Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

by Ashley Winstead

And on some nights, like tonight, I found myself haunted by what I couldn’t have.

Sometimes a person was your home, the love you learned to grow for yourself, stored in another’s body. Sometimes they were the way your body first learned what it wanted. Sometimes they were an awakening.

(How strange to call it a tender age, as if we nineteen-year-old girls were soft and good to eat.)

But nature doesn’t know good or evil. All nature knows is survival.