by Molly McGill
Dear ever-faithful diary,
I yet again turn to you due to a lack of real companionship in my life, keeping the pretence that you are a real friend with whom I can share my sadnesses and my joys. I hope to soon no longer rely on your fabricated kinship but, for now, I will have you lend an ear to my thoughts and ramblings once again.
Every day I fill these pages with my mourning for the days of my humanity, when I basked in the sun’s joyful face and enjoyed the simple pleasures of summer.
I must have told you my earliest memory; of painful sunburn and salty tears that my mother wiped away while soothing my scorched arms with ointment. I didn’t learn my lesson of course, unable to resist the siren song of blissful heat, making my sunburn worse.
Every childhood painting I made the effort to preserve captures me in sun-drunk bliss, tanned face and pale hair. Simple pleasures now just a memory, faded like the artistic endeavours of my younger self.
I keep those memories safe, behind the thick glass of picture frames a lover gifted me long ago. My only pastime is to gaze at them for hours; my eyes would have dried to shrivelled marbles in my head, had I still my humanity.
That’s why the paintings must stay behind glass, my friend. If I were to touch them with my pale fingers, the infection might bleed the mortality and sunshine from them, like it so cruelly did to me long ago.
But do not worry for me my fictitious friend, for just last night I found my own fragment of summer to harbour in my lonely home, made just for me.
She glowed under the jaundiced yellow streetlights as I watched her walk with companions dull compared to her brilliance. Her laughter like the early morning birds of my birthplace and words spoken in that delightfully familiar accent of home. The fates placed her in my path, I know it!
I must have this woman, my diary. I know her blood will taste like sunshine.
And her screams will be so very human.
Wish me luck,
Love
P.L.Y
Molly McGill (She/her) is a writer from Country Derry in Ireland. She specialises in short horror fiction and folklore influenced work. Molly joined Sage Cigarettes Magazine as an Associate Editor after graduating from John Moores University in Liverpool studying Film Studies and Creative Writing joint Hons.
