Found in Armfield's short story collection, salt slow

IDs: Queer, Chronic Illness, Sapphic, Mentally Ill
Author IDs: Queer

Armfield’s story 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 and the protagonist. Cassandra was the first woman that the protagonist dated, and the story explores their relationship and the protagonist’s reckoning with their sexuality as a part of this nonlinear temporality. Through this nonlinear temporal structure and her communication with Cassandra's body/ghost, he protagonist appears lost in time, and their lostness parallels the lostness they feel about their 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 expected, and Cassandra becomes quite upset. They don’t talk for several days, and eventually, the protagonist goes over to apologize. Cassandra lets them in, and they end 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 they find out that Cassandra has drowned is because they are “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 they 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 immigrated 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 disintegration also emulates temporal play. The protagonist defies the wear and tear of a degenerating body, instead transferring this degeneration to the re-animated version of Cassandra’s corpse.