Jessica Mosher
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A Woman Screams

A woman screams.

Hmmm.
 
A woman stands on a rooftop, screaming.
 
Not quite.
 
A woman perches on the knife’s edge of a rooftop and lets loose a guttural scream from somewhere deep in her bowels, allowing the channeled trauma of generations of women before her to rush past her vocal chords and sprint out into the night like a galloping horse. The fear of not ever being enough manifests as sound in her throat, then gushes out into the universe like a tidal wave. The tight bars of societal expectation holding her in place tremble and, through the sheer force of her emotion, explode, shattering into a million tiny pieces. Then, spent, she begins to violently weep with a previously unacknowledged and even now, incomprehensible depth of feeling, as if the wellspring of her grief and despair have connected so deeply into the earth, that even from up here on the rooftop, it will never, could never, run dry.
 
Too far?
 
Fine.
 
A woman stands on the edge of the rooftop and lets loose a guttural scream.
 
You’re welcome, Reader.
 
She is lithe in the way these women are. She is blonde in the way these women are.  She is tragic, in the way these women are projected to be. This one, this living, breathing one, is all of these things and none of these things.
 
Another writer, well-intentioned or otherwise, would probably describe her as a wraith. As if that matters in this moment.  As if it makes her suffering more valid. As if a solid, tangible woman doesn’t think or feel or live or exist in a way that we’re interested in hearing about. To be damaged, you must be ephemeral. Wispy. Pale. Here and then gone again. You cannot take up space, you cannot be heard.  Bird-like features, that writer might say. Delicate, even. Soft, with a beautiful singing voice.  Liable to smash headfirst into your window if you cleaned it too well.
 
But Reader, have you ever seen a hawk? Or an eagle? Come on. Bird-like? As if a bird can’t be a threat! I suppose we must imagine that other writer must mean a delicate bird, like a sparrow.
 
Not like a hawk.
 
Not like an eagle.

No, just a sparrow.
 
This woman, though, is like a sparrow! Teeny tiny little hollow bones! Infinitesimal, beady little eyes! Covered in feathers! Wings bursting out of her upper back!
 
Fine.
 
But she is delicate, pure and pale. She always is.  She has to be, doesn’t she?
 
I know, Reader, I hate us for that too.
 
So this woman is delicate. And she has so many feelings. They course through her insides. They are inescapable, all-encompassing.  They live somewhere in her brain, no, in her gut, no, in her heart. No, they have, veritably, taken over. They bubble up inside her like hot jam.
 
You know, when you make jam? And the syrupy, cloying, heat-masticated fruit is almost done being fruit and pretty much ready to transform forever into jam, and for some reason when the process is almost complete you are instructed to bring the wet hot mass to a boil, and each bursting bubble recalls what you imagine magma must look like? Thick, viscous bubbles popping. Ominous in their weight.  Like at the end of The Lord of the Rings, when he falls into the lava with the ring?  And suddenly you want to throw a ring down into the jam, as if that would do something, and not just ruin the jam.
 
Okay! Alright.  
 
They bubble up inside her, not like hot jam, because apparently that is a “me-specific-metaphor,” Reader.
 
They bubble up inside her, just a mass of not-jam feelings, thick and viscous and eerily dangerous.  Ominous in their weight. 
 
And so she screams, on that rooftop.  And she screams again. No one is there to hear her except for us, Reader.
 
The night breeze ripples along the fringed hem of her excessively impractical silk nightgown, that only this brand of fictional woman seems to find comfortable. Her hand flies to her throat; the weight of the delicate pearl necklace she grasps there seems to ground her and elevate her all at once.
 
You know what Coco Chanel said, before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.  I guess before our sparrow left, she chose to take off her sweater.
 
Her breath catches. She grasps the pearls. She breaks out into a cold sweat – unsure if that’s a product of the viscous, not-hot-jam-feelings, or of wearing a thin layer of silk as her only defense against the darkness of a May night.
 
Her damp hair sticks to her forehead. She is still, improbably, excessively attractive. Mostly because it appears she needs assistance – she is in distress. Our hearts would go out to her, if we were by her side on the 86th floor.  She could be the damsel, the princess, and 86 floors does feasibly constitute a tower. And she does, after all, need saving.
 
She reaches for her coat.
 
So she isn’t impractical, she brought a coat, after all. I stand corrected, Reader. Even I am wrong sometimes, even I occasionally don’t know where the story is going. So she has a coat! Good for her. One less thing we can blame her for. One less thing we can say she should have done differently. Because we love to do that, don’t we, Reader? “I would never, I can’t imagine, she shouldn’t have, I have two daughters and they wouldn’t, oh no, she must be faulty, wrong, bad, faulty-wrong-bad wiring, defective.”
 
Faulty wiring, like she’s a furnace installed by an alcoholic electrician, connected poorly. 
 
…Actually…
 
If we are comfortable enough with our respective world views to blaspheme God by describing them as an alcoholic electrician, and we recognize feelings as faulty electrical impulses, which, science tells us, they ostensibly are, and we describe a woman as a warmth-giving object, which, aren’t we supposed to, Reader? Warm. Caring. Like a human oven, baking bread-children, turning them out one at a time and then nurturing. Warmly. Like…
 
…A furnace.
 
In case you are lost, sweet Reader, join me once again on the 86th floor alongside a nightgown-clad sparrow-furnace in distress. Or a human woman. Your choice – no, really, whichever you find more appealing.
 
She reaches for her coat, draped over the railing. She draped it there with preternatural grace when she first burst forth onto the roof.
 
She fingers the interior pocket to ensure that the note she wrote is securely and gently, delicately and tragically aligned inside. The stars flicker, a great expanse of diamonds scattered across a deep navy quilt. 
 
As if one could ever be in possession of enough diamonds to experimentally and carelessly scatter them across a quilt to compare the two. In this economy? At least hot jam is an accessible metaphor.
 
The stars twinkle.  Natural twinkling, not yet overtaken by the artificial glitter of the city. There is a moon, if you want there to be. A few clouds, if that helps your sense of ennui.
 
She inhales the weight of the world.  She screams one final time. She grips the railing.
 
The tears continue to stream down her delicate cheeks, unbidden, and her thoughts turn to the note in her coat. The coat-note. A vestige of her practicality, of her tangibility, of her solidity. How very un-sparrow-like of her.
 
She wrote the note in Rhode Island earlier today.
 
This is not intended as an to insult Rhode Island, this is one of the few historical facts that I have decided on these pages to uphold.  Reader, Rhode Island is, admittedly, a delightful little puzzle piece in the map of the eastern United States, filled with coastline and lobster and gilded age glamour.
 
But, hand to god historical fact is that she was there earlier in the day. And now she wants to be nowhere.  So here she is on the 86th floor.
 
She will not make a good wife for anyone.
 
That is another line from the coat-note. It is a line that can be traced back to her time in Rhode Island, despite the coastline and lobster and gilded age glamour. Historical fact.
 
Maybe that’s the faulty wiring – not that the furnace will be too hot, but that it will never be warm enough. Never nurture enough. Always be just a touch out of alignment.
 
She has too many of her mother’s tendencies.
 
That is a line from the coat-note too. It is a line that can be traced all the way from sea to shining sea, across the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesty to California. Slow, on foot; a rapid straight shot, as the crow flies. Historical fact.
 
Or as the sparrow flies.
 
How quickly as she flies? She doesn’t pause another moment.
 
She jumps.
 
 She tumbles through the air.
 
Inexplicably, not a single breast escapes her nightgown as she falls. How remarkable is that?  There is a brand of individual who would be more interested in this story if one of this sparrow-furnace’s breasts did escape the confines of her silk nightgown as she plummeted over the edge. Are you one of those individuals, Reader? Would you be titillated (pun intended)? Would you revel in the salty tang of the salacious?  How incredibly easy it could be to sexualize her further just mere moments before she discovers what will become her most intimate bond of all, her connection, fierce, inescapable, and unsparingly violent, with the ground below. 
 
Sixty five floors remaining. She plunges, really.
 
The old Galilean experiment that demonstrates gravity.  Simultaneously dropping two cannonballs of different masses from a high place, to prove that gravity is a steady rate – 9.81 m/s^2 – so deeply constant. Two cannonballs and a human woman. Do they hit the earth at the same time?
 
Forty eight floors to go. Sinking, still. Look away, Reader, if you’re sensitive. It won’t be long now.
 
If only she was a bird.  Teeny tiny little hollow bones.  Wings bursting out of her upper back.  Tiny, beady little eyes, covered in feathers. She might have felt the wind rushing past and chosen instead to soar off into the night, second star on the right and straight on ‘til morning.  Towards hope, towards peace, towards kindness, towards ambition, towards joy.
 
Twenty two floors left.
 
A few flaps of powerful, sinewy wings and she would be far, far away from herself and her life and the feelings that are (and aren’t) like hot jam.  Never Icarian, not this sparrow, she wouldn’t dream of flying so high. She would, as is proper, imagine a comfortable, Goldilocks middle distance above the earth. Unassuming. Deferential.
 
But, alas, she isn’t a sparrow.
 
Three floors to go.
Two.
One.
 
She lands.
 
A moment for her, Reader. If you will. 
 
 


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Thank you. I will continue.
 
She lands in the most inexplicably staged way. As if she floated to the ground gently, like  a peaceful feather, not like a cannonball. Not like a human woman. Another historical fact that I also wouldn’t believe if I didn’t know it to be true.
 
And then! Would you believe it – someone snaps a photo. Hear the click of the shutter, feel the whir of the film.
 
In a tale of sympathetic half-truths, this is actual truth.  As if that other writer, half in love with the wraith-sparrow-furnace of his own creation, required her to be beautiful even in death. 
 
Not on the pavement, no, she didn’t hit the pavement.
 
She landed on a limousine. The definition of luxury.
 
She could be sleeping.
She may be sleeping.
(But she isn’t sleeping.)
 
Her left hand is on her chest, as if she is still clutching her pearl necklace at the impropriety of it all. But her breast didn’t even escape, you might think! Oh Reader, she was so proper.
 
Her feet are delicately crossed at the ankles.  Oh Reader, she was such a lady. 
 
And someone snaps a photo.
 
Hear the click of the shutter, feel the whir of the film.
 
She didn’t want anyone to see her body. 
 
That’s another line from the coat note. It is a line that can be traced over the mountains of her heart and into her spirit. Historical fact.
 
The truest part of all of this is the magnitude to which her final coat note wish was not granted. The truest piece of this story is the final and indelible denial of the woman’s right to ownership over her own body. 
 
Someone snaps a photo. Hear the click of the shutter.  Feel the whir of the film.
 
If she was a hawk and not a sparrow…
 
If she didn’t own pearls, couldn’t afford pearls…
 
If she wasn’t pale, if she wasn’t an ephemeral waif…
 
But. Alas.
 
Someone snaps a photo. 

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Jessica Mosher is a Canadian actor and award-winning writer based in New York City. Winner of the prestigious Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, she has also been recognized as a fiction finalist at the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards, long listed for CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Prize, and awarded a Core Residency at Millay Arts. Her play “Stand By” was recently named a finalist in the Tennessee Williams One Act Play Competition. She loves stories about women behaving badly.