Screen Shots: in a new series of flash fiction for AnOthermag.com, critic and essayist Philippa Snow looks at the interior lives of female characters on screen.
Sometimes I feel like a character who has been written by a man who hates his mother, but I bet all women feel like that occasionally, don’t they – either way, God doesn’t have a mother, and that’s how I know I’m sick. My husband is a man of science, and that’s how I know he’s stupid. My husband is a rational man, and that’s how I know he’s weak. After it happened we were on the train together and he said “what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” and I didn’t say anything but I’m certain I was looking at him like I thought it should have been him, like anybody who would say a thing like that really deserved to be the one who was dead. His usual head-shrinker shit, as if anyone gets anything by believing in anything; as if dreams weren’t sort of embarrassing; as if it weren’t nightmares that were essentially truthful, essentially real; as if chaos did not reign on earth and, after that, in hell. Of course, really, I know that it’s me who deserves to be dead, but that won’t happen because, like I said, I know God has nothing to do with me. I’m from somewhere else. Where I’m from, none of the other women have faces, and sometimes I’m not sure if I have one, either.
It was his suggestion we go to the cabin, because he and I have different ideas about nature and what it means to commune with it. Maybe it’s because men often talk to you, or at you, without listening; I think he talks at nature without listening to it, too, and it means he isn’t as scared of it as he should be. He pulled me out of the hospital because for him, my seeing another doctor was essentially an infidelity. (“No therapist can know as much about you as I do,” he said, practically cooing it as if I was our child, our dead child, and if I hadn’t been so weak I would have laughed in his face.) Didn’t want another man rifling through my head, or another man’s pills in my throat. I felt, and I still feel, as if I had finally become interesting to him in that moment – at the moment he arranged for me to be discharged – because suddenly he could study me; he could focus his attention on me as a patient, not a wife. He mistook the primal stink of darkness on me for the stink of something fixable by therapeutic means, and I allowed him to, because it seemed like exactly the kind of thing a wife should do. It kept him busy.
“I want sex to be violent because sex is natural, and nature is violent”
As we disembarked the train and set out towards Eden, which is the ridiculous name he selected for that house, I had a vision: nature, while we stayed there, would attack him and unmoor him. Ticks drinking his blood; foxes speaking to him from the bushes; a deer with a dead fawn hanging from its rear end manifesting like a curse. It unfolded just as I had seen it, every detail. In the cabin, he exhausted me with talking therapy all day, and at night I made him play the sadist. He thinks that I want sex to be violent because I want to be punished, when in fact it is me asking are you alive are you alive with my body over and over, asking him and also asking myself, never getting a real answer. I want sex to be violent because sex is natural, and nature is violent. For my thesis, I’ve been writing about gynecide; I know what it feels like to kill as a woman, sort of, and I know what it feels like to be killed as one, too. If I really were a character who had been written by a man who hates his mother, it would be the case that all my book-learning had made me bad because I’m female, because I am a mother whose son is dead – whose son died before he grew old enough to hate me. In fact, as I keep telling my husband, all women are evil, and it’s simply the case that people don’t really understand what “evil” means. Nature, I say to him, is Satan’s church, and women simply have a better idea of the way to worship in it.
Last summer, also at the cabin, I heard my son crying suddenly in the forest, and I ran out in a panic to find nothing there at all, even though his screams were ringing in the trees as clear as day. That noise, like the pressing of a trigger on the weapon of my body, changed me. It was as if I had slipped through time; as if some terrible curtain had been lifted, and suddenly I could see there was no winning against doom. I know now that being a parent was not really an appropriate choice for an individual such as myself, and yet I wanted it anyway. It was some inbuilt woman thing. I grieved him, and I grieved him, even though I let him fall. I watched as he pulled himself up onto the ledge of the window of our fourth-story apartment without doing anything about it, and he fell, and he shattered like a doll. Crash, bang, smash, lights out. So, yes, I did it, in a sense, and I did some other terrible things, too, and I know now that it is time for me to do other terrible things, both to my husband and myself, but it means nothing because I am nobody. I am called nothing. I am “She,” just “She.” I am a merciless earth-old force and all my actions are unchangeable and predetermined. You want to know something sort of funny? When I married him, I took my husband’s name, but now I cannot for the life of me remember what it is.