Sarah Al-shimary

Sarah Al-shimary is a 17 year old girl living in Las Vegas, NV. Her work is drawn from personal and shared experiences that are twisted and wrung out soggy on paper. She has been featured on several other magazines and craves to contribute. She hopes to create a feeling of uneasiness and shock that is reflected in her work.


Instagram: @sarlsh. 

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Butterflies go South during Winter


  Gauze fitted over eyelids; heavy and inauspicious. When I move around it slathers on me with some despondent pragmatic I’ve known before. Muffled voices, screeches deafening to the ear if the bandaid had not been covering it. With every vocal chord hymn comes a lick to my arms. A lick that raises the skin like gutted innards of a newborn. I am deaf. I am blind. I am unspeakable and loud. Shuffling near whatever I am laying on. Slab of metal underneath me. Cold-cut salmon, I am the fresh catch of the day. The paper blanket given to me lacks coverage on my feet. A morgue. Butterfly hand touches my own cautiously. Do I terrify? Do not waver over me. Touch me. Skin onto my coarse, unforgiving flesh burns something sound in me. When did I last touch? Muffled voice speaks to me. I nod in complacency. Tell me what I do. I nod for an answer I know I’m afraid to get. Movement around me. Same hand touches the bandaid on my forehead. Lifts the perverse skirt. Continue. The light begins to gleam through the fissures of the white cast, my eyes shut tightly not used to this freedom. The last layer on the onion, the one that makes people cry. My head is bobbed back over water and I am still blind. The lens focuses and I look around me. Faceless. Blank. White. Where am I? I didn’t ask for this. Who are you? What am I? Give me a mirror. Give me something. I look back into myself and all I see is pitch void. I look at Butterfly Hands and nothing stares back. No face to fabricate an emotion, no motherly gesture to soothe. I am not from here. I am not from these people. Slimy grey hands catch my body and restrain me from moving. Please let me leave. Let me escape. Let me scrape my limbs against the shattered tile if it means to leave from all of you. Let me run, run far away from this place.