by Genevieve Bentz

Genevieve Bentz is a writer and attorney living in Washington, D.C. She studied creative writing at Princeton University under Joyce Carol Oates, Edmund White, and Chang-Rae Lee, and previously working as a ghostwriter and staff writer for the Brooklyn Quarterly. Her work has been published in the Nassau Literary Review and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as on her personal Substack, Cold Cream.

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Even on hot days her husband was still cold, clutching his phone, buzzing louder than the cicadas crawling out of the baked ground. Sex-crazed, infected with fungus, she watched them turn white, limping toward one last fuck before dying, just like him. Abortion and divorce were hard to get these days but she knew what women in the South always had: you kill more flies with laced honey. A traditional housewife—pesticide puddings, death-cap mushroom gravies, arsenic whiskies—she waited for his skin to turn blue and then, like her mothers before her, she would finally spread fragile, translucent wings.