by Elisa Luna Ady

In Southern California, we did lines of light. We wallowed sunlit in our hopscotch puddles, paddling the concrete, our palms smoothing away the chalk silhouettes we’d long ago given up on. We held the light still with the fine points of our teeth. We dulled and nuzzled and whetted. We swooned beside the desert succulents—agave and red maids and nopales we dreamed of de-needling for fun. We filed ourselves on our first light, which was also our final, which would never end because the light was a snake swallowing its own tail. The light went on around us, duplicating, raising objects, furthering itself and its attendant parts. The light lengthened and burrowed and bit into its own bite, committing cannibalism in such a way that we were forced to fawn over its littlest wounds, its loveliest edgewise slants. We knew the light to be indestructible, unerring. We loved it as it loved us and in this fashion we marked the years, growing slower, spotting, husks held over until we could hold on no longer.

Elisa Luna Ady is a writer from Southern California and a 2025 Anthony Veasna So Scholar in Fiction. Her poetry and fiction are featured or forthcoming in Adroit Journal, Passages North, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago, where she’s at work on several full-length projects. Find her at: elunady.net