Someone You Can Build a Nest In

by John Wiswell

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

With the little tact she possessed, she determined this was the wrong time to offer to eat someone.

Dressing up so that you could eat never made sense to Shesheshen; the food was typically dead and surely unimpressed with its audience.

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.

This was not how she’d imagined their first kiss. She’d overheard enough allosexual virgins gab about the lightning strike at the touch of lips, and the fever rush of blood that reminded them how much of themselves were alive. This was not like those descriptions. It was another moist orifice pressing into her. A sort of mutually failed cannibalism.

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

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

Self-conscious, Shesheshen picked up her two forks again and tried to capture some of her pasta. Two forks were not enough forks for this. The spaghetti was versatile in its resistance. “Slightly strange. It’s like an evasive bread.”