The Resurrection of Casey Girl
Foreword
Years ago, I was working in Italy. I’d heard of Michelangelo’s David but never seen him. So I bought a ticket and walked down a long hallway lined with what look like half-finished sculptures. Huge square chunks of veined marble with forms of people being released. Works he never finished. I thought, What a shame. A waste. Then I turned a corner, and there he was. Towering. Perfection. It’s the first and only time I’ve ever looked at a piece of stone that took my breath away. No matter how long I sat and stared, I could not understand how human hands did that. How did Michelangelo know David was in there? Hidden in the rock. Spotless. No blemish. Just waiting for the sculptor’s hands to fling wide the prison doors.
Only one other time in my life have I felt this way. And the source of that awe you now hold in your hands.
From the moment we’re born, life chips away at us. With every hammer stroke, we watch in horror as the pieces that once made us fall to the ground. Soon we stand amid the rubble. The fragments. The shards and slivers. And we think to ourselves, I need that. I can’t leave that here. It was once a part of me. I’m no longer whole. I’ll never make it without it. So we spend much of our time chasing or collecting the pieces that break off, those that are stolen, or the ones we leave behind. Pretty soon, the pieces we carry are more than our hands can hold, so we throw a bag over our shoulder and stuff it full. Eventually a backpack. Before long, we’re reduced to vagabonds scouring the earth. Tormented by the fear that we’re incomplete, never whole until we find every single piece. Soon our pack is bigger than us and we’re bent over, inching along. A beast of burden walking under the crushing. Focused on what’s missing rather than what’s revealed.
But every now and then, one brave soul comes along and risks what the fearful won’t and never will. Despite the possibility of open rejection, abandonment, criticism, mockery, laughter, and shame, she lifts her pack off her shoulder, empties it before the world, and lets strangers sift through the pieces. Holding each by hand. Gemologists studying her imperfections under a magnifier. Every piece a word spoken.
When Michelangelo freed David from the cold marble cell that held him, the ground below the scaffolding was littered with pieces. Pieces that once made up the rock but not David. We know this because when finished, Michelangelo didn’t sweep all those discards into a pile only to hang them in a pack on David’s back. Why would he free him only to curse him through all eternity with carrying the marble walls of his own prison?
For reasons none of us understand, Casey has suffered the pain of the hammer and chisel, which makes her uniquely and singularly qualified to show the rest of us that we’re better off without all that deadweight. That despite the scars on the surface, there’s something beautiful, perfect, and without blemish just inches below.
Her majestic, powerful, soul-cleansing, pain-riddled, and triumphant words woven through a tapestry of sweat-soaked and tearstained pages are a masterful mosaic made up of all the broken pieces that mirror the whole. Stand too close and see only jagged rocks. But back up . . . and a giant killer emerges.
Casey Girl.
Writers are not like other people. We are the piece-keepers. We gather and guard. Holding fast throughout all eternity the discarded pieces that whisper the majesty and wonder of what is. What was. And the ever-elusive and exceedingly dangerous truth: what could be. We alone carry and share them. Carving pieces into letters that make up the words that heal us. And once they are carved, whether by hammer, chisel, or damp velvet cloth, we spill them selflessly across the earth’s table, where they walk the hurting from broken to not. From unable to breathe to laughing. From sickness of the soul to tears dripping off the corners of a smile. From lost to known and accepted in the knowing. This is the matchless and immeasurable power of our words. That’s what we do. We wander the earth. We unearth David. We slay giants. For we alone are the keepers of the letters that set us free.
—David Bishop
I closed the book.
Casey tucked her knees into her chest and laid her head on Angel’s lap, rocking back and forth, her eyes staring ten thousand miles behind us. In the entirety of my life, I’d never heard anyone cry like that. I’d like to think what I heard was a cleansing. Niagara washing her from the inside out. And while I wanted to reach in and hold her, I knew better. I could not ease her pain. So I stood and watched her shake and heard an almost inhuman sound emit from the pit of her stomach. Something was loosed. Something I couldn’t see. A shackle she’d been carrying but wasn’t any longer.