Borrowing

It was summer, and the lake at the end of Emma’s house stank of the heat, the moon hung fat and sickly. Emma spent her days sticking her head in the water for as long as possible, her body, narrow and dry, rising from the earth like a decapitated fish. She was twelve and trying to get closer to her mother by borrowing her sadness. Her mother was stuck behind the kitchen window, nursing a baby who didn’t care that he already had sharp teeth and made her shriveled nipples drip strawberry milk. On certain Sundays, a boy named Mark would visit the lake by Emma’s house and cup warm pools of cum in his hands to feed to the fish. It must be good to be food. Emma sat up and started collecting spit in her palms, but the fish wouldn’t bite. “You should try feeding them something else,” he told her and stared at her crotch. Emma hadn’t been kissed, even though she told her friends otherwise. In that moment, she decided to fall in love with Mark, because she knew that calling it love would make it alright. Emma stared over her shoulder at the kitchen window. It looked miles away.

Sabrina Li is from Princeton, NJ and is currently a junior studying English at Harvard College. Her flash fiction has been selected as a semi-finalist in American Short Fiction’s flash fiction by Justin Torres and has won first place in The Los Angeles Review’s flash fiction contest.