Fishflies
/Erin Moon White
Inside a refrigerated convention center at the Midwest American Model Search, Amelia and her mother joined a desperate mob of kids and their parents in a long, twitchy line. A few were finishing their posters and making last-minute adjustments to outfits and accessories. They fixed their hair with black plastic barbershop combs or puffed it up with hairspray, coughing under the halo of chlorofluorocarbons. Amelia wiped gloss over her lips with a sticky pink wand and spat gum into a wrapper, tucking the cinnamal blob into the smallest pocket of her purse. When it was her turn, she lifted a homemade headshot glued to poster board then lowered it back down so the agents could take a look at her. Angling to show her profile before moving on to the next station, she widened her smile.
Amelia didn’t want to be a model or even believe she could become one. But the commercial breaks during episodes of Star Search had convinced her this pathway might be a viable loophole to an early acting career, so she’d registered, sharing the news with her mother on the morning of her fourteenth birthday. It wasn’t an audition, Amelia conceded in response to her mother’s no-fucking-way face, but it was a place to start. Carol agreed. Only on the condition of Amelia’s birthday.
As the line moved forward from one folding table to the next, a few agents offered their business cards along with mild flattery on Amelia’s bone structure. After three hours of this process, Amelia was feeling hungry and rejected. She wanted to leave. To eat in the revolving restaurant at the top of her mother’s office building, the one with red roses floating on round white tables where Carol got a half-off tenant’s discount once per month. They planned their lunch order. Two French onion soups, one chicken Caesar salad to share. A man with a blonde ponytail jumped in front of his table to pull Amelia aside. His rabid enthusiasm about her fitness for a career in print modeling was alarming but impressive. He took them to lunch in the tower and paid for it.
Instead of renting the mothbally cabin on Mullet Lake for a week as they had for a decade, Carol reallocated their modest annual vacation fund and bought two plane tickets. Amelia and her mother flew from Detroit to LaGuardia the day after school let out, landing during the morning commute. Their yellow cab jolted through shimmering rainbows of exhaust. It was boiling and Amelia felt carsick. At a stoplight, a bike courier approached the window on Carol’s side of the car and smiled with a mouthful of broken front teeth. He leaned forward into Carol’s face, then pointed at Amelia. Her mother rolled up her window. When the cab ride ended, Amelia opened her door and puked onto a curbside pyramid of empty green champagne bottles.
The agency lobby was mercifully chilled and playing Destiny’s Child, white couches spread out in a wide concrete box. The man from the search convention stood and waved when he saw Amelia. His golden hair breezed around his shoulders. It looked very soft. He handed two warm Aquafinas and subway maps to Amelia and her mother, then gave a rundown of Amelia’s weekend as they went up in an elevator to his office. Amelia sipped her bottled water and tried to look fresh, still shaking from being sick. The agency had arranged a rigorous schedule of go-sees and test shoots. Following a breakneck orientation that emphasized proper hydration as the best kind of skincare, Amelia signed some papers and the modeling agent, her agent she realized, was pressing the button beside the elevator going down and she and her mother were headed back out into the overheated city.
The sunrise beamed through a gap in the hotel’s blackout curtains, lasering onto Amelia’s eyelids. She kicked off the heavy duvet and took a shower. Moisturized her face and combed her hair into a smooth ponytail. Drank an entire bottle of water. After breakfast, unnerved by the subway’s aroma of piss, Carol instead hailed a cab and accompanied her daughter to an apartment in Brooklyn. A man with tangled dark hair told Amelia’s mother she could return in four hours when they were done working. He led Amelia upstairs and placed her on a barstool in his humid linoleum kitchen, a fat grey tabby panting dog-like under her bare feet.
A woman carrying endless trays of eyeshadow appeared, introducing herself as the photographer’s girlfriend. She assembled her tools—sponges, brushes, and creams—and began applying Amelia’s makeup, smearing handful after handful of beige glue onto her forehead. It kept melting off. She warned Amelia to stop sweating but Amelia couldn’t, not even with both box fans blowing directly on her. They styled her topless under a white blazer with tall black heels and the full coverage hipster briefs Amelia had worn under her street clothes. The photographer stepped back and appraised his work, reaching into a shopping bag on the floor and fluttering out a rosé satin thong.
“They’re brand new,” he said, pointing to the tags.
“I’m wearing my own underwear,” Amelia told them, crossing her arms. And this was a riot.
“She wears her own underwear!” They both began to shout and dance around. They poured themselves Sunny D and vodka, offering her nothing to drink, not even water. From behind the lens, the photographer’s wild black hair shook. He leaned his squinting face from one side of the camera to the other, wagging or twirling a finger when he wanted Amelia to move her body parts into a different formation. She was instructed to keep her chin tilted up, lips parted, eyes cast down.
“Look at the camera like you’re looking at the boy you love,” he instructed. At the time, this translated to a look of terror. The boy she’d loved since kindergarten never missed a chance to reject Amelia. But she knew what he meant. She made a face like she might be willing to have sex with the camera, but probably not, which pleased the photographer and his girlfriend.
“Yes. You torture him,” said the girlfriend. The couple kissed and the shutter started ticking again.
When it was over, they ignored Amelia as she collected herself. She pulled on her jeans and white tank top then waited on the stoop for her mother’s taxi to arrive. A woman taking out her trash next door frowned at Amelia, shaking her head as she walked back inside her building. Behind a zippered horizon of brownstones across the street, the sun was setting. It burned Amelia’s face, melting the layers of foundation into thick streams of sweat. A cab pulled up. Sliding over in the backseat, Carol surveyed her daughter with concern.
“I’m fine,” Amelia said. “They said you have to wear a lot of makeup to show up on film.”
After a handful of tepid go-sees, they went home. Weeks passed in the liquid monotony of summer before Amelia’s freshman year, June delivering its annual plague of fishflies in prolific hoards. Winged, goggle-eyed maggots hatched en masse each morning from the lake, leaving a humid current of crotch-like musk in the air. They covered the pavement, popping wetly under car tires, and congregated on reflective surfaces in a seamy coating of walnut pesto. At the end of their 24-hour lifespan, the bugs were swept into shimmering khaki heaps along the curb, the horrific cycle starting over at dawn.
Hiding indoors from the infestation, Amelia hung out alone in the attic next to a window air-conditioning unit. She thought about her photos obsessively, replaying the test shoot in her mind. When a thick manila envelope arrived jammed into the brass mail slot, she tore it open with her teeth. Scanning the rows of black and white cells on the contact sheet for her own image, the underdressed child she found looking back with frightened eyes and her jaw set made Amelia wince. She went out back to where her mother was kneeling next to flats of pansies. Carol wiped her hands on her jeans and the sweat from her forehead, taking the folder and fanning away the flies with it. She looked down at the pictures.
“We’re never calling those people back,” she said finally, pushing her spade into the soft dirt beside rows of blue-and-white flowers. They agreed Amelia’s father would never see the prints and hid them at the bottom of the kitchen trash.
While Amelia’s parents ritually argued on the back porch after dinner, Amelia shoved her hand into the garbage bag past slimy uneaten pasta until her fingertips found the folder’s thick edges. She tucked the pictures into a magenta rayon duffel and walked outside into the late summer dusk toward her best friend’s house. Amelia found her friend working on a portrait of the family Great Dane, Margaret, in the basement where they’d spent almost every night that summer while Carly’s parents smoked pot and cigarettes in the garage and mostly left them alone. Carly cleaned her brushes over the laundry sink as Amelia presented the contact sheets one by one. “You look like you’re thirty years old, you little baby whore,” Carly howled, dumping out a jar of mud-colored water.
Amelia did an imitation of the photographer and Carly did an imitation of Amelia. “Prove to me you want to be famous,” Amelia said, deepening her voice. Carly kissed Amelia on the mouth. She tasted like berry Chapstick and mint chip ice-cream. Her tongue practiced against Amelia’s. They battled for territory and counted one another’s molars, playing for gag reflexes or little bites. Their abs were sore from laughing, cheeks damp with spit as Margaret nosed between them with her snout, begging for scratches and snacks. They fell backward onto the pull-out couch, Margaret climbing over them like a giant spider. Amelia sat up and fed the dog Cheetos. Carly pushed a tape into the VCR. When they woke to Margaret whining to be let out, it was early the next day.
There was nothing to do. There was always nothing to do, but they were sick of it. Despite an obvious reverse-snobbery that rejected the adjoining suburbs as preppy and pathetic, Amelia and Carly decided they were bored enough to spend the day shopping the main street people referred to as The Square. Wearing bikinis with cutoff shorts—optimistic about winning the attention of imagined older boys—the two friends rode their bikes the short distance to where the city ended and the lakefront suburbs began. They locked their bikes to a lamppost and wandered the quaint retail drag arm in arm, swatting at the bugs, lugging their shared ennui in and out of bookstores and boutiques and the pharmacy. They stole nail polish and sour candy and guides to astrology, Sun In and disposable cameras ripped from their foil pouches.
At the gas station they bought cigarettes, practicing inhales to a mantra they’d learned—Mom’s home, Mom’s home. They smoked while following a lush, mansioned cul-de-sac to where giant lakefront homes ended and the private park began. Nauseous, Amelia lowered her cigarette, stubbing it out against a birch tree and leaving a dark scar. Carly took off her sunglasses and surveyed the park. “Let’s go to the pool,” she said. Along the tennis courts, they found a gap between a brick wall and an ivy-tangled fence and squeezed past with bellies sucked to ribs, affecting the same casual posture that enabled successful petty theft. Through a brick hut they entered a steamy beige women’s locker room that exited portal-like onto a concrete pool deck sprawling with striped loungers and bright towels, chemical blue water bobbing thickly with swimmers.
Nobody inquired after a park pass, and somehow, there were no fishflies. Potentially, Carly reasoned, because rich people could pay to have them removed with special technology. Or maybe, Amelia thought, it was due to the levels of chlorine pumped into the pool to dilute baby piss. Their luck felt miraculous. They photographed each other with their yellow plastic and carboard cameras—posing on the diving boards and under laddered chairs where too-tan lifeguards loomed in their red tank tops, noses white with zinc, whistling with authority whenever they got the chance.
After swimming, Carly and Amelia each dry swallowed one of Carly’s mother’s Valiums. They sprayed their hair with Sun In and fell asleep on their loungers, waking up stiff and pink, heads peroxide orange and buzzy from the downers. On the walk home, they impersonated the other bathers. Fussy mommies with their coolers full of juice pouches and string cheese. Nannies with armpit hair begging in French and German accents for toddlers to please use their words and put on sunscreen. Small-nosed girls in polo shirts and tennis skorts, swim team boys in their self-serious Speedos and rubber caps. Kids tormenting the seagulls with limp concession stand fries. Amelia and Carly snuck into the pool every day after, maintaining the pretense that they hated it and everyone they encountered there.
Amelia came home each afternoon with wet hair and a deeper tan. She told her parents they’d gotten permission from the park guards to go into the pool, and her parents believed her. Amelia’s father was making chicken kebabs on the grill when Amelia returned later than usual, the long Midwestern summer dragging daylight to nine pm. She sat down with a paper plate and peeled the skin on a blistered green pepper. Her father cleared his throat. He was being made partner at his accounting firm. Amelia’s mother kissed him and set down her fork, searching for the reaction on her daughter’s face. It was like something off television. They were moving to a bigger house in the suburbs, and Amelia would be attending the public high school there in the fall. “They have an excellent theatre program,” her father added. “We thought you would be pleased.”
Amelia wanted none of it. She chucked a skewer of grilled meat across the table and knocked over her chair, releasing a nail-biting whine she hadn’t made since childhood, then slammed the front door and rushed to Carly’s house. Through copious hot tears she told her best friend what was happening, Carly’s face fixed in concentration like she was doing mental math. Margaret lifted her spindly dinosaur’s body onto the couch and stretched across their laps. Carly held Amelia’s hand. “Don’t worry so much,” she said, leaning over Margaret and resting her forehead on Amelia’s. “You won’t end up like those people.”
School began separately for the first time since kindergarten. It was still warm in October, the sky chalk blue behind a collage of yellow leaves when Amelia met Carly at The Square for the first time since summer. Amelia had on a lime green sweater set and was spritzed in the citrusy top notes every girl at her high school wore. She’d gone out and bought the same platform soled black slip-ons they all had, and she wore those too. Carly’s dark lipstick and combat boots, fishnet tights and heavy eyeliner made Amelia feel like a child. Neither of them stole anything while browsing the department store’s makeup department, but Amelia could tell Carly would have tried if she hadn’t been there, which pained her.
Outside the ice cream parlor, there were some boys from Amelia’s gym class. They eyeballed the girls eating their double chocolate scoops. “Hey Amelia,” one of them said, looking down at the fly of his tennis shorts. “Does your skanky friend want to give this a lick?” Carly fired back a litany of insults so profane an older woman passing by asked where everyone lived.
“Not in this bullshit place,” Carly answered with a mean laugh. The woman told them to go home before she called the police and the boys swaggered off, sagging cargo pants belted below their asses. Carly raged as they headed toward Amelia’s new home. “How can you stand living here?” she wanted to know, as if there was a choice. Watching Total Request Live on Amelia’s bigger and flatter television, an awkward silence began to bloom between them like algae, spreading outward each day until everything was toxic, until they stopped talking.
In the drama program at her new school, Amelia was cast in a student play. The director’s name was Thomas. He was a sophomore. Thomas’s melodramatic one-act was about a perfect family that ended with the father committing suicide in front of a police station. Amelia’s motivation playing the twelve-year-old younger sister was preadolescent shyness. In real life, Thomas was an only child with two living and loving parents. He had a borderline arrogant way of defending his script as fiction. But he wasn’t an asshole. He held eye contact and listened to people when they talked. It reminded Amelia of Carly—the way she zeroed in on people because she wanted to know things. And the way she thought she was smarter than everybody else in the room, because usually she was.
They were in line backstage during rehearsal lunch break with the rest of the cast and crew waiting for slices of sweaty cheese, shredded iceberg lettuce and perspiring deli meat provided by the stage mothers to build their own subs. Thomas was standing behind her. He whispered in Amelia’s ear, “It’s like the part was written for you.” She lunged for the scripted bait, pushing him into an empty dressing room and kissing his mouth with a measure of force meant to prove the role wasn’t written for her at all. From that point on, they were together, and when Amelia’s parents separated, she found herself shielded from grief by the bubble of having a real, first boyfriend.
Her father had rented his own apartment in a part of town with smallish houses planted in tight plots between narrow rows of driveway. Carol went over to help him furnish it. Every week, she stocked his freezer with lasagna and tuna casserole. Sometimes Amelia’s mother didn’t return until morning the next day. One afternoon after rehearsal, Amelia came home to find Carol sitting on the front porch with an empty bottle of gin at her slippered feet. Her mother didn’t drink. Amelia sat down on the same step and Carol flopped an arm around her, pulling her daughter close.
“Your father has a fiancée,” she said, breath like nail polish remover. Carol turned her head to one side, pointing out her blue topaz earring, then she turned to the other side to reveal an empty earlobe. “I left an engagement gift on her nightstand.” Crying into Amelia’s hair, Carol told her daughter how foolish she’d been. Because of course he was never coming back. He was moving to Sedona with his girlfriend, and she and Amelia were staying there in the suburbs. Carol got to keep the house. Then, years later, she put it on the market for much more than they’d paid.
They were supposed to be packing and cleaning. Amelia’s mother clutched a silver thermos of vanilla-hazelnut coffee and bourbon in one hand, phone in the other. She flicked a thumb up and down the screen as Amelia filled boxes with things to keep, donate, and throw away, updating her daughter on various people from Amelia’s past. So-and-so married that boy she went to homecoming with. Amelia’s old community theatre friend was having her third baby. Did she ever talk to whatshisname? He started a very successful restaurant downtown.
“Why don’t we go there for dinner tonight?” she suggested.
“Why do you follow these people, Mom?” Amelia asked, trying to untangle a clump of junk necklaces. “I was barely friends with them.”
“Oh, you know,” she said, taking the jewelry out of Amelia’s hands and gently pulling apart the mess of chains. “Just fun to keep up on things. I wish you were on there.” Amelia explained as she had many times before that as a therapist it was ill-advised to keep social media accounts.
“So then, how’s Thomas doing?” her mother asked. “It’s too bad he couldn’t come back with you.”
“Thomas is fine,” she said. “Much better than fine, actually. He sold his novel last week.”
“That’s so exciting,” Carol clapped. “Why didn’t you tell me? What did the two of you do to celebrate?” She scooted off the bed and put her arms around Amelia, who pulled away.
“Do you see how much there is to do before you can even think about showing this house? Also the bathrooms are filthy,” Amelia accused. “Can you please put on some clothes and grab more boxes from the garage?”
“Did you have any breakfast this morning?” Carol asked. She looked tired and hurt. “Why don’t I take over in here,” she said. “You go up to the attic and see if there’s anything you might want to keep.”
“I’m sorry,” Amelia said. “I’ll eat something. We celebrated over sushi.” Then she added, lying, “It was really nice.”
Amelia went up to the floor-level attic window where she used to read in a nest of quilts and old cushions. The blankets now were neatly folded with the pillows in a stack, but everything else was the way she remembered it. Half-melted scented candles stuck to chipped salad plates. Novels and diaries and teen magazines organized in one milk crate, scripts and songbooks stacked in another. Her mother wasn’t clinically a hoarder, but she threw away almost nothing. In a dusty water jug, an oversized bouquet of dried pink roses—the first gifts Thomas ever gave her. Amelia had gotten exactly one leading role in all of high school, and she cried for days after the play was over.
Picking at the brittle petals, she reopened the text Thomas sent the night before. Told some faculty abt book. They asked abt drinks. Ok if we host something small at ours? Amelia felt inclined to suggest they go to the bar near school without her but thought better of it and clicked the screen shut before she could change her mind.
Cecilia wasn’t a shitty person—Thomas had written in his novel—just a shitty girlfriend. Her heart was telescopic. She could handle emotions when they were cast out at a distance, but up close, she was avoidant, non- reactive, non-self-disclosing. As a therapist, Timothy could imagine, his girlfriend was probably excellent. She was an actor after all.
Cecilia was nothing like Amelia, except that she was. Along with the rhyming name and matching career path, biographical data from hometown to graduate school had been unchanged. Granted, this was all a little lazy of Thomas. But Amelia also sensed an ad hominem shortcut. Page by page, psychoanalytic greed yanked her toward the unknowable mainframe of her husband’s emotional life, where, sequined and center-stage, she expected to find herself.
“Would you even cry if I died?” Timothy asked Cecilia as she scrubbed a coffee cup that was already clean. Cecilia stopped washing dishes and looked out through the window over the kitchen sink. She drummed her soapy, manicured fingertips on the countertop.
Timothy remembered the way she used to come alive in school plays, how her performances made him hopeful there might be more to his girlfriend than how she was offstage, with him. As soon as the curtain fell, he would rush to the dressing room with flowers, thinking he could catch a glimpse of Cecilia in her illuminated state. But he never did. He always found the same impatient girl tugging out bobby pins or removing her makeup with a smudgy cucumber-scented wipe, pointing to where she wanted him to drop the bouquet. Cecilia, he thought, was better when she was in character.
After a moment, she turned to face Timothy and said, “Would I cry? Probably not, Timothy. Is that something that’s important to you?” Cecilia looked as though she might be sick and returned to washing her cup.
And then, after a mere thirty-seven pages, Cecilia disappeared. Amelia was slow to finish the rest of the book. When she reached the end a few weeks later, she told Thomas she loved it, consoling herself with the declining state of book publishing, on the figment of a chance his novel would ever sell. Draft after draft, she performed her role as devoted and objective therapist-reader-spouse, limiting feedback to basic formal elements: pacing, length, chronology, typos. And with each next iteration, the book’s potential seeped into her psyche like a neurotoxin. Thomas found an agent. The manuscript was sent to publishers.
It wasn’t that Amelia was jealous. It was more like being deconstructed in front of fun-house mirrors—a type of humiliation, only absurd. Because it wasn’t really Amelia she was seeing broken into pieces, it was a character. It was fiction. It was fake. Still, paranoia festered in her every time Thomas came another step closer to realizing his artistic ambition, and when the editor called to congratulate him, Amelia saw herself at the book release, fumbling with a handful of cheese and a plastic cup of bad wine failing to graciously perform the role of wife and lover who happens not to be the author’s muse.
Whatever look was on Amelia’s face betrayed the many cozy layers of bullshit she’d fluffed up around herself in reassurance. “You didn’t think it would happen, did you?” Thomas asked, setting down his phone.
“You didn’t think it would happen either,” Amelia reminded him.
Then, squinting a little as if to be sure he was seeing clearly, Thomas added, “You didn’t want it to happen.” Amelia said nothing.
Wedged behind a green Rubbermaid tub of Carol’s outmoded wardrobe, a pile of sharp wooden angles stuck out under a bedsheet. Amelia crawled over and uncovered a stack of paintings. On the first canvas, a girl wearing a pink string bikini was shown stretched out poolside on a chaise lounge. She wore massive dark sunglasses and boasted a slick mosaic of square abdominals. The girl was almost grotesque against the smooth aquamarine background. But she begged to be looked at, and closely. Her complexion was sunburned and oily, white streaks of sunblock highlighting bumps of acne on her chin. Her legs were equine. Hooved. It was Amelia.
In the painting underneath the first, there was another piece depicting similar themes but differently zoomorphic. The girl figure stood on a diving board, tall and winking over her shoulder. Elk antlers wreathed in a crown of bramble and burs sprouted from the top of her head, a blurry pageant queen’s sash of insects draped gauzily across her back—fishflies arranged to spell, Princess. In the bottom right corner, the artist’s initials swirled together in cursive lowercase, clc. Carly Lynne Cantor.
The last piece was larger than the other two, an envelope taped to the back. Amelia unstuck it, shaking the contents into her palm. A smaller envelope fell out first—the pool photos and their negatives—then the modeling prints. Amelia cringed, stuffing the prints under a pillow. The painting featured a stark white background and even harsher definition on Amelia’s young face. Tense-eyed and balanced in heels on skinny baby giraffe legs, wearing only underwear and a cheap suit jacket. A stroke of cadmium red blooming on her bitten lower lip.
Amelia remembered the way her best friend sometimes used to look at her, like she was reading her mind and aura at the same time. A kind of heat Amelia hadn’t felt since fourteen flickered in her, the lawless current that ran through everything she and Carly did together pulsing from a distance.
Another text from Thomas. Everything ok over there? The sting Amelia had been feeling over the novel was noticeably less acute. She took a breath. Fine by me re: party, she replied. Just packing up over here. Invite whomever. She gathered the canvasses in her arms. Downstairs in the living room, her mother was kneeling on the floor wrapping Christmas ornaments in newspaper.
“Why didn’t you tell me about these?” Amelia asked, arranging the stack of paintings in a row against the couch.
“I forgot they were up there,” said Carol, sitting back on her heels. “Carly dropped them off quite some time ago. I gave her your number.”
Amelia remembered a voicemail Carly left for her around the time she and Thomas were planning their wedding. She said she was finishing a project for her master’s thesis and would Amelia mind calling her. Things were too busy, Amelia had reasoned, to catch up after fifteen years. Plus the wedding was small and running over budget—they couldn’t easily extend an invite if the conversation led them in that direction. Amelia made a good faith promise to get back to Carly after the honeymoon, but never did.
“When did she come by?” Amelia asked her mother.
“Oh. A few years ago, I think. When the Cantors moved up north. She said she was moving to London or Berlin or someplace?” Carol said. She stopped mummifying a porcelain angel and took in the paintings. “They’re kind of disturbing, aren’t they?”
“I feel like they look more like me than I actually look like me. Does that make sense?”
“She certainly captured your je ne sais quoi or what-have-you. You two were so close. And wild together. Not like any friendship I ever had,” Carol admitted.
Amelia took a roll of bubble wrap and sat beside her mother. Shoulders touching, they swaddled objects from their past lives, taking care to package each item tightly, but not so tight that they would warp or break or be too difficult to unwrap later. Outside, the air shifted and went still, sky going dark green before splitting open with thunder and hail in a type of meteorological moodswing specific to the Midwest.
The summer after she moved to the new house, Amelia spent almost every day at the pool without Carly, rotating through groups of friends who never fully claimed her as their own. Whenever it grew overcast, the lifeguards would blow their whistles at the first streak of lightning or muffled boom of thunder, signaling for everyone to flee the water. The girls stood shivering under the gazebo, hugging towels around their bodies. The leaves flipped over onto their silvery undersides. Earth connected to sky by dark, vertical clouds. Amelia loved these disruptions, nature’s theatrical disregard for routine.
But the other girls were annoyed. If the rain lasted more than a few minutes, they started organizing the contents of their beach bags and combing leave-in conditioner through each other’s hair. They complained and rolled their eyes when the weather didn’t blow over, when sirens started to blare, announcing it was time to take shelter at home. As they hopped onto bikes or into their parents’ cars, Amelia stayed back and watched lightning slice through the sky. She marveled at the audacity of those storms—wind chopping up the lake and ripping into the trees. The way something invisible could tear itself apart, insisting on being seen.
Erin Moon White is a writer and artist from Michigan. Her work has appeared in [PANK], Blunderbuss Magazine, Mistress, Shampoo, The Oleander Review, and elsewhere, including a Mass Poetry Festival collection of ekphrastic poems. She holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University and is currently a Gish Jen Fiction Fellow at the Writers' Room of Boston.
