Zoë Davis

The first time she bled: moths.

They poured from the wound: legs, wings, powder puffs. Hundreds, thousands, and not one drop of blood. It was beautiful, the way we froze, shock forming a ring of us. No discomfort poppied her face. She didn’t stem the flow. She simply let herself become a cocoon, a human flower, eyelashes petalling. A brittle hurricane glittered between us.

We’d been dating for two months. She was the window I saw my future through. She smiled, cried, and laughed with consuming passion, yet I hadn’t seen this coming. Not a hint in her mother’s frown or her father’s indifferent shrug. There was no family history. No familiar pain.