A Love Story
By Ava DeVries
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There was once a man who built a girl of clay, smoothing the ridge of her nose and hollowing her eye sockets with careful thumbs. He put her in the oven to bake and came back the next morning to find her in sharp-edged pieces.
There was once a man who built a girl of glass. He liked the way the light refracted through her insides and painted colors on the walls, but she shattered under the weight of his body and made his skin bleed.
There was once a man who built a girl of iron, forged in fire and wrought into shape. She was rigid and cold and hard as nails, but he left her in the rain one day and found her all rusted shut.
There was once a man who built a girl of flesh. He could feel her pulsing where he touched, warm and giving under his fingers, but he could only have her for so long before she began to rot.
There was once a man who built a girl of dreams. She visited him every night, but when the sun rose each morning, she slipped away from him again.
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Ava DeVries writes about the weird, the uncanny, and the abject. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Washington University, where she’s also pursuing her MA. Ava is a Submissions Reader for Fusion Fragment and the Lead Fiction Editor at Beneath the Garden. Her fiction has appeared in Crow & Cross Keys and Broken Antler’s BAM Quarterly. She can be found @ava_devries on Instagram and @AvaDeVries04 on Twitter.
