And Then You Weren’t by Cheryl Anne Gardner

Once, I painted a green field, you standing in it, the wind in your hair and in the lace hems of your dress. You cut the skin from your breast and gave it to me. I set my hair on fire and gave you the ash. We made love in the moonlight, that field now grey, and as I pressed my thumbs into your throat, you said, “Shhh, I can hear it, breathing, thick, in the distance…”  You asked me a question, but I can’t remember what it was. Then you said you wished you had a glass eye, one that would never grow hazy when you looked at me, like the marbles we played with on the street when we were kids. I had one in my pocket just for such an occasion. You laughed and you laughed and you laughed … and then you didn’t.

© 2012 Cheryl Anne Gardner, First Appeared at Fictionaut

Cheryl Anne Gardner is a hopeless dark romantic, lives in a haunted house, and often channels the spirits of Poe, Kafka, and de Sade. She prefers novellas and flash fiction to writing bios because she always seems to forget what point of view she is in. When she isn’t writing, she likes to chase marbles on a glass floor, eat lint, play with sharp objects, and make taxidermy dioramas with dead flies. Her writing has been described as “beautifully grotesque,” her characters “deliciously disturbed.” Her short fiction has been published in dozens of journals including Dustbin, Hobo Pancakes, Carnage Conservatory, Pure Slush, Negative Suck, Danse Macabre, and at The Molotov Cocktail among others. She lives with her husband on the East Coast USA, and she is currently the head fiction editor at Apocrypha and Abstractions Literary Journal.

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