We Ate the Dark

by Mallory Pearson

it’s been nearly five years since this house’s last visitor, when they boarded it up in the sheriff’s final walk-through. Now it shudders with the weight of their life, overstimulated by their laughter, their spitting, their swallowing, the ravenous way they tear open boarded entryways.

Wasn’t that what summer was for? Rotting away on a couch that molds itself to the shape of your body, watching reruns of reality TV until you can feel bits of your mind melting through your ears? He’d get his life together when the leaves fell again.

If he pretended the house no longer existed, there was peace. It lived on only through folklore

There was a certain art to ruination.

Now she had everything she’d thought she was supposed to work for, and nothing to show for it. What could she brag about? A degree? An

Wordless and wide-eyed, seer and seen, Marya Sokolova spent her life listening to other busy mouths tell her who she was meant to be. Marya was good at keeping quiet.

She hadn’t thought herself capable of attraction to begin with—not like the other girls her age, at least. And she hadn’t quite understood what the word lesbian meant.

Now in the Ford—Cass’s grip loose around the wheel, Marya leaning against the rear glass, Poppy’s thigh against hers—Frankie felt that complete sensation of seeing someone and being seen by them too.

It is so hard to haunt, so much harder than slipping away. She wants to drink it all up. To go where she once stood, danced, slept, kissed. She wants some taste of the life she had, back before her shadow’s reflection became an entity of its own.

I want this forever, Cass thought. I want them down the street. I want them in this room until the end of time. Just them, and this moment.

How had she ever been without them? They were extensions of her body, the lines between them indistinguishable.