“Never to Behold Again”

Beauty is a consumable thing.

I owe thanks to the author Isabel Yap for this flash story. Her collection Never Have I Ever introduced me to the tradition of binukot — and while this flash piece isn’t actually about that tradition as practiced in the real world, reading up on it gave me the idea for the story!

It was published in Daily Science Fiction in March of 2022, and you can read it for free online.