A STORY
by Reese Kwon
Reese Kwon is a 2005 graduate of Yale, where she was awarded the Wallace Prize in fiction. She is currently an MFA candidate in Michael Cunningham’s program at Brooklyn College, where she won a Himan-Brown award for creative writing. Kwon is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine, and “Superhero” is her first published short story.
IT WAS ONLY a few months after Christina renounced God that she went off to college. The first day there she told everyone to call her Cassandra. She looked in her full-length mirror and repeated, “Cassandra, Cassandra,” imagining a girl saint sadly turning her scarred back.
THE FIRST COUPLE of times that her mother called, she asked for Christina and was told by Cassandra’s suitemates that she had the wrong number. Finally Cassandra herself picked up the phone, and her mother asked why everyone was so confused. Cassandra laughed and explained that, for whatever reason, everyone had started calling her Cassandra. She asked, “It is a pretty name, though, don’t you think, Mother?”
Her mother said, “It is a nice enough name, but, sweetie, you know there really aren’t any saints named Cassandra.”
She laughed again, “It’s just a nickname, Mother.”
WHEN SHE WAS very young, her mother had explained her name to her. “You were named after one of the youngest saints,” her mother told her as she brushed her hair. “A martyr. She believed in God, but her father was a strict Roman nobleman and forbade her from praying under pain of death. When she persisted, her father had her whipped until she died. She was twelve or so. The Church called her Christina, after Christ himself. And so, because you were named in her honor, Saint Christina will watch over you very carefully whenever I’m not there.”
“And God does that too?” she asked. She pictured a large face darkening the sky.
“God too.”
IT WAS ODD to be alone and without prayer, with no one to talk to at night. What was perhaps most terrifying about losing her god was that, without the promise of a never-ending paradise, the imperfect and the limited were all she had. So she liked dreams in which she was superhuman, or a vampire, or otherwise immortal. She would save lives, steal blood, bend towers, wear cloaks. Waking up from these dreams always seemed a pity.
HER ABDICATION made for a good excuse, though. Hooking up with one attractive boy or another, she would sit up when the boy would start to undo the buttons on her jeans and she would say, “Oh, I’m so sorry, but I can’t, I was raised as a Catholic and I still have some of that stupid guilt.”
Adrian’s or Blair’s or Dave’s eyes would widen with a smile, and the boy would stop worrying her jeans. “So you were a good Catholic girl, huh? Still have a Catholic girl uniform lying around anywhere?”
She would shake her head, and he would kiss her again, softly, and she would be safe.
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