Flash Fiction

Dead Girl Summer

by Saumya Sawant

Hot summer days, we perspire, existing only in those moments when your broken AC kicks to life, blows out stale cold air. Summer of our seventeenth year, we itch to discard these skins and take flight anew. I press my feet into the white of your bed sheets and wonder if this is what it feels like to rot. You lie next to me. We are two dead girls in a morgue. The skin on your thighs pulls and sticks like brown dates; I fantasize about prying them open. Later, when you hand me a red popsicle and keep the blue one for yourself, your dark eyes meeting mine, I will wonder how you knew my favorite color was purple. Outside, the sun bleaches bones white, but not here. Here, we slip our skins off, and wait.

Appeared in Issue Fall '23