First Kiss
by Erin Dawkins
The man gazes at her with the curiosity of a hundred eyes. He leans into her and grazes his tongue over her lips. They feel dry and cracked, like clay.
She is in the shallows of the riverbank, surrounded by water lilies. Her body moves weightlessly with the perpetually lapping river.
He cups his hand around one of the heart-shaped pads holding the lilies like a tea cup and saucer, and then he stares at her for a long time. “Lily,” he whispers.
Lily doesn’t wince or shutter, as she can only lie still. Though something wakes inside her—something she yearned for while she was still breathing with life. When she sat along the river for hours, watching men and women, hand-in-hand, each couple awaiting their first kiss. She used to practice on her arm, goosebumps like mountains on her skin, imagining the moment when it would finally be her turn to be kissed.
As darkness fell, Lily found herself walking along the river, her fingers floating airily through thick, drowning fog. She approached a clearing to find a man and woman on a bench. Their lips drawn close together, hesitantly at first, as if they were never meant to touch, but when they do, it’s as if their lips were never meant to part. Lily brings her face close to the woman’s.
The man’s heart pulsates like that of a wild animal, the cage of his chest barely restraining it.
Lily doesn’t fight the urge to squeeze the man’s heart and mute the noise, to strangle the universal emblem of love. Her arm leads, and soon it is inside his chest. The length of her arm is buried, and, slowly, she is inside him. Her entire body is one with his and she can feel his heart becoming less excited and more irregular.
Lily inhales.
The other woman’s eyes are open and petrified. Her cheekbones and jawline rip through her graying, sunken skin. The buttons on the man’s shirt pop, as the bones in his sternum and ribcage snap like dried sticks framing an expanding cavity. The woman’s eyes, once suffused with terror, are now devoid of life. What’s left of the woman shrivels and falls onto the seat of the bench like a shriveled balloon.
The man’s hands cling to his broken chest as Lily leaves his body. She faces him, smiling with satisfaction. He looks at the bench, and then back at Lily, and begins tearing at his throat. His mouth is agape, gasping for the scream that is lodged like a sick lump. It’s a buried scream, that’s silenced and stolen in the thick of the most terrifying dream. Lily watches as he flees, shrinking into the darkness.
Just then, Lily is overpowered as she begins to gasp for air herself. Her hands reach up around her neck. She is under the veil of murky water, recalling the nightmare of her own fate. Two thumbs press hard into the base of her throat.She reaches to the night sky from the depths of the water, unable to fight the force holding her down, burying her breaths like treasures lost below, never to resurface again.
It’s night again when Lily finds herself at the riverside..The fog carries her to a man and woman on a blanket at the edge of the water. She watches them talk, laugh, and embrace each other with loving gestures. Just as they lean in for a kiss, Lily settles into the man’s body. The woman opens her eyes when she feels his hands swallowing her thin neck. The man, Lily, opens his mouth wide and moves it to hers. His eyes are bedeviled as he inhales her lifeforce, until only a shrivel remains of her body, hanging ravingly from his teeth. It drops just before he reaches into his mouth with terror painted on his fingertips, attempting to the life he unwillingly ingested. Lily leaves his body and walks along the riverside, collecting the lives of lovers. Just as she was robbed of her first. Those who are undeserving of a fifth, a fifteenth, a twentieth kiss. Once again she finds herself unable to breathe, powerless and captive under the weight of the water – arms floating languidly in front of her, eyelashes decorated with tiny saturated pearls.
***
It’s sundown at the riverside. A man with a blanket tucked under his arm walks to the edge of the water.
“Here, Eve! I found a spot!”
Eve walks hurried toward her husband’s voice. She stands still and gazes at the water while her husband spreads the blanket on the grass. She shifts the weight of the picnic basket from one arm to the other.
“Oh Frank. The lilies are beautiful.”
While Eve empties the contents of the basket, Frank kneels and dips his hand into the water. His fingers graze the white of the flowers. He imagines her face as he strokes the delicate softness of the petals. A grail of remembrance. Lily.
Frank stands up and wipes his hand on his trousers. He turns to join Eve on the blanket, and he is nose to nose with her. She smiles wickedly as her mouth opens, spewing polluted water. Muck surfaces from her pores. Her moments are unnatural, as if her joints are locked in place. Her head crooks to the left with a sudden jerk. The wretched stench of decay is all around him. He stares into her eyes intently, clouded with fear, but well enough to know that the eyes he is gazing into are no longer Eve’s. She puts her hands on either side of his head and draws it close to hers. He doesn’t fight her. And as if obeying a silent command, an understanding of sorts, he opens his mouth. Their lips meet and consensually grow wider, as if passing something between them. He can feel his insides shrivel and wilt. He finds the strength to push her away, and pounds on his chest, attempting to draw air from the nothingness she’s left for him.
Lily steps back and watches him fall to the ground, without a single breath to spare. She steps over him, and walks breathlessly toward the riverbank.
Erin Dawkins (she/her) received her MA in English with a specialty in Creative Writing from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Recent fiction has been published in Wild Greens Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Five Minute Lit, Half and One and forthcoming in Sky Island Journal and Still Here Magazine. She recently completed her debut literary horror novel. In 2025, she received an Author’s Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
Whisper House Press 
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