Sugar

by Mia Ballard

T he plan to kill Dean unfurled in my mind like a dark bloom in the midst of an otherwise idle Tuesday evening, the kind where the air tastes like spent fuel and the sky bleeds orange, stubbornly holding onto the last dregs of daylight.

My transformation wasn't for love; it was a sacrifice on the altar of compromise, a slow, insidious erasure of my identity. The realization of his infidelity is a perverse liberation, a permission slip signed in betrayal that frees me from the self-imposed shackles. I no longer feel the need to dim my own light to match his dull glow.

Period.

After burying my beloved Dean underneath the lemon tree in our backyard, I did the only reasonable thing left: I bake a cake.

Love, for all its beauty, is fragile. It can slip through your fingers or be buried under the lemon tree in your backyard.

There's a magnetic quality in his ugliness—an allure that defies explanation.

This is so real

There's a perverse desire that grips me, a longing so visceral it feels like a wild animal trapped within my chest. I wanted to unhinge my jaw like a snake and swallow him whole.