Found in Armfield's short story collection, salt slow

IDs: Queer, Chronic Illness, Sapphic, Mentally Ill

Author IDs: Queer

CWs: Mentions of homophobia, internalized homophobia, death, drowning, descriptions of decomposing body

"Cassandra After" follows a woman as she navigates the sudden and tragic death of her girlfriend, Cassandra. The story starts when the woman’s girlfriend “returns,” nearly six months after her death. This new Cassandra is decomposing, and seems to only be visible to the protagonist. The story is nonlinear, exploring the woman's relationship with Cassandra through a series of flashbacks interspersed with conversations in the now between "Cassandra After" and the protagonist. Cassandra was the first woman that the protagonist dated, and the story explores their relationship and the protagonist’s reckoning with her sexuality as a part of this nonlinear temporality. Through this nonlinear temporal structure and her communication with Cassandra's body/ghost, the protagonist becomes lost in time, and her lostness parallels the lostness she feel about her identity and sexuality.  

The protagonist remembers, “I had kissed a man, just once at a work event, and afterward expected Cassandra to be understanding. I’m not sure why I thought this would be the case, really, except to say that I had never been with a woman before and had perhaps naively anticipated the same unconditional support I received from female friends” (Armfield 165 - 166). Things do not go as the protagonist expects, and Cassandra becomes quite upset. They don’t talk for several days, and eventually, the protagonist goes over to apologize. Cassandra lets her in, and she ends up staying the night. Cassandra never returns from her Saturday morning swim the next morning. Cassandra and the protagonist were not public, and the only reason that the protagonist find out that Cassandra has drowned is because she was “in her bedroom when [the police] knocked” (167). 

The protagonist’s relationship with the dead version of Cassandra also plays with time, as it is not until Cassandra has been dead for months that she returns. The story emphasizes the ways that Cassandra’s body is decomposing, and when she appears, it is “in the clothes in which she’d been buried” (149). As the story develops, Cassandra’s body deteriorates further, and she starts to lose control over her movements. At the same time, the protagonist remembers that when she and Cassandra were dating, the protagonist “had a bad body around that time—creaking joints and difficult digestion, a martyr to mouth ulcers and bleeding gums” (163). These aches and pains seem to have emigrated from the protagonist’s internal body to Cassandra’s external body, as her joints are visible and splitting, and she is no longer able to digest food at all (a fact that she laments to the protagonist while attempting to eat fried rice). This physical transference of disability and bodily degeneration also exhibits temporal play, as if the pain of the past is moving out of the protagonist and into Cassandra's body The protagonist defies time's wearing of her body, instead transferring this degeneration to the re-animated version of Cassandra’s corpse.
Discussion Questions

1. Why does Armfield choose to tell this story after Cassandra’s death? 

2. Is this a ghost story? Why or why not?

3. Why is the protagonist closeted? How does her closeting impact her relationship with Cassandra? With “Cassandra After”?