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Venus



“A million years ago,” she says, “when our ancestors were children, there was a plant called the Venus fly trap. And it would lean out and snap at the air.”

She opens her mouth to demonstrate. I watch, hand lifted to protect my eyes from the suns blazing above.

“It was a weird thing for them,” she says, “because that was back when people usually ate plants, and not the other way around.”

“Oh.” I reach out instinctively and touch her cascading hair. It is beautiful and lush, but it will need more water soon, for the stems are growing brittle and the petals drooping, her body wilting in the agonizing light.









Lucy Wallace is an emerging writer and high school student in the San Francisco Bay Area. When she is not writing, she can be found studying Russian and painting mice. She hopes to pursue a literary career of some sort, and she has strong opinions about scones.