Sam

Ants in a two-mile-long line of traffic, grains of sand behind my ears. You are slow with your hands and your eyes ask my lips to say yes. I shift the car into park ignore the slamming of car horns

they want to move six inches. Your hand is in my shorts.

My feet are in your lap and you tug on the hairs that my razor missed above my ankle. The old TV is background noise and the volume is never right. We spend ten minutes every night turning the dial. It’s too loud or too quiet. It stays on the same setting. I wear the only helmet while on your bike. Sweat on leather my exposed skin blisters. I whisper in your ear at red lights. Screaming when you go ninety in a forty-five is encapsulated and erased by wind.

You climb into the clawfoot bathtub fully clothed and your boots send air bubbles to the surface I am trying to find but you hold me down by my shoulders. I don’t struggle. We watch each other through the water and when you pull me back up your eyes are red and you’re out of breath and god I wish you’d just fucking do it

we’re both crying.

I am too eager and you are too too too unpermitting and too young to understand Too young to understand that it’s never the last

• 62 Sophia Ficarrotta

time when you say it’s the last time

Metal in my mouth. Footsteps I taste metal in my mouth and hear your footsteps Your pant legs have dirt all over them I trip over a tree branch You drag me by arms to an open grave and I miss the hot sand and plastic yellow shovels Do you know how heavy dirt weighs on the lungs?

Trust me, you say. Trust me, you beg. And I do.

These Fish Bite • 63