Lizzy Burnam 🐞

1. Where I came from: 
A lightbulb sits in a cardboard box in the closet. It’s an extra—just in case. For years and years and years, the lightbulb sits in that box, unlit, waiting for the death that would free it from darkness. 

2. Where I’m going: 
A woman with a tremor in her hand scrawls a letter on a sheet torn out of a yellow legal pad. She folds the sheet and slides it into an envelope—very gently, as if laying down a sleeping baby in its crib. The letter is shuffled through many hands before it lands in the mailbox for which it embarked on its journey. Unfolded at last. But the handwriting is cramped and illegible. 

3. What I’m made of: 
After snow: A churning tangle of snakes, twisted together to share heat. The collective hiss rises like steam from the pit, only half asleep. After sunshine: The social lives of reptiles are very poorly understood. It is assumed, however, that the solitary snake is not sentimental about the skin she shed. 

4. Why: 
Once upon a time, a little girl wandered into the bleak, dark woods and returned the next morning with bleeding knees and elbows. The next night, the little girl wandered into the same dark woods and returned with fresh wounds. And again the next night. And again. Why must you hurt yourself? asked the little girl’s mother. Don’t you know the definition of insanity? asked the little girl’s teacher. But the little girl returned to the woods, night after night, her body engulfed by bruises, until one morning, the little girl stumbled out of the woods, collapsed, and died. During the autopsy, the medical examiner split open the little girl’s chest and found, in place of her heart, a compass.