"FEED" last day
Harley stopped painting her nails. Not because she didn’t care, she still wore the white hoodie that swallowed her whole like a straightjacket made of cotton. But the tiny rituals, the gloss, the eyeliner wings, the chewing gum she swore kept her sane all stopped one by one, like lights going out in the distance. She was conserving energy, maybe. Or time. She watched her own reflection that day, lingered longer than she used to, as though waiting for it to move on its own. In the bathroom mirror. In shop windows. In Dylan’s eyes. There was a shift. Not loud. Not sharp. Just enough. It started when she found the dead cat outside the building early in the morning, stiff in the snow with its stomach split open, pink spilling like melted bubblegum. She stared at it for fifteen minutes. When Dylan found her, she didn’t say anything. Just asked if he had a lighter. She didn’t smoke. “I think I’m going to die here,” she told Vanessa over FaceTime a few hours later. Not dramatic. No...