She was about to draw the curtains when she noticed it.

A tiny black insect sat quietly on her windowsill. The girl was notoriously terrified of insects, yet for some inexplicable reason this little creature inspired no fear. There was something about its complete stillness that reminded her of herself, and the thought filled her with sadness. She assumed that, like many insects, it came alive only after dark, and she felt an unexpected affection for a life that truly began only when the sun withdrew its painfully bright light.

"A creature of darkness," she murmured, smiling at the words. Only in near-total darkness could she surrender herself to her unusual sexuality.

She was a creature of darkness, one who found no form of physicality attractive. She could not bear the thought of two bodies—with all their flesh and bones—pressed against one another. Even more repulsive was the act of intercourse itself. She could never understand the need for that violent intrusion into the intimate interior of her womanhood.

Instead, she was aroused by absence.

Whenever night fell, she would draw the curtains until the darkness in her room became absolute. She dressed her entire body, covering every inch of skin except for her eyes. For this she used a burqa she had bought in a distant Eastern country. Had the kind merchant who sold it to her—after the customary bargaining—known the true purpose of her purchase, he would almost certainly have accused her of blasphemy and lust. But she cared little for the moral implications of what she did, and every single night, without exception, she surrendered herself to her absent body.

The bed, fitted with a water mattress, had been chosen specifically for the sensation of weightlessness that water could imitate. Weightlessness. Bodilessness. For could one truly possess a body without feeling its crushing weight?

Sometimes she dreamed of outer space. Perhaps, in the vacuum beyond gravity's grasp, she could exist in a state of perpetual sexual ecstasy—a life that was itself an orgasm, severed from the confines of her own skin.

Those fantasies prepared her. She slipped a hand beneath the layers of clothing until she reached the warmth of her vagina—the only trace of her flesh that did not fill her with revulsion. Her cold fingers parted her womanhood until they found its essence, that exquisitely sensitive point.

In the darkness, her eyes wide open, she masturbated to her hatred of the body—her own as much as everyone else's. She stretched her thoughts of bodilessness to their furthest limits. She imagined endless ways of erasing flesh, and the more grotesque those fantasies became, the greater the pleasure gathering inside her.

She was not a masochist in the conventional sense. She did not long to have pain inflicted upon her body as part of some erotic game. That would still require her to inhabit herself—to feel, to perceive, to acknowledge her own physical existence.

She wanted not to exist in the physical world at all, but rather as some fleeting erotic impulse that rises, reaches its peak, and then quietly dissolves, fulfilled.

To her, that was what true feminism meant.

But tonight her ritual was interrupted by the foolish little insect.

Moved by a sense of kinship, she made an unprecedented decision.

She left the curtains open.

The moonless night was dark enough anyway.

She lay down and surrendered herself to her sexuality. The moment her fingers began to move, the creature started to glow.

With quiet astonishment, the girl realized that the plain-looking insect was, in fact, a firefly.

The first firefly she had ever seen.

As a child she had listened to her grandmother's stories about those strange, fairy-tale creatures, yet she had never once seen one with her own eyes. The awakening of her curiosity, however, did not entirely distract her from the pleasure she sought. She continued her exploration of absence.

She noticed that her arousal seemed to grow in perfect step with the intensity of the firefly's light. Her clitoris became increasingly tense, deliciously tender, while the tiny creature illuminated more and more of the room.

Soon, its glow reached her own body.

She could make out its outline beneath the heavy layers of fabric, and for the first time she felt none of the revulsion she had always expected. The familiar spasm of nausea did not rise in her stomach.

She wanted to undress.

Trying not to interrupt the rhythm of her masturbation, she peeled away every layer until she was left wearing only her underwear. Propped upright in bed, her gaze drifting between the dazzling light of the firefly and the shape of her own body, she reached an orgasm unlike any she had ever experienced.

Her body trembled with waves of pleasure. She threw back her head and allowed the ecstasy—and the light—to fill every part of her being.

The firefly stopped glowing.

She rose and walked to the windowsill, wondering what had happened. Crouching until she was level with the tiny insect, she could have sworn it looked back at her with quiet satisfaction before taking flight into some unknown corner of the dark room.

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