I was drowning in my own imagination. Colors and pretty words and too much champagne. A night to celebrate, a night for falling in love. I came looking for you and I found nothing but a black hole, a gaping wound from which the blood would always pour.

I don't remember why I was there, what possibly could have happened that was worth celebrating. Was it a post-election party, maybe? 1972, Nixon had won, and I remembered you saying something vague, something incomprehensible; "Finally someone worth bringing down". In any event, there we were, at some country club in some Massachusetts town,
and there was the dashing if withdrawn Bill Mulder with his dashing if uptight wife, Teena. There were other couples, names and faces that have since slipped my mind, memories taken from me in a dark laboratory stinking of human blood. But I remember wearing blue, light blue with ridiculous purple trim, and I remember thinking I was like some simpering Melanie Hamilton, and then Teena walked in, in shimmering green silk. She was Scarlett and I was
Melanie and oh how lovely the magnolias were that night!

You and Bill shook hands, congratulated each other on some such thing, and Teena barely glanced at me as I badgered her with questions about Fox and Samantha. I had stories to share about my own Jeffrey (yes, *my* Jeffrey, as even now he will never be yours), but Teena was lost in her own world, careful to be polite to me but no more. I had no idea how much she loathed me, loathed my status as your wife, viewed it as some inconvienence
to her way of living instead of sacred fact. I didn't learn until later, did I?

We danced that night, and I drank champagne. Colors swirled around me and pretty words floated through me, and I couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. It
was the last night I laughed, but you wouldn't remember that. You would be gone the very next day, no real explanation, and before I could confront you I would be taken away, abducted and made into a test dummy. I didn't know that yet, as I twirled in first
your arms then Bill's, and my laughter sang out as gay as bells ringing.

The clock struck midnight when Cinderella's dream became six mice and a pumpkin, and it was striking midnight as I went looking for you. Bill and I had danced one final waltz and I had one more glass of champagne. Bill disappeared, undoubtedly to grab Teena's mink, and I left the ballroom to look for you. I found you.

In the arms of Scarlett, Melanie found her wandering beau.

Was I surprised? Not entirely. Shocked though. Colors and pretty words and the scent of magnolias. I wanted to disappear and I wanted to take you with me.

I remember wondering out loud on the way home, how long had it been going on? How long had I been blind to this, to the innuendo? You said nothing, not a damn word, because
you don't air dirty laundry in front of the help, and that bulking and perpetually stern man you had driving was help.

In my blue dress with the pale purple trim, I was Melanie.

Stripped to my slip and hose with only my make-up to remove, I was just me, Cassandra. You hit Cassandra, back-handed her once across the face, and her lip split and blood ran warm down her chin. I watched it all as if it wasn't happening to me. I had gotten my wish and had disappeared into the black hole, collapsed inside the gaping wound you left in our
marriage. I watched you as you handed me a handkerchief.

"Wouldn't want to get blood on anything, Cass." Calm, cool, collected. You even lit up one of your cigarettes, and the stench haunted me even in the dungeon you committed me to.

Was it laughter I heard in the wind that cold November night a year later? Laughter, dry and toxic, tinted with a hint of smoker's cough?

Years later, in between abductions when Jeffrey tried his damnedest to understand his poor, sick mother, I would recall a night of dancing. Colors would swirl and for a moment I would be in your arms, until I opened my eyes to see for myself the hole into which I'd fallen. And then
I'd find myself on some cold steel slab, thinking it was over, that someone had found me dead and this was my autopsy, and the pain would be fresh and the oil thick and I'd know it was you who did this. I remember Samantha Mulder, small and fragile and pale, crying for her father, and I remember thinking that she didn't want that prayer answered. She and I wanted colors, you see, colors and pretty words. She was me, maybe, a younger me born of
slime and Scarlett, and that her and I were in it together told me every suspicion I had was right.

We suffered because of the vanity of one sorry son of a bitch. How many died for you, how many died so you could have your whore? Jeffrey wanted to know his father and he's out there now, and what will he find, I wonder. Will you sacrifice him, too, to some dead cause? Jeffrey was, is, mine, and you'll take him from me if you can.

Blood pours even now, even now as I wait for it to finally end. And how perfect is it to stand before Fox Mulder and beg him to pull the trigger. His mother had killed me in another life, his mother and the man who was certain he'd been the father, as they stood entangled in some operatic embrace, her lipstick staining even his earlobes. Poetic, isn't it, this drama you conceived. You sold your own daughter and your devoted wife for a little screw with a
tight bitch and never blinked once. I want to ruin it for you, and if *they* really come one day, I hope you're the first to die. I hope you've got a Morley jammed between your lips when they do it.

And for me, somewhere, it will be colors and pretty words and the wound, somehow, will close.