You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

by Akwaeke Emezi

she didn’t want to talk about how it felt to try to learn how to be safe with someone who wasn’t the dead love of her life.

This mountain, this man she’d literally just met, they were turning her into a woman who wanted so loudly that it was drowning out the logic of a choice, and that terrified Feyi. That felt dangerous, fast and menacing. She had to get away from it.

It was safe to want someone she couldn’t have; she didn’t have to follow up on it, she didn’t have to do anything except

be drunk on her own desire.

This desire that pooled like traitorous flame, that wasn’t in response to someone else, that was coming from her and just her. She belonged to it, and it belonged to her, and that’s as far as it needed to go. How long had it been since she’d felt this on her own, with and by herself? All her timelines stretched back to a dark road covered in glass. It didn’t matter. She was alive, like her therapist had taught her, and it was okay to live.

she was herself again, and it was none of their business.

It felt too early in the morning, like it was just her and the birds and the trees and the eager sun splashing against the textured walls.

She felt possessive of herself, echoes of last night’s reclaiming, perhaps.

She was hers; she was alive; there was so much to do.

They’d never broken up, he wasn’t an ex, he was just… dead.

“I wish I could tell you it gets easier—” “It doesn’t,” she interrupted. Alim put his chin in his hand and propped his elbow on his knee. “No, no. But it gets… older. It grows with you.”

there are so many different types of love, so many ways someone can stay committed to you, stay in your life even if y’all aren’t together, you know? And none of these ways are more important than the other.”

She kept reminding

herself that she had a choice, that she didn’t have to end up with him. She didn’t have to end up with anyone, no matter how pretty the picture looked to strangers.

Feyi became aware of her senses—the linen she was wearing soft and textured against her hips and sides, the delicate touch of her braids brushing her shoulder blades. She knew she should turn back. No good could come of following a song like that when she knew who was waiting at the other end, but because Feyi was herself, and alive, she kept going, holding the books like a secret.

grief can also be the softness when the spikes are removed, something that gives your palate joy,

“We never really know anyone,” Alim replied with an easy shrug. “And I want to spend an obscene amount of time discovering you. It’s honestly half the fun.”

“I’m saying you make me feel not alone, Feyi. I don’t think you understand how hard I’ll fight for that, how long it’s been since I had that.”

Alim was so painfully beautiful to look at, not just his face, or his body, but the whole of him, the way he was relentlessly tender, the way he let pain pass through him like a current, the way he didn’t run from it or try to divert it into something else. The way he offered blood-smeared copper as a gift, a consecrated object, alive grief.

“It’s not your business what I do with my body, or what Alim does with his. You have no ‘right’ to me, we weren’t together, we weren’t even exclusive. You’re not entitled to fuck me just because you were a decent human being and went along when I wasn’t ready to be intimate with you, or be mad because I ended up fucking someone else. You don’t get points for waiting for me. I didn’t use you, I didn’t lead you on. I went as far as I felt comfortable, and I stopped there.”

she had felt something huge rear up in her heart, like a planet shifting her lungs aside, flattening them against her ribs. Alim had held her for a long time and checked in with her after they uncoupled their bodies, asking if she was okay, how she felt, soft worry in his hands and voice. Feyi had told him she was perfect because that was how her body felt—sated and languid, fed with pleasure. She hadn’t told him that her lungs were flat, that something alive was breathing in her chest. It had been so long since she’d felt like this, Feyi didn’t recognize what it was until Nasir said it like an ambush, and fuck, he was right. She loved Alim. Somewhere in all of this, she’d

His voice sounded like smooth waves of deep amber honey pouring and folding over on itself.

love how you skin fear and move through it. I love how you lean into grief and somehow use it to be even more alive.

Genre is a loose concept for me, and because I read across genres, it feels natural to write across them as well.

commissioned one to make a menu specific to Alim’s character. For me, if I’m going to put art in a book, then the art has to be as good as my writing.

think it’s fascinating what people will do when they prioritize their pleasure.

Grief has been described as “love with nowhere to go.”