Elizabeth Mills' previous work for The Toast can be found here.
When I was eighteen years old, after a year of happiness and firsts and fumbles and pain, I broke up with my girlfriend. That moment was a catalyst – the lit match to the gasoline, the first pebble of the avalanche, the final crack in a foundation poured out wrong to begin with. Over the course of the next eight years,
You're on your third magazine when the doorbell rings – one of those glossy, absolutely fucking worthless collections of ten dollar shirts, overpriced meats, and knockoff game consoles. It's the second time you've looked through the stack on your kitchen table, driven to desperation as you are by a birthday two weeks away. “Anything's fine,” he keeps saying, “I'm not picky.” That asshole. God damn him. You worry at your wedding ring and get up,…
They say a witch lives over on Elm, right on the corner in an old house that's sort of fallen down between two towering oak trees. They say her lawn's green and lush because of deals she's made with the chattering squirrels that bound along its expanse with no fear of the blackbirds perched on her home's roof. They say the rhododendron bushes flanking the house's front steps will laugh and twitch and watch if…
Late-night shifts in a celestial graveyard – the gravestones are sunk into layers of star stuff. The wraiths drift along paths composed of nebulae, burning gas and color forced to consider order. Staff ask for cooperation when the supernova crypts threaten to redshift and take a galaxy of dead royalty with them. An unseen grave is still a grave and flowers should be placed in urns or vases close to the voids where families lie…
