Someone You Can Build a Nest In

by John Wiswell

Dedicated to everyone who has been made to feel monstrous.

Her father’s ribs, rich in marrow, cracking delicately in their mouths, and providing the first feast of their lives.

Shesheshen liked priests. They tasted righteous.

Honestly? Girlboss.

The Wulfyre family was going to be disappointed when they learned she didn’t have blood.

On a rack beside the door was a set of wigs she’d made from the scalps that people hadn’t been using anymore.

For some reason, clutching at clothing was a classic human sign of being pathetic. In her experience, clothing never ran away from you even when a monster literally ate your head.

But humans never stood up for the right thing. They stood around feeling uncomfortable, and later pretended that feeling uncomfortable meant they were virtuous.

It was the older families that clutched most of the wealth, even though it was harvested by the laborers. What the laborers got out of it that kept them from eating the rich, Shesheshen didn’t understand. She was a mere monster.

One thing she didn’t understand about humans was how they could think with so much stimulation around.

Me too girl

This revelry was a kind of fear, for hatred was the fear people let themselves enjoy.

“Fire! Fire is the wyrm’s one weakness!” Being burned was a weakness of hers, insofar as it was a weakness of every living thing she’d met. You could roast a sheep or a human on a fire and nobody called that their “weakness.” Having fire thrust into their eye sockets was a threat to them. Weaknesses were a human invention. They called it your weakness if they fantasized about murdering you with it.

With her free hand, Homily touched Shesheshen’s arm through the quilts. Her touch was so warm, different from the fire. Heat made flesh, and offered.

Nobody actually helped each other. That’s why people had religions, hoping gods would provide help where people refused.

They were churning goat butter or whatever humans liked doing in their spare time.

Homily’s room was everything Shesheshen didn’t like about people. A bed larger than any human’s surface area, and the sheets were so tight across it that you would have to wrestle to get under them. Mirrors hung on the walls, to trick you into thinking you were company. Dressers and bureaus to encourage people to change clothes more frequently than made sense. Bedrooms were made out of bad habits.

Those people, likely none of whom ever had someone cross the street to avoid them, or had fingers and gossip pointed at them, and who had definitely never been chased on horseback off the edge of a cliff.

That permitted the spriest of the townsfolk to keep gyrating together, arms draped over shoulders, hands adjusting on hips, noses in necks. It really would have been more practical for them to eat each other.

Homily would make a beautiful nest.

Surely, this was how love felt to everyone. It only seemed odd because it was Shesheshen’s first time. Was she blushing?

Romance was awful. She couldn’t even do something as simple as murdering rude people anymore.

“Go into your room with them. Wait until I say you can go.” “Yes, madame.” Did he sound a little excited? No, she didn’t have time to examine his fetishes. She had surgery to perform.

Hm

“Nobody talks to me like this,” he said. “Do you think you could threaten me a little more?”

Homily had another way of sidestepping humanity’s penchant for complaining: enjoying herself. People could simply choose not to hate things.

She was flanked on either side by feminine young men who stared at her with a mixture of adoration and anxiety.

Goals

Resting her cheek atop all of Homily’s curly hair, she asked, “Do you like your family?” Homily dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. “I owe them everything.” Shesheshen said, “That is not the same as liking someone.”

Could it be that every quality Shesheshen had fallen in love with was a symptom of pain?

“You will get me access to the building. If you do not, I will pick an orifice of yours. You will discover which one I pick when you feel me climbing into you. Eventually, you will be less of a person and more of a suit of clothes. You will not believe the things I will do while I wear you.” By the end of her proposal, Laurent was flushed, breathing heavily, and eager to help.

Normalize manipulating men's fetishes for your own gain

We raze every building, and into every cellar we roll a bomb. Until there is nowhere it can hide and no one it can pretend to be. That’s how you protect a family.”

It was the roar of someone who’d never had to be afraid.

She wasn’t kind because of some angelic virtue. It was insecurity. It was an adaptation to cruelty. Shesheshen wrapped her arms around Homily and held her to her chest for a moment, mourning the realization that she’d fallen in love with someone’s pain.

Shesheshen joined the four other volunteers for patrol, hiding her smile behind her hand. It was a great night for hunters to go missing.

This was the same mistake so many humans made: believing someone would leap over trauma when it hurt them badly enough. That wasn’t how it worked, and the monster knew it. All Shesheshen could do for Homily was be patient with her, and make space for her, and eventually, one day behind her back, eat her mother.

For a moment, Shesheshen wished she was a bomb. An explosion was the closest something could come to godhood. To become the power to erase everything that threatened her.

Suddenly she was alone with her girlfriend’s mother. Did humans get this excited at such opportunities?

Royalty was a lie of civilization.

True love was a woman sinking up to her elbows in her viscera, delicately removing hooks from her rigid tissues.

Are you angry with me?” “Angry about you defiling the corpse of the sister that I . . . that I murdered?”

“It is highly poisonous. I let it poison me.” “Why?” Despite herself, Shesheshen looked down. “I wanted to impress you.”

“You want me to name you, and you don’t care what? The puddle of my girlfriend’s parts doesn’t care so long as I talk to her?”

“I did not know, either. I did it when I was full of meat, and thinking about you.” Homily tilted her head and squinted skeptically. “Were you trying to be sweet just then?”

What do you call that thing that I had to save? I had to save it. I had to save us. You are my safety.”

In the voice of her sister, Shesheshen said, “I am sorry for what I did to you.”

STFU IM CRYING

If its next bite of food did not come quickly enough, it squirmed and gave her a good ache. It was a bit like having an infection as a lunch guest.

She did not mind. From what she knew of civilization, all children were parasites. You were supposed to grow to like that about them.

The spaghetti was versatile in its resistance. “Slightly strange. It’s like an evasive bread.”

Homily said, “I shouldn’t have hurt her.” “She shouldn’t have abused you until you ran from home. Your family shouldn’t have built a household out of your pain.”

Homily batted at the offspring’s unruly limbs, yelling, “Epilogue! Epilogue, let go of my hair!” Shesheshen grabbed the offspring by the loose flesh at the rear of its flank and pulled. “We are not calling it Epilogue.”

“If you do not put down boundaries, your family will haunt any house we live in.”

Time was the sort of thing you had to care about when you belonged to more than yourself.