“Well, that’s depressing. Don’t you want to travel? I’m going to Italy in a few weeks for my junior year abroad, Venice and Rome. I’ve already been, but I loved it so much, I didn’t see the harm in going back there for a full semester. Plus, two of the girls in my sorority are coming, too. The art history’s good there, of course, but we’ll probably just party. Apparently classes are a joke.” She drums her fingers against her stomach, counting the seconds until the next clap of thunder.

Annie resists the couch’s gaping mouth and rises. She walks to the edge of the porch. To her left, lightning almost blasts a tree branch. She slips off her shoes and socks and steps onto the grass. In a matter of seconds she is soaked, water leaking into her belly button, down the nape of her neck.

“Hey! Come back here.” But Georgia’s voice is devoured by the wind. Annie walks to the edge of the lake. The water laps at her ankles playfully, urging her onward. She closes her eyes and lies on the bank. The rain pelts her, punishes her. The lake pulls her forward and her body shakes with the ground as another clap of thunder drums through her ears.

She lies like that, sinking into the damp earth. Her body buzzes as lightning flashes behind her eyes. She is at the bottom of the lake, the fish nibbling at her chafed corpse, body bloated and blue like a whale. When the fishermen find her, they’ll slice open her stomach and all there will be is cotton, tendrils of it, coiling out of her.

She had the same sensation, felt the same thrum of anticipation, when she was fucked for the first time, by a boy from the ice cream parlor, who worked her same shift, the feeling of maybe dying, but in a good way, embodying a physical experience she’d never had before, her body hoisted onto his bed, his shirt still on, sweat stains at the armpits. He asked if he could grip her head. She said yes, and he took a fistful of hair, bit her hard on her exposed shoulder when she took her one free arm and tried to wrap it around his neck.

She saw white when he got in, her eyesight turning hazy as she stared at the clock on his bedside table, at those numbers that in this moment meant nothing, just another scrap of man-made creation, destined to burn with the rest of the earth. To die with her. He flipped her over. No clock. Her head banging against the wall of his room, a thumbtack searing a mark into her forehead. He apologized for hurting her. But she didn’t mind it, the pain. Then he came.