Listen to the author reading this story:
1
After her last child tears its way out of her body and starts school, Cass commits to weekly yoga. She hates the way her mid-life, post-partum, suburban ass looks in yoga pants but relishes the consolation donut earned on the way home (and is more-or-less used to the side of guilt that consumes her later).
It is a Friday night class, mostly by necessity. The children have soccer on Mondays and Wednesdays, but not at the same place or time because (look, ma, look!) that would make too much sense. The oldest has what Cass’s husband calls a “violin lesson” and Cass prefers to think of as “torture-by-caterwaul practice” on Tuesdays. The youngest has speech therapy on Thursdays; the middle does art. There are always games and sometimes (Cass cringes at the very thought) “recitals” on Saturdays, and Sundays are for laundry—and the rediscovery of forgotten homework. Only Fridays are free now, and Cass begrudgingly claims them as her own, typing YOGA in capital letters on the family calendar and clicking “repeat weekly” until “forever” before her husband can remind her that they really should plan a date night soon.
It’s not you, it’s me. No matter how many times Cass practices that line, it still sounds hollow. Which is fitting, since that’s mostly how Cass feels now.
2
Yoga is her therapist’s idea.
When Cass mentions the emptiness, the sense of utter gone-ness that has settled between the remnants of her uterus and the remnants of her heart, Jennifer prescribes counting to ten. But also flexibility. “With others!” Jennifer chirps. “And yourself!”
Cass does not tell Jennifer about the shadows she sees sometimes, how they creep and twist in her peripheral vision and beg, always beg that she turn her head and look, ma, just look. Cass never looks.
She prefers to keep pretending that the shadows aren’t real.
3
On Fridays, Cass is:
· mountain’s flexed muscle,
· a tree that never sways,
· a cobra ready to strike,
· a crescent moon waxing with light.
But today is Monday.
Monday Cass is:
· two hands tugged in three directions.
· Two eyes tracking three kids.
· One mouth, offering three drumbeats of encouragement.
· One body, shaped like a woman / a wife / a mother, ignoring the shadows that are beginning to beg louder, beginning to insist: it’s me, it’s me.
· One body, ignoring the shadows that refuse to ignore her.
4
On Wednesday, Cass is two hands tugged in three different directions again but this time she feels her body stretching and wonders if Jennifer was right about learning to be flexible. Her body feels elastic; her arms feel longer. She remembers last week’s instructor pleading, lengthen your torso. He couldn’t have meant it literally and permanently. (Could he?)
When her knee throbs to predict rainfall like the barometer it’s become since fracturing in last year’s Lego Incident, Wednesday Cass does not bend over to rub it. Her arms slip from their sockets like slinkies; her hands are already there.
5
In the twenty minutes after the children fall asleep but before the adults nod off during the same hour-long HBO show they attempted to watch last night, Cass’s husband tells her she looks different.
“Different good?” Cass asks. She snakes a slinky arm through the living room, into the kitchen to retrieve the popcorn she’d made and almost forgotten. It’s still hot, and drowning in butter. The arm snaps back, a sublime rubber band of cellulite.
Cass thinks she could love this strange new elasticity. Maybe she is (finally) manifesting the dream she dreamed during those carb-less, kegel-filled years of hiding her post-partum pooch under oversized tops? The pooch is almost ten years old now. But maybe Cass is, at last, adapting?
Instead of complaining that the popcorn is over-buttered and over-salted, Cass eats it in fistfuls.
“Different good,” her husband says.
6
They stumble upstairs when the TV timer shuts off and the sudden silence wakes them.
Photos in sleek black frames line the staircase. Cass knows every school portrait, every off-camera meltdown—but sees herself in none of the images, and certainly not this new one of small, smiling faces on a pumpkin-filled wagon.
“Were you there, Cassandra?” her husband asks.
Surely she was. (Wasn’t she?)
Surely she pointed the smartphone and hollered, “Cheese!” (Didn’t she?)
Surely she’s still here. (Isn’t she?)
Cass snaps a secret selfie before brushing her teeth. But no matter how she tilts the phone or adjusts the bathroom light, the image remains dark—saturated with shadows that not even filters can fix.
7
Tonight the shadows are loud. Restless.
They whisper, look, ma, look.
They yell, it’s me, it’s me.
They scream, DIFFERENT GOOD.
Cass—tired of their taunts—looks.
Glares back.
Glowers.
Screams, LEAVE ME ALONE.
(The
.....shadows
...............creep
....................closer.)
8
Jennifer asks if the yoga helps.
Cass nods.
Jennifer smiles and chirps about “progress!” “flexibility!” “inner strength!”
Cass smiles too, but not at Jennifer’s buzzwords. The secret, Cass thinks, is to let all the little hands stretch you thin; let all the little voices tear you apart. There is room to grow then.
And room to let the shadows creep in.
9
With each pose: shadows.
With each stretch: more.
Shadows fill
what has been worn and torn away
under eyes, between thighs, in the terrifying expanse of arms.
But they twine thickest here:
over Cass’s heart.
Forever
On Fridays “weekly” until “forever,” Cass is:
· a boat rocked by waves.
· A bow knotting,
· a chair folding,
· a corpse abandoned.
Her body is still hers. (Isn’t it?) She thinks of the children (who stretched it, bled it, milked it), the doctors (who stitched it back together), the shadows (stuck tight as lycra). And she thinks of her arms, holding so much but still always reaching—for the popcorn, the light, the yesses that push her from the frame.
Look, ma, look.
Cass looks.
Her ass (at last) is a sculpted wonderland—but all she can see are the shadows.
Tracie Renee (she/her) is a librarian, a Publishers Weekly book reviewer, and a BOTN-nominated writer who lives and dreams in sort-of Chicago. Find Tracie in HAD, Orange Blossom Review, on Bluesky (@tracierenee.bsky.social) and at https://linktr.ee/tracie.renee.
So pleased that CASS landed here in Frazzled Lit, as it's sort of a companion piece to "This is Fine, Everything's Fine" in issue one.
https://www.frazzledlit.com/p/this-is-fine-everythings-fine