In My Dreams I Hold a Knife

by Ashley Winstead

I never absolved myself of the sin of being so utterly forgettable.

I think some part of me could sense—even here in our triumph, in our wild, perfect beginning—the small seeds of our destruction.

His whole life—the person he’d been growing into—reshaped around his sister’s death. Like a vase at a potter’s wheel, smoothed and molded around the dark, hollow space of her absence.

But now that the day was here, red-and-white-balloon arches and Eliot Lawn crammed with families in folding chairs, I realized: there was no more time to change things. This was how it was going to end. How the story would be written.

And I knew, with sudden clarity, that I didn’t hold the cure. I was the thing making him sick.

It’s funny how the world reshapes itself according to your desires, if you demand it.

Maybe we were the same. Mint and Jessica: two sides of the same coin.

I hoped I’d never get what I deserved.