After scrolling past another photo of Portia’s baby contorted against age blocks, Daisy posted a picture of herself and captioned it, “Are you there, external validation? It’s me, a selfie.” She thought it was so clever that she searched the phrase on Twitter to make sure she hadn’t accidentally stolen it from an old tweet she’d forgotten about. This yielded zero results, which first made her feel like the funniest fucking bitch on the planet, then second, created concern that perhaps the caption actually made no sense. But she didn’t really need it to make sense, exactly, just to draw attention to her personal freedom and general youth. And to her spaghetti-strap crop top, a garment she had purchased after Reformation boldly described it as “SLUTTY” in their marketing email.

Daisy took a day-old bottle of wine from the fridge and poured herself a glass, feeling powerful for taking a two minute break from her phone. Especially after posting content, she thought. When she picked it back up, her home screen showed three notifications, all emoji responses from her book club girls. Nice. She opened Instagram and tapped the shimmering circle around her profile picture. Red hearts burst from the lower corner of her screen as she reviewed the story again.

Are you there, external validation. It’s me, a selfie. She was pretty sure it did make sense.

Daisy imagined Portia examining the photo closely, holding one of her full breasts as she admired Daisy’s braless liberation, sweet milk oozing through her fingers as she longed for a body that was, once more, just her own. Daisy had moved away from their bleak Illinois suburb a year ago, to a city with palm trees and mountains and grown women wearing children’s clothes. Now she occasionally attended graveyard movie screenings and natural wine tastings so she could post pictures of them the next day, during peak scrolling hours for the central time zone.

Daisy sipped her wine and tapped the word Activity at the bottom of her screen. A girl she considered a friend—also single in the big city—had watched the story but didn’t comment, which confirmed to Daisy that she was mad at her and/or actually hated her.

Daisy scanned her mental files for reasons she could be hated, landing upon contenders like annoying, into herself, weirdly pretentious even though her music taste hasn’t evolved since high school, and seems nice at first but when you get to know her actually isn’t which has led some of her loved ones to politely refer to her as ‘sharp.’ Then she decided that, in fact, it was her friend who was actually the bitch for hating her when she didn’t even do anything.

Daisy clicked the friend’s story and watched a short video of her betta fish. She nonsensically replied, YOUNG HOT FUN CLUB!, with a fire emoji, hoping this cleared the air.

Daisy revisited her Activity list to see if Portia had seen her story yet. She was wondering if perhaps she looked too good in today’s selfie, if Portia might be so taken aback by her attractiveness that she was simply rendered speechless, when a notification banner appeared across the top of her screen with a name that sent her heart to her throat. Kevin.

The message said, lol.

He was her high school crush. It was the first time he’d commented on any of her stories. Why this one? Maybe she really did look incredible. Daisy downed the rest of her wine and refilled her glass. She needed to be slightly out of her mind if she was going to respond.

They were thirty now. Could this lead to a sexting situation? Daisy had always fantasized about late-night messages from a past admirer, someone who had longed for her years ago. I still jerk off to you, they’d say, and fuck, I love doing it. She’d scold them like she was horrified, then surprise them by asking for details. What do they imagine her wearing? What do they imagine her doing?

Daisy gulped her wine, intimidated by the task of getting the conversation there by way of lol.

She clicked Kevin’s profile and scrolled past photos of him golfing to one with his wife and two toddlers in front of their home. Daisy said, “I guess everyone has a fucking baby now,” out loud. To no one. She zoomed in on Kevin’s wife and entertained an internal Family Feud game as to which mall store she’d bought her outfit from. Daisy cast votes on Madewell and Guess but stopped once she landed on Buckle, remembering that she’s a feminist.

Zooming back out to the ranch house almost certainly full of Hearth & Hand woven baskets, Daisy wondered if Kevin really wanted to be a dad. She pictured him tapping through his Instagram stories and sniffing a glass of mid-range whiskey, one child screaming and the other chewing on a Polly Pocket dress in the next room, as he landed on Daisy’s picture. He pressed his thumb on her chest so he could look at her longer. Are you there, external validation? It’s me, a selfie. He smiled and tapped the Send Message bubble at the bottom of his screen. He wrote lol, but what he meant was, You look great. I missed out. Or maybe, Why didn’t I realize you were cool, or even, I love my wife and I love my kids but sometimes, when I look at you, I wish I never had them.

With her second glass of wine empty, Daisy stared at Kevin’s “lol.” She typed, What’s so funny?, erased, You remember me?, erased, You have literal children?, erased, Am I hotter than your wife?, erased, Would I look hot pregnant?, erased, Am I a fucking loser?, erased, Am I falling behind?, erased, Would a baby make me stop hating myself?

Her phone vibrated in her hand. It was Portia. Yessss girl!! GORGEOUS! P.S. Xander says HI!!! Then a selfie with her baby, his tiny, soft body resting in the curve of Portia’s arm. Her fingers squeezed his terry-socked foot. She looked happier than Daisy had ever seen her.

Daisy flicked away the notification and stared at Kevin’s message. She clicked her screen to sleep.

Adding her wine glass to the pile of dishes in the sink, Daisy thought about Portia. It was past midnight in Illinois. Why was she awake? Maybe her baby had trouble sleeping. She must be so tired. Daisy wondered if she was capable of caring for someone that much. She wondered what it would feel like — to kiss a newborn belly, to trace a finger along mini heart-shaped lips. To be a mother.

She slipped into bed without brushing her teeth and looked at the moon through the window. It was a weird orange-red color, vampiric and full. Her room had a balcony attached to it, and she considered stepping out to the metal railing for a closer look. Instead, Daisy stayed in bed and tried to guess if it was a Blue Moon or a Harvest Moon or a Super Moon. She didn’t have the answer. She closed her eyes and made a story up.

Lindsey Peters Berg lives in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in Rejection Letters, HAD, and Moot Point Magazine. Currently, she’s at work on her first novel. Say hi @lindspetersberg.

Lately I’ve been too busy to visit my grave. To lay on the grass and soak dew into my skin. To whisper sweet nothings down into the dirt where only my skeleton can hear.

Sometimes I think I can see my headstone if I really squint. The other day I swore I spotted it on the horizon, pale green and blinking in midday moonlight, but a car honked on the street and the flat blare wiggled into my abdomen and broke my focus completely.

That’s one thing: without a skeleton in my body—a sealed bag of savory Jell-O, really, though no one’s yet noticed—sound moves differently. There’s no sharpness to things. Words wobble in and out of focus. Gunshots start soft and echo around, reverberate themselves into extinction.

But my god, sound is everywhere. Squeaky wheels on a grocery cart make my brain feel like crumpled foil. My daughter’s swim meet is torture.

Not torture. I’m proud of Ari. She’s twelve and still so small but she swims so fast, kicking her little feet up and down the pool until she comes up gasping at the end of the lane, pumps her fist when she realizes she made it back first. Little alien girl, her swim cap and goggles suctioned SMACK to her eye sockets. I couldn’t wear those. I doubt my head would hold its shape.

We’ve been fighting. Before, when she was two and three and a thigh-high hurricane, we didn’t fight. We were best friends who put each other to bed and elbowed each other in the boob by accident during spontaneous hugs and morning snuggles. But she’s gotten mean lately, cliquey with the blonde girls at theater camp and angry for the first time that her dad lives so far away. She told me I was weak the other day, after hearing me argue with him on the phone. She told me he was stronger. She called me spineless. Which, I mean. I am.

So I grounded her. Told her to show me a little goddamned respect. Took away her tablet, drank gin on the couch at midnight, flicking fingers across the unfamiliar apps she’d downloaded: YouTube, Candy Crush, a Barbie something-or-other that made my heart ache from how young it made her seem. An anonymous social media app where she’d said she was eighteen and given our home address to someone named Jarrett.

I let her go to her swim meet. The blonde theater girls don’t swim. Maybe she’ll absorb the other kids’ easy joy and pacifist approach to competition, maybe I have something to learn from their hippie grown-ups with their “COEXIST” bumper stickers and Gentle Parenting. I sit next to them on the bleachers which slowly smush my butt flat and I try to think about something other than the taste of friendly earthworms after heavy rain. Here I am, most of me, showing up.

But the noise. The noise. A thousand kids shouting from the pool deck and their thousand shouts made screams by a thousand whitewashed cinderblocks. I can’t cut through it. The sound seeps into my Jell-O flesh and stays there, leaks through into my brain in a steady roar. Ari is animatedly gesturing in the center of a group of taller kids. I slither off my bench.

I smoke a cigarette at a picnic table outside the rec center. It is dark. The picnic table is wet from rain earlier and smells like the forest it was likely kidnapped from. I put my face down on the table, inhale deeply, and think about my grave. The way the roots of grass lock together and keep my bones for me, in their pile in their box in the dirt miles and miles away.

Low beams of yellow light precede an older model sedan into the parking lot. It pulls up next to the picnic table and idles, driver still sat in silhouette beyond panes of smudgy glass. I watch the figure for a while, flicking my cigarette butt. He’s considering me, too. After a minute, the window rolls down two inches and a very faint voice calls something that I wouldn’t have registered at all if it wasn’t:

“Ari.”

I choke on smoke and my thumb bends backwards—it happens sometimes when I lose control—but I don’t think my shock is visible in the dark. I clear my throat, push smoke out of my lungs, steady my voice.

“Jarrett.”

I walk over and lean on the window. He rolls it all the way down so that I can rest my forearms on the door.

“Hey there, girlie.” His voice is rough and sickening and older than I had thought to fear. “You’re a grown eighteen.”

The cigarette is still burning in my hand. A squiggle of smoke trails into the car.

“Put that out,” he says.

The floodlights come on behind me. The swim meet is ending and families are starting to stream out of the building and into the parking lot. The white light leaves my face in shadow and outlines his features just for me and I reach in without thinking, lit cigarette in hand, and stub the ash in the cool wet of his left eyeball.

He screams. The families behind me turn as one to where I stand beside the unfamiliar car. I don’t look at them. He’s screaming and clawing at his eye and I walk around the side of the building out of the floodlight and disappear.

I text another mom from the swim team. Can Ari come home with you? Everythings fine, will pick her up in an hour.

I lay on the grass, on the shadowed field that sprawls behind the rec center. My nose flattens entirely to my face as I press it into the dirt. I close my eyes. I breathe.

I can feel my skeleton’s presence. She’s safe, I know she is. I’ll be there soon. Promise, baby girl. The soil here is different than at home, a different composition of loam and silt, but I inhale it viciously anyway and fill myself up with the pure base carbon that I am and always was. I soften. I imagine the grate around my plot, the gentle slope of ground above my bones. There’s silence.

Helen Savita Sharma is a librarian and writer working on her first novel from her home in North Carolina, where she lives with her partner and two cats. Helen’s passions outside of writing include “Higher Love” by Steve Winwood, ensemble dramedies, and watery Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee.