The following is an extract from M. J. Severn's flash fiction piece entitled Faithful:
When he met me, I had the void, I nursed it in a perversely sentimental way, like a mother nourishes a terminal baby. I knew the end. I knew he would fill it, overflow it, and it would be a precious pit no longer. He would take my perfect private deformity from me, touch it with his tender healing hexes, try to put it back seamlessly, and this was the worst assault of love.
And I loved him, I loved him with a fierce, deep purple attitude, a brooding, dragonfruit-throttling love it was, the love that is made concentrated and dripped into mood rings.
Mine was a divine difficulty: deification at twenty-four.
When he made me cry, I felt it was a glib dismantling of a sacred culture, a heretic demolition of kingdoms, by something so potent and unremarkable as a feminine tear. When he made me grin, bear my teeth, I felt my territory, which included the world, swell until even the gruelling moat of my void was stretched to depletion, dried up, its currents no longer embossed with electric eels...
M. J. Severn
2022
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