Cassandra
In the morning, she biked up the path by the slough. At the station, she started the coffee. A moose stood grazing in the back yard, unbothered. She checked the AP wire, the police blotter. At 4:45, she switched the source from the night feed to the news from Washington. At the top of the hour, she shuffled printouts from the evening before, put them in order alongside the local stories, the weather, and the tide reports, and read it all into the mic. At 5:30, it was messages for people out of cell range, handwritten on index cards. To Cheerio. Miss Beulah B. is coming today. Give her a warm welcome. From the gang at Tutka Bay. The track lights made the broadcast booth feel snug, the hallways of the station dark, the windows to the daylight outside far removed.
Evenings, she biked to rehearsals for Frankenstein the Musical. She was both Mary Shelley and Dr. Frankenstein’s bride. Dr. Frankenstein was the town dentist in suspenders. The monster, a big guy from a pioneer family. Seagulls scrabbled and fought on the roof of the theatre. There was a tango end number, stage makeup, fresh king crab legs in the green room, doused in butter and lemon, caught by someone’s nephew. I had a dream, she said, the spotlight illuminating her brown Mary Shelley wig. A creature reanimated, a man stumbling over arctic fields.
On the last morning in July, outside her cabin by the public beach, a bouquet of wildflowers appeared on the handlebars of her bike. It was the season of fat raspberries, fresh-caught salmon packed layers-deep in freezers, fiddleheads fried in the pan.
At the station, the phone blinked red, someone calling. She wondered if it was the man who—back when she’d first come to town—had her over for dinner, fed her chicken breasts stuffed with ham, his wife excusing herself when the last course was done. He’d called the station a few times when she was there alone at dawn. She picked up the phone, was glad when no one was on the other end. The tide is falling, she read from the paper into the mic, and then because maybe she wanted something to be different, she whispered, Small craft warning. The phone’s light blinked again as she read the sunset and sunrise. Double blink, a message. The message, a blank sort of hissing.
At the French restaurant with her friend who worked at the food coop, the owner came to take their orders. He couldn’t stop looking at her friend, who asked for his specialty. The friend’s partner was a man twenty years younger, a fisherman with a boyish face that masked his temper. Her own partner was a man ten years older, a jack-of-all-trades who was ready to start a life together. She’d thought she was too.
Smoke rose from bonfires on the ridge. During the second week of August, in the outhouse by the public beach, she came upon a pool of blood at the base of the toilet, seeping into the bolts, thickened by the cold of night. Who’d been here, she wondered and thought of the two pink lines swimming into sight, the pain that had come a few weeks later. She kept her hands crossed over her stomach as she walked down the shore, the icy wind buffeting her jacket.
During the open dress rehearsal, the coils around the monster’s neck fell off, revealing the folds of human skin. His Adam’s apple was green, her friend said when they met by the snack table in the lobby. The friend said how much she’d liked the show, makeup covering the darkness around her eye, adding, Come up tomorrow, there’s something I want you to have.
The friend was moving back to the South, where they both were from. The gift: a chair, wooden, its seat flowered, fuzzy with age. Her friend maneuvered the chair into the passenger side of her car. Its backpiece, carved with an angel, nestled above the headrest. It fits! her friend said, delighted. Inside the house the friend shared with the younger partner, a depression gaped in the wallboard, the aftermath of his fist.
She felt, as she did the tango with Dr. Frankenstein on opening night, a dissatisfaction, prickly, in the cool heat of the spotlight. As she took her place on stage and the tango started, Dr. Frankenstein’s hands light on her shoulder and the small of her back, their steps matching, she saw his eyebrows were tweezed and penciled, his face powdered white, his posture absolutely correct. The director’s son had been charged that day for statutory rape, his girlfriend underage. Don’t report the story, the director said when the show was over, taking her aside.
She drove home, slept, woke at three, headed to the station. She held the story with the news about the son in her hands, read it aloud, felt an uncoiling in her throat. Between the tide reports and the sponsored announcements, she said into the mic, My friend, leave him. She thought of the way she’d said no to the man with the wife, climbed into her beat-up Subaru, driven away.
The play wound down and closed. Where the moose had been, the fireweed had flowered, and the petals were falling to the ground. She flicked through the index cards, put them back in the box. Cheerio, she said into the mic. The dull, tight ache began to spin. It’s Beulah, she said. I miss you. Please come find me. The ache twirled faster, up toward her mouth. A 4.2 earthquake, she said. 5:57 this morning, August 28th. The ground shifted, moved, turned to a rolling, liquid wave.
Take care what you say, her partner had answered when she told him she needed space. Clutching the arms of her chair, she leaned close to the mic and didn’t stop herself. She said, Tsunami warning for the Lower Kenai. In response, the siren blared. The station manager burst into the booth. What are you doing? he said. The phone light no longer blinked. The booth was quiet and dark. Did you bring that chair from home? he said, running his hand through his disheveled hair. Dear Doctor Polidori, she said into the mic. She settled deeper into the chair, pressed the button once more to go live. I dreamed we’d gather all the pieces, put them together again.
That afternoon, she set the chair by her cabin. She sat and looked at the beach. The roof of the public outhouse gleamed. Far out to sea, the fishing boats came and went. Soon her partner would return from set netting across the bay. Her friend had texted her—she’d met a lumberjack who was coming with her to the Lower 48. An eagle lifted from the trees by the slough, looking for cats. Don’t you take a cat, she said to the eagle’s shadow, crossing over her land. Or a baby.
JR Fenn is from the Central Appalachians. Her work has appeared in many places, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, 100 Word Story, and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction. Her flash has recently been recognized as a first place winner of the New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction. Her chapbook, Tiny Vessels, was chosen by Rita Bullwinkel as the winner of The Masters Review Chapbook Open and will be published in February 2026. She lives in Western New York with her family.