New Short Fiction by Mackenzie Denofio

 Summer Sleepover Fun! 

We arrive with our pillows packed and our mother’s kisses still clinging to our forehead. It's our first night away and our mothers are worried the other mothers won’t let us use the phone in the middle of the night if we need to. We brush her off.

 Our lips are covered in cherry-flavored lip balm, our bathing suits are tied tight, and we brought a Ouija board for when the adults fall asleep. 

 We’re going to say Bloody Mary three times in the mirror and talk to a ghost named Evelyn from Georgia who died when she was seven and then we’re going to see the shadows of unknown people outside the bedroom windows and hug each other so tight in between giggles because we did it. We brought Evelyn back. 

 And we’ll watch a scary movie that we’ll watch again in ten years and find to be silly and stupid but for now we’re adults and we chose the movie, and our parents don’t even know we’re watching it and we’ll have nightmares for weeks, but we won’t tell anyone. We won’t tell anyone how wonderful it feels to shriek under blankets and have someone else’s legs around us. Because for once the man who sits on our laundry chair every night as we try to go to sleep is real and he’s killing girls like us and we knew it all along. 

 We go swimming until the skin around our fingers is curled around themselves. And I turn to you, and I tell you that I want you to drown me.

 You step on my back as I lie on the bottom of the shallow end. We’ve done this before. We do this all the time.

 You ask me to slap your face and I do, and you slap mine. We see what a punch in the arm would feel like and wrangle our limbs around each other until they’re crushing. We know now, children are always looking for death, they want to come face to face with it, seconds away from it, and have made the choice. 

 I want you to hurt me, I say because we’re play pretending, because our whole lives have been play pretend. But we know one day we could be slapped, drowned, choked and we want to know the feeling beforehand so when we feel someone’s fingernails drag around the thin skin of our throats, we can say oh yes this again, I know this. 

 I want you to drown me. I say because I don’t trust anyone else. Only you. An adult wouldn’t understand it, they were never like us. Your hands are kind and soft and you’re wearing Barbie pink nail polish with silver flakes of glitter on the manicured edge, like we had discussed last week. Your hands are the only ones that can dip me under the water and take away my air and then return it again like new. I open my eyes even though it stings, and I see the sun under or over a flimy layer and then your face, looking down at me. 

 Your face is there, and you smile, and you’re impressed because I lasted so long, and you don’t know if you can prove yourself. I think you can. 

 That night I won’t be able to sleep even as we’re pressed together nearly cheek to cheek. The curtain will move in the circular breeze the fan makes and I’ll see a figure out on the lawn, and I’ll know. We’re right. We’re always right. 

- © Mackenzie Denofio 2022

Mackenzie Denofio (she/her/hers) is an emerging writer in Boston, currently getting her MA at Emerson College. Her work can be found in Blind Corner Literary Magazine, Generic Magazine, and Crack the Spine Literary Magazine. When not writing or reading she can be found fantasizing about walking the halls of a haunted manor as a gothic heroine.