandra herself does not. “Please,” she says again.
Wordlessly, the woman slowly sinks to her knees. Cassandra can’t meet her gaze. She turns her face away but ridged fingers take her chin roughly and forces her to look. Her grip is strong as iron, and Cassandra instinctively flinches.
Ask.
The word echoes the relentless crash of waves during a storm, an unbridled force of nature beyond the comprehension of man.
Cassandra draws a shuddering breath. “I want to wash away the blood,” she whispers. “All of it.”
The woman says nothing, only shifts so she can hold Cassandra’s face between her palms. Her skin burns like cold steel and Cassandra shivers but cannot pull away, even as the woman leans forward and kisses her.
At first, it's gentle. An innocent brush of the lips that sends pleasant warmth through her body. Cassandra goes limp under the touch, allowing fingers to tangle in her hair and pull her closer. Sharp nails claw the sensitive skin on the back of her neck and she whines softly.
Then the woman opens her mouth and pain splits Cassandra’s skull like an executioner's ax. She makes a muffled cry, trying to pull away but she’s caught by the hair and the teeth and paralyzed by the disjointed body of screams currently unfurling inside her head. Millions of faces scream, their flesh and muscle melting into a million gaping wounds and mouths spilling more and more blood into the sea. Their suffering crawls under her skin, burrowing deep and becoming as real as muscle and bone.
She knows. Lord, she knows! All these nameless, formless people – what they have, will, and must suffer leaping and swirling together in strange visions that register with terrible clarity.
Cassandra bucks, releasing the quilt to brace herself on the woman’s broad shoulders. She squeezes her eyes shut against the onslaught of past, present, and future. Her screams drown in the blood of the world.
When she opens her eyes again, she is alone. The woman is gone. The water laps gently at the shore, calm and quiet. Everything around her is bathed in a red glow instead of dreary gray. The metallic stench of blood hangs on the air.
Her basket sits beside her overflowing with strange garments. Silky dresses beaded with glittering pearls, patterned purple stockings, torn trousers and thick coats and uniforms adorned with heavy medals that click when she drags the basket over to her. She touches the soiled fabric and her fingers come away red.
She selects a checkered blue pinafore from the top of the heap. Blood blossoms around the long, jagged cut which tears diagonally from the left shoulder and splits the skirt into ribbons.
Panic surges through the tips of her fingers as she begins her labor. In her mind’s eye, the child runs barefoot through the woods holding an arm across her stomach. Each step threatens to dislodge the organs she’s desperately holding in place and she coughs wetly, sobbing for her mother. Hours before, she will walk along the bank with her brother, picking colorful sea glass out from the heel of her foot. She will become fascinated by one the exact color of blood.
The Washer Woman draws the pinafore out from the water and wrings out what she can.
“Find me,” she urges the girl across space and time. “Find me. Ask me. Ask me…”