By WILLOW DELP
General content warning.
She has the sharpest teeth.
She is seventeen years old, and she has mastered the art of cruelty. She brings people close enough, lures them with her sweetness — her fair skin, her honeyed voice. She emanates not just a sort of radiance (although she does, unquestionably), but a sort of innocence, a sort of cuteness. She is small, five-three. Bite-size. But she is the one that bites.
***
She goes to school and crunches her jaws into people’s throats. And it sustains her, this abject, utter meanness — it nourishes. It feeds. It fed when nothing else did — it fed when the pantry was empty, the fridge bare. It fed her when nobody at home would. When she lived with her mother, the days were long silences of crushing absence, and the nights were punctuated with wails and littered with broken glass. She took those sharp edges on for herself.
And now, she lives with her aunt. The fridge is full of fresh produce, the pantry bulging with processed snacks in rainbow-colored packaging, but she still doesn’t eat. She grows gaunt — pale and ghostlike, hair falling out in golden-colored wisps — but in high school, she glistens under the fluorescent ceiling lights. She is a beautiful ghost.
***
Saltines are the color of pearls, and she knows this because she’s stared at them both so much. Saltines are one of the few foods she eats, one of the few things she can stand pass her lips, and when she crushes them with her teeth, she is clinging onto every crumb.
Her pearl necklace hangs loosely around her neck, lying lazily atop jutting collarbones, and no matter how much she feels them bump hard against her waxy skin, she’ll always keep it on. The necklace was the last thing she gave her, the last object binding mother to daughter. The pearls have dulled, but still, they shine. They are the color of saltines.
***
She didn’t live to see eighteen — trapped in girlhood, forever, her youth eternally preserved. The entire school came to her funeral, watched in lurid fascination as their beloved waif was lowered into the ground. She was good to a few people, bad to most, but there was something enchanting about her all the same. She was the closest thing they had to royalty, and then she was gone.
She is gone.
The worms feast on her body as it decays. She tastes sweet.
In the dark soil, not even the pearls shine.
Writer | Willow Delp ’26 | wdelp26@amherst.edu
Editor | David Duehr ’28 | dduehr28@amherst.edu