By Lindsey Baker

He was upset, curled up on his side of the motel bed wearing that silly paisley shirt while the new year dawned, unsatisfied. The street under our window was clogged with figures in gold and black, their feet stamping in the cold like mares in heat. When it’s that sort of midnight it’s easy to believe that life happens on purpose. I asked him to please get up for our kiss and instead he touched his toes and tore his legs off in thick strips of flesh and muscle, wound them around his fingers, splattered them against the wall like squids. Exhausted, he went to sleep. In the morning, the year of the red rooster, his legs grew back and I rubbed them with my hands until they turned pink with blood flow. The color was all off and they were too short but he said he didn’t mind. They were enough for now. I sat him by the window so he could watch the birds worm and roost, worm and roost, worm and roost, following their movement with the tip of his sore tongue against the glass.

Lindsey Baker lives and writes in Atlanta, GA. Her fiction has previously appeared in The Molotov Cocktail and Blood Moon Rising Magazine.