Paved with Good Intentions by Sophie van Llewyn

You promised me the sea for our vacation, but after driving under stone arches, you took me to a hotel with a pool. It was there that I bathed with all the other endangered species. When I rustled the mud resting at the bottom I felt that I was disturbing someone’s ashes. I asked you to climb higher with me, so that I might catch a glimpse of the ocean, shivering in the distance. Instead, you drove me to the mountains. And then you rose to higher plains. I am still struggling to find my way back to the water.

Sophie van Llewyn is an Assistant Editor with Bartleby Snopes. Her fiction has been published/is forthcoming in Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Halo, Ink in Thirds, Flash Frontier, The Molotov Cocktail, Sick Lit Magazine, among others. You can find her on Twitter @sophie_van_l.