Someone You Can Build a Nest In

by John Wiswell

Homily fished out one of Shesheshen’s hands, lacing their fingers together delicately until they were a wickerwork of flesh. Shesheshen wondered if wicker chairs felt this happy about interlacing. Once more their bodies melded together, and she luxuriated in the woman’s generous heat. It was like cozying up to an unusually soft oven.

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

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.

“No,” Shesheshen said. “Do not let it hurt you. Do not try to prove you are generous by letting yourself be hurt.”

Damn wtf shesheshen

“You can cry. You can ask to be held. But you cannot hurt me just because you’re hurting. All right?”

Fascination with stories has kept me alive through many of the worst periods of my life, and I owe a debt to the collective world of storytellers that I will never be able to repay. That is the chiefest reason I write. I found permission to be myself on the page thanks to authors who showed sympathy and depth in non-human characters.

Captain Hook (a man who was so ridiculously defined by his disability that it became his name, but who also made that disability a weapon).