We Ate the Dark

by Mallory Pearson

She’s becoming a repeater. A doll with a string in its back, learning the absent world—death not a final animal but the sensation of seeing a million unrecognizable colors. Just as brutal and sensitive as the plane she was a part of before, when her blood pumped her to life.

How to describe it, the unbidden memory? How to describe them among it? Holy place. Sinless. Sofia

She couldn’t tell the difference between a headache and the loss of her mind. Her heartbeat was too close, too loud, boiling under her skin.

she’d touched the tree and she’d opened herself up to the terrible and wanting world.

a soul-splitting moment where she thought that maybe, regardless of the rising sun and the lake-water baths, she’d never be free of this untethered feeling.

Everything was familiar and foreign to her all at once. Even the air smelled like the past.

LONGING IS THE DREAM KILLER

“We build ideas of people in our head, don’t we?”

Frankie tried to keep up with the words; they slipped away from her, thin and nimble as black snakes underfoot.

From the sky, she’s a know-it-all. She looks through the blue like glass. They are ants beneath her, her family, her women, their lives mapped out like flight patterns, their stories imprinted on the ground.

savored the flavor of snuffing out candles with freshly tasted fingertips.

The thought of warmth is so delicious that she dreams of chewing the sensation between her teeth.

Towers of dust, tumultuous waves across the countryside of the dead.

We looked at each other, wishing for solace, afraid of the dark and the emptiness to follow it. We tilted back our heads. We took the apocalypse in.

don’t look at me, I’m on fire, you lied to me and I have nothing left but this moment in my ruined hands.