A Goddess’s Wrath

Kim wasn’t sure why she bothered going to class today. She had only been there for about two hours, and she was already on the verge of screaming in the high school cafeteria with the tenacity and sexual frustration of the billions of cicadas currently making home and love in her small town. 

She was an hour late this morning. She told Ms. Krull she was railroaded, a common excuse given that her town was labeled the “crossroads of America,” but she didn’t believe her. Ms. Cruel, as she was known by her students and anyone unfortunate enough to be cursed by her presence, never believed Kim. None of the teachers did really. What good-standing, patriotic White American citizen in a post-9/11 climate was going to believe anything said by a fat black girl with a funny accent and a distracting hairdo? 

Ms. Cruel, whose pasty skin could be sold as its own unique paint color at Lowe’s, instead threw Kim her own outdated, butchered flavor of ebonics and told her that if she wasn’t going to take her classes seriously, then she had no business coming at all. Thanks for the advice, teach, Kim thought. Wish you told me before I woke up and brushed my teeth for this shit. 

She took her fork and impaled the microwaved, imitation cheese ravioli on her plate and shoved it in her mouth like Saturn consuming his own children. The meat and sauce oozed in the corner of her mouth just like the bloody aftermath in the Goya painting. She was too pissed off to worry about her fellow classmates passively ogling at the mess. 

A hydra. That was what Kim was drawing on her napkin. It contained five colossal heads, the two on the left reading “Mother” and “Father,” the two on the right reading “Scholar” and “Lover,” and finally the center head reading “Subconscious.” At the far bottom center, dwarfed considerably by the beast, stood a small, laurel-crowned heroine with sword in one hand and a torch in the other, inscribed with “ferocity”’and “prudence,” respectively. 

Art intoxicated her in ways that made the weed and Smirnoff just simply pale in comparison. She would spend hours at the local gallery, which had both a Warhol and a Burchfield, as well as countless others, just examining every minute detail, every blade of grass and every stitch in every fabric of the subject’s clothing. Oftentimes she stood in front of the painting, sketching out every bit of the outline, only to modify it with her own style. She can’t even recall how many potential suitors she drove away by suggesting they visit the art gallery instead of letting them poorly finger her in the back of a theater during a screening of the latest Star Wars or superhero flick.

Aaron, her current boyfriend, was the only one who was down with the gallery date idea, and he managed to feign interest in Impressionism and stimulate her ennui enough for her to give him a hand job in the back alley once the gallery closed. They were dating soon thereafter, though it has become obvious to her in the past couple weeks that he only humored her interests in hopes for sex and really just wanted to ramble about his own interests, which included Quentin Tarantino, doomed business ideas, and homophobia.

He was about seven years her senior and was currently working on getting his associate’s degree in business at the local community college, though he so rarely attended classes that it pushed him back at least an extra two years still before he could graduate. Her best friend Dorothy - where was Dorothy anyway, she's going to miss lunch? - often voiced their objections about this age gap, to which Kim would repeat the same semi-confident mantra “age is but a number.” And besides, Aaron often told her at the beginning of their relationship she was a woman wise beyond her years and that she wasn’t like other girls. Women his age just didn’t understand him, he would say. He would often give tiring, jumbled sermons that there were two types of women in this world: goddesses and harpies. Kim, he insisted, was the most divine goddess he ever met. 

Kim liked to be called a goddess. When you spend every day of your young life being simultaneously demonized, sexualized, and brutalized for your non-skinny, non-white, non-feminine body, when your white dad hides his wife and daughter from his elite business friends because interracial relationships don’t look too good at the country club, when he visits your bedroom late at night not late enough for your mother to be asleep but late enough where she doesn’t interfere, when all your classmates call you a black whore behind your back even though Aaron was your first consensual lover - when this plagues you every day like wrathful frogs raining from the heavens, it is nice to know there are at least some who see you not as a wandering troll, but a deity worthy of her own altar to be worshiped at, is nice sometimes. Even if that same man will call you “uppity” when you two argue and a “Jezebel” when you two fuck. What is with white boys and their weird black girl fetishes? she would sometimes wonder after one of his tri-weekly, two-minute pump-and-dump sessions. 

But the goddess thing stuck with her. After the first time he called her that, she found a book on Botticelli and sketched the outline of his painting of Minerva, modifying it as a self-portrait. She gave her a slight smirk and a near-missable tear in the shape of a heart. It was one of her best works. In fact, she was drawing from the design of the gown and laurel for the heroine in her hydra sketch. 

As she drew the shading on the central monster’s forked tongue, her Nokia vibrated in her pocket. A text from Aaron. He hadn’t spoken to her since their fight last night, when she

confronted him about “hanging out” with this white girl named Abby. He claimed she was just a friend of his, but she didn’t know of any gal pals who liked to talk in an almost baby voice and pull down their v-necks around their bros. She also tended to hug him for an uncomfortably long time and often completely ignored Kim. Aaron responded just as any innocent man would when confronted with the consequences of his own actions - by screaming and accusing her of manipulation and abuse and calling her names and crying and threatening to kill himself, all the while completely avoiding the issue at hand. Realizing this was getting her nowhere, she went home. She expected him to try to bombard her with phone calls or texts or whatever, but the phone was concerningly silent all night. She pretended not to care, but kept the phone on her thigh all night while pretending to watch a Reese Witherspoon movie. 

After almost a whole day without communication though, it seemed he was finally ready to speak his mind. Kim opened the text on her Nokia. The text read: “U dont trust me so we r done. Hope ur happy. Bye.” 

Kim wanted to toss the phone across the cafeteria and stomp on it over and over and then pour a gallon of the expired milk being served all over it. But she knew those fuckers were borderline-indestructible and that it would just cause a scene. Oh, there’s the angry black fat lady having a tantrum again, her classmates would probably think. The message would remain there always, taunting her. Just like everything else. 

She shoved the phone back in her knapsack and returned to the Hydra. Right now, it was the only thing she wanted to think about. No lying boyfriends, no sneaky hoes, no handsy fathers, no passive mothers, no broken homes. She couldn’t pass classes or keep boyfriends or be mentally stable. But she could draw. She could draw like a motherfucker. And like Herakles, this disposable paper hydra was her trial. 

She was nearly done with the scales on its tail when her best friend Dorothy met with her at the table. She looked at the clock. Lunch would be over in five minutes. What took her so long? 

Dorothy was a tranny - or transsexual, rather, as she told Kim was the preferred nomenclature - and while she never exactly looked that pretty, she especially looked like shit today. Her once long, curly, auburn locks were hacked off, looking like Falconetti’s Joan of Arc with bedhead. Her emerald eyes were missing their once signature sparkle. Her makeup - which she arrived an hour early to school every morning so she could meticulously put it on - was smeared. The eyeliner looked like two black eyes, the uneven foundation exposed dark stubble on her chin, and the faded ring of rapidly removed lipstick gave the impression of sloppy cannibalization. The skirt on her eggshell white floral dress was torn in the front, as if someone or someones were eager to see what lie underneath it. Instead of her trademark gay boy falsetto, she spoke in a worn, whispered croak. 

“Hi.”

Kim rose from her seat with so much force that it knocked over her milk carton. Dorothy flinched. Kim came around the table and held her friend, head pushed against her chest. 

“What happened?” Kim asked softly. 

“It’s okay,” Dorothy said, clearly attempting to hold back sobs. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, I’m gonna worry about it. What happened?” 

“Just… just some girls in the bathroom. They didn’t want me to be there I guess. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have invaded their space.” 

“Fuck that. Did they hurt you? Are you okay?” 

Dorothy didn’t respond, now softly sobbing. Kim looked over her friend’s shoulder and saw a red stain forming against the ass of her white dress. 

“Who did this? Which girls? Point them out.” 

Dorothy let out another sob. “Please don’t. I don’t want any more trouble.” 

“Which girls, Dorothy? It’s okay, sweetie. Kim is here for you.” She kissed the top of Dorothy’s head. She repeated, “Which girls?” 

Weakly, the transsexual lifted her faded eyes and pointed a bony finger at a group of three girls about four tables away. Dorothy then looked like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, sentencing these heartless cunts to their early graves. Kim recognized the girls: Rebecca, Angela, and the ringleader, Monique - the Midwestern Y2K answer to the Heathers clan. They were the ones to start the rumor of Kim being a black whore who gave the teachers blow jobs in exchange for crack money. In fact, they pretty much started all the rumors at this school. They were a pack of privileged, white princesses who held so much power over the town that no one dared to fuck with them. Anyone with any sort of future to look forward to simply overlooked their treacheries. Unfortunately for them, as of today, Kim had nothing left to look forward to, nothing left to lose. 

She slowly sat Dorothy down into her seat and gave her a soft kiss on the cheek. 

“I’ll be right back honey,” she said, brushing her fingers through the freshly-chopped hair in order to comfort her. “Try to rest for a bit.”

“Okay,” Dorothy whispered, knowing her friend had made up her mind. 

Kim slowly rose from her seat, walking away from the table and rapidly increasing her pace the closer she got to the bullies. She stood behind them. At five-foot-nine and weighing 228 pounds, she towered over these little pawns like a proud rook. Upon seeing her, the girls snickered in unison, baffled by the mere existence of a creature such as her. It was Monique who was the first to speak. 

“What the hell do you want, you black bull dy-” 

Her slur was cut off by Kim grabbing a handful of the blonde Michelle Pfieffer cut and slamming her face as hard as she could into the plywood table three times in rapid succession. The second time, the entire cafeteria was shaken with a thundering crack of Monique’s nose. The students all rose from their seats, some running out of the cafeteria as if this was the second coming of Columbine. Many were screaming. 

At first too stunned to do anything, Rebecca and Angela merely stood, the latter’s mouth so agape that when Kim slammed her head against the table, two of her front teeth projectile launched out of her mouth, landing in a tray of ravioli on the next table. 

Finally stirred from her haze, Rebecca tackled Kim, trying to push her down. Rebecca managed to get a few weak punches to the attacker’s head before Kim leaned over the bully’s shoulder and bit her tiny ear clean off. A sprinkle of blood sprayed in Kim’s eye, but she continued her assault. 

Dorothy had not moved. She watched in wonder as her best friend - one of the most sophisticated and subdued women she knew - gladly metamorphosized into an Amazon warrior just to protect a lone transsexual’s honor. Kim continued to beat on the girls, and she even managed to knock down a few teachers who tried to suppress her. She fought with the unbridled, primal bloodlust of Ares in Trojan assault. A goddess among men.