Gnaw

Leah felt reckless. She sucked air through her teeth as she strode across the sand to the bonfire. There were still a few beers in the bucket. Nothing she liked, but that wasn’t the point. Jimmy stood close to where the waves rushed up the beach and sucked back out. Hungry, the ocean is hungry, she thought. He’d looked past her when she’d arrived, kept on talking and laughing with his mates. Once she had sculled the can, she licked her fingers and ran them over her thick brows, just like her mother had done at the front door when she’d left for school that morning. The sand was light under her feet as she set off towards him. She softened her movements as she came closer to him, felt her hip bones scoring the inside of her dress. She reached out to touch his shoulder, the warm bitter beer sloshing in her belly.

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Catherine Bisley (Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is a writer and filmmaker based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her produced film work includes Untitled Groping Revenge Fairytale, Cetology, and Garage Stories: A Strange Collective Experience of Isolation. She was shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize in 2020.