I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce)

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You know, when other women realize that their
marriage just isn’t cutting the wedding cake, they go get a quickie
divorce. Wham, bam, thank you man, and don’t forget to send the
alimony check on time.

Not me.

Oh, no, I couldn’t just get something as
simple as a divorce from my husband. I needed a friggin’
exorcism
.

And that fun little errand had brought me
four thousand feet up into New Mexico’s rugged Sangre de Cristo
Mountains. Up onto some godforsaken plateau covered in scraggly
pine trees. To add to the surreal look of the place, a couple dozen
pebble-sized stones, spaced along an abstract pattern, emitted
faint light as if they’d been dipped in cheap Day-Glo paint.

I faced a roaring campfire, sitting on a log
that had been split in half to make a crude bench. The rough ridges
of the wood threatened to tear right through my thin blue jeans. I
looked truly pathetic.

Last time I’d checked myself in a mirror,
about three hours ago and four thousand feet lower down, my eyes
were sunken in and dark enough to do a raccoon justice. My
straw-blonde hair looked no better than a rats’ nest. One that had
been condemned by the rats before they moved out.

My teeth chattered like a matching pair of
porcelain-veneered castanets. I pulled the Navajo blanket more
closely about my shoulders. The blanket was a garish thing,
decorated with red, yellow, and green squares and whorls and
probably some kind of Aztec god that ate people’s hearts at the
local Waffle House. Of course, all I cared about right now was that
the damned thing kept me halfway warm.

Dora, the shaman performing the sacred rites
for me, didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. Say ‘female shaman’
to the central casting geeks at Paramount or Warner Brothers, and
see what you get. They would’ve sent over someone old, wizened,
with great facial lines and a kind expression. Maybe who managed to
pull off the vibes of Wes Studi crossed with Maya Angelou.

No, Dora looked more like one of those
tawny-skinned, impossibly fresh-faced teenage girls in
jeans-and-silk tops that women’s magazines were always trying to
pass off as self-actualized housewives. Women say that they hate
the girls in
Playboy
who display cellulite-free butts and
triple-D silicone implants. Nuh-uh. The girls we really
love
to loathe are the ones in
Ladies’ Home Journal
or
Good
Housekeeping
who pretend that they’ve blown past 35 with nary a
wrinkle to be seen.

Dora began a liquid, repetitive drone of a
chant that rose and fell with the wind. She raised her delicate
arms and began to move. The gestures, as elegant and fluid as the
motions of the models I’d once filmed in Mapplethorpe’s studio,
gracefully turned into some kind of interpretive dance.

I shouldn’t have jinxed myself right then and
there, but I did. I thought for a split second that
hey, maybe
this is actually going to work
. Maybe I’d be free and
gloriously single again.

Stupid, stupid Cassie.

A low
growl
came from just beyond
where the firelight danced at the edge of the clearing. I opened my
mouth to say something, anything, but I really didn’t need to. Dora
had heard it too.

She stopped her dance. Turned so that her
back was to the leaping yellow flames. Slowly, she dropped into a
defensive crouch.

Dora held her ground as the shining white
bear-tiger thing that had stalked me all the way from California
slipped out from between the trees and stood, completely unafraid,
in the open space of the clearing.

It looked like my husband had decided to show
up.

The man – the man-
thing
– that I’d
dated, taken to bed, cuddled between my legs, and promised marriage
vows began to pace back and forth. As if trying to decide the best
way to attack its prey. Dora didn’t take her eyes off of it.
Neither did I. But as that dark-humor-part of my brain caught up
with what I was seeing here, I let out a bubble of a laugh,
something that would’ve done justice to a Girl Scout who’d gone boy
watching for the first time.

That thing, that Mitchel-thing I’d slept
with?

I’d actually walked down the aisle with it.
Taken marriage vows with it. For richer or for poorer. For better
or for worse.

And for sickness and in health.

Oh, that was just too friggin’ much.

Mitchel’s bear-tiger form let out a roar that
must’ve shaken the window fixtures on houses as far away as Santa
Fe. I felt the very air itself recoil from that savage sound.

And I could smell his breath now, in his
beast form. Unpleasant, burning bacon on hot copper kind of
scent.

He could see that the only way to me was
through Dora. Fangs glistened in the moonlight. He leaped at her.
Ebony claws thrashed the air. Like some kind of horrific threshing
machine come to life.

Freeze Frame.

Hey, hold up for a moment. This is me, Mrs.
Cassie Thantos. Formerly Miss Cassie Van Deene of Chatsworth,
California. I’m sorry to interrupt your reading enjoyment just as
it’s getting good.

I know, I know. This is the part where, if
this was a feature-length motion picture, that the F/X budget would
be kicking in. Some cool CGI to show the creature-thing I married,
maybe some high-flying wire-work that would show Dora doing a
triple-flip karate kick that would flatten Mitchel’s ball sack.

I’m stopping the story for a moment to ask
you to please take this seriously. This really, really happened to
me. And before anyone out there starts making blonde jokes, don’t
think that I wouldn’t have noticed that my husband went around on
all fours and wearing a Day-Glo tiger pelt instead of a
European-cut Armani jacket with French cuffs.

Believe me, he was a lot better dressed at
the start of all this.

I want to start us there.

I
need
to start us there.

If it helps put you into the scene of events,
then that’s all well and good, you know. But it’ll help me a lot
more if I just get it out of my system, off my friggin’ chest, and
onto the page.

So think of it as being my therapy buddy.

Stick with me, okay?

And…jump to Scene 1, Act 1. Way before Dora
and I met the creature of the Shaggy White Lagoon on a mountaintop
north of Taos.

Where I grew up, in one of the sundrenched
suburbs of Los Angeles, you have to think sunblock, sunblock,
sunblock all the time. At least,
I
thought of sunblock all
the time. I wanted to be in the entertainment biz, and they wanted
fresh, not leathery, wrinkled faces.

Sixteen years ago, looking sweet and innocent
and totally do-able as all get-out, I’d taken first place as Miss
Topanga Canyon. Newsflash to anyone who needs to buy a clue: you
don’t win that by writing essays on solving world hunger.

Ten years ago, I decided I wanted to make
small, independent films. I wanted to win more trophies. Be invited
to those special parties down in Hollywood, you know, where the
guys all look like they’ve had their jaw lines carved from Trevino
marble.

Artistic guys, ones that appreciate a woman
who can wring tears from an audience by pulling a wide-angle dolly
shot. And most importantly, sensitive guys, ones who somehow just
know how to make a woman feel special when they hold open the door
of the Ferrari or Bentley or the Gulfstream private jet for
you.

I put up with the smart-aleck comments that I
picked the wrong side of the camera to be on. Ha, ha, ha. Jerks. I
soldiered on, doing films that appealed to the direct-to-video
crowd. A biography on Millard Fillmore for the A&E channel. A
crapload of commercials touting food products that I wouldn’t feed
to my dog, let alone children.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. Why do it?
It paid
mucho dinero
. It was grist for my mill, as far as I
was concerned.

Life planted a big, fat, open-palmed
smack!
on my cheek right then. Mom had a fatal heart attack
while out to dinner with some guy she’d been dating after she’d
split from Dad. I’d been in Oregon, doing an ad for some damned
chowder house out on the coast, but the way I heard it, she went
quietly and passed out in the middle of a plate of veal
picatta.

I can think of worse ways to die.

At least now, being married to Mitchel, I
really can.