Phantom Limb

by Lucinda Berry

Her self-pity would drone on until I was suffocating in it.

Now it was as if part of my body had been suddenly chopped off. I was an amputee, and like any amputee, I was left with the excruciating phantom pain of being tortured by my lost limb. Every person who’d lost a body part still felt the burning, throbbing ache as if it was still there, and the empty void of Emily would never leave me.