Let Me See

by Aileen O’Dowd

I take up residence in my lover’s eyes so that I can be there when it happens — the inevitable fall from grace. I’ll watch, safely sheltered in the canopy of his lids, when he rips the candy from my lips and tells me — he never loved me anyways. I’ll look down at myself with disgust — see the red-faced, mascara-stained woman, begging him to stay. Please, she’ll say, I never meant to hurt you. It meant nothing. I was drunk.

6S

Aileen O’Dowd lives in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review.