I feel like I could starve. My hunger has the velocity in which I could swallow every star, which is to say I could swallow each grain of sand, but I hate the taste of sand. As a child, I chewed everything: telephone cords, lawn clippings, once held a battery between my teeth. And of course, there’s everything I couldn’t taste: gravity, fury, the breath before the kiss. My boyfriend takes me to the beach even though I hate the sand. I did not eat at the restaurant because I know he’ll want sex, because as cliché as it is that is the only hunger he knows. I know this is bland. Let me tell you instead about the field where the battle took place. Centuries ago – centuries, which of course taste like orange skin and molasses – armour clad men stormed the field to bare swords against skin and spit out each other’s blood as they always do, but still even centuries ago there was grass to grow back from the trampling, a moon to see for those who take off their armet. Tonight she is full and so loud she’s got that ring of brightness around her that I imagine tastes like sodium, like an electric shock, like the good kind of orgasm. But I cannot get her to look at me, even with the exposure turned down she vanishes into her own light. My boyfriend tries with his phone, but his cracked screen splits her into shards. I bite my tongue. At the museum next to the battlefield I always want to lick the suits of armour and I’ll confess I always imagine a girl inside. I tell him I want to go to the battlefield but he wants to go back to the car, to the backseat where the streetlight will slice into the window and I won’t even be able to sink my teeth into it. In the centre of the battlefield is the statue of the angel and nobody knows when she was erected or by who, as if she arrived on her own terms. Her halo has disintegrated and it looks like someone bit a chunk out of her neck, but if you go at the right moment of the moon cycle, the right angle of midnight, the moon shines into her face with that intergalactic kind of brightness. It’s the only way I can taste up close. I always fear her head will fall off but if it did I would hold her tight. I would hold my breath and kiss the stone ridges of her hair.

Dallon Robinson (they/them) is a queer writer. Their work usually features women who kind of suck, the moon, and/or deep sea creatures. Their fiction appears or is forthcoming in Milk Candy Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. They are mostly on Instagram at @dallonwrites.