Alaya Dawn Johnson

The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men.

Gods are what people worship. Men are what die.

The past stands in the path of the future, knowing it will be crushed.

In the dark, I seem to stretch. Without a body to witness, I grow and grow with my pleasure. I feel like a constellation, a concept hung on a scattering of stars.

Hands and lips and teeth, and you'd forgotten-no, you'd never known-this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.

Then you remember that Jack--that's his name, the mac & cheese--plays lacrosse. That's probably where he got all those yummy muscles. You need two hands for lacrosse.A pinky? Damn, you might as well starve yourself.

Amid all that blood of the dying sun, the verde was still alive.

So I take my lover, my king, and I put him in a pedestal and I cut him down. A man, like the ones who ruined the world.

After everything that's happened, her fear of requesting a prescription or of asking Trevor about his mother baffles her. Shouldn't life-altering events make you less afraid of the little stuff? But it's the little stuff that paralyzes her: talking, eating, dressing, sleeping. Everyone in school is afraid of the apocalypse; she is afraid of living through it.