Someone You Can Build a Nest In

by John Wiswell

Dedicated to everyone who has been made to feel monstrous.

Inside her chest, where humans put their lungs, she placed an open bear trap. It was her prized skeletal possession. It did not trap bears anymore. Instead, she kept it as a secret pair of jaws, for when people needed to be bitten.

Shesheshen had been called a wyrm many times, often by startled hunters. She’d also heard “wyrm” used to describe drakes, harpies, qilins, kappas, and giraffes. In her experience, it was an epithet for whatever thing greedy humans wanted dead and were too afraid to kill themselves.

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

Catharsis Wulfyre’s hand felt like winter had abruptly returned and fallen exclusively over Shesheshen’s face. His gauntlet dug into her flesh, squeezing her mouth closed.

He had the chest of a man who exercised for sport, which made for pleasant chewing. His marrow was unusually sweet, and his bones hard against her orifices. Sturdy bones scratched pleasantly against her insides, and she squeezed them into alignment so she could hold new shapes. Much of his flesh and innards went to her digestion, turning into sustenance for healing against the poison. Other parts of him, she kept for subtler uses. It felt good to have some kidneys and a pancreas inside her again. After she plugged them into her own innards, they reminded her body how to get its juices flowing. In hibernation most of her body mass had reverted to impressionable lumps of flesh. They needed instruction. They needed more people’s organs, to remind them how to become herself again for the new year.

She wanted to eat that inventor, have the inventor go to some hell, and then descend there herself to eat them again.

Smoke streamed out of chimneys on the west side, like so many bowls of dust overturned and spilling, except spilling in the wrong direction.

Still, it was probably inappropriate to ask this man for a hundred pounds of beef.

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

An uninvited hand found her shoulder. It was Laurent’s, firm flesh and gripping her like she was prey. She made sure there were enough bones in her shoulder to keep up the illusion, to fool his hand. His hand was unwanted, but it wouldn’t be his hand for very long.

They shrieked in what Shesheshen assumed was another of the consensual oral horrors that humans called music.

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.

The vast chasm stretched in front of them, like a second nightfall rising out of the earth’s carcass. It hungered for her.

it neighed and bucked as though to exile its own spine.

She’d hit the river with all the elegance of cream pie against a brick wall.

She tried honesty. “I have some trouble with blood inside me.”

Shesheshen tried to maintain the meat illusion that she had a human mouth.

As they left the wagon, Homily said, “How are your legs feeling?” “I like them. I should grow some more.”

Shesheshen slept on top of the covers, on top of the bed, like an ornament of flesh.

“One of two things is going to happen tonight. I could eat every piece of you that you don’t need to stay alive, until there is nothing but a fleshless bundle of organs and prime bones. Then I will swallow your still-sobbing self inside of my flesh, and keep you alive, and make your mouth my own. I will hunt your family down and work your jaw such that I eat them with your own mouth. Only when there is nothing left of you will I swallow you and let you weep in an oblivion of stomachs. “Or . . .” She paused. “Do you want to hear the or there?”

Two violinists kept circling each other and performing, though, in their own shameless form of musical copulation. 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. No one offered Homily such pseudo-cannibalistic harmony.

There was an uneasy safety about it, an allure and simultaneous urge to run, as thighs glanced against hips, and their hands fluttered in search of appropriate purchase. All of this intimacy, without any of the expectation of an attack. Dancing always seemed implausible from afar. Now, under its power, Shesheshen was completely lost as to how humans could do this in public.

Companionship. That was civilization’s trap and snare. And Shesheshen had stepped right into it.

Humans loved complaining about the smells of places. By sheer frequency of behavior, it was their second favorite thing, after going in private to defecate.

“I keep choking on this. But I need to tell you about Mother. She is a lot to handle.” “Does she have the normal amount of human hands?” That got Homily to laugh so abruptly that she lost her balance and tipped over. Shesheshen caught her by the arms, letting her lean as much weight as she liked. It was a pleasant pressure. Homily said, “Okay, okay. You’re invincible.” “I would like to be. I would pick even more fights.” “Mother is a profoundly political person, and she takes everything personally. It’s best not to say much around her.” “I love not talking,” Shesheshen said,

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

“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.

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

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.

“I’ll help.” She couldn’t help, not as she was hiding bloody laundry and fighting her own thoughts just to make sentences. She was trapped in the manacles that her family had made out of her own mind.

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.

A sound that typically only came out of sick birds escaped Epigram’s throat.

When that one bomb had gone off, the entire camp had lost their civilization. The terror of its violence was greater than a monster or a baroness.

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.

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

“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?”

More resolutely, she said, “I didn’t know you could do that.” “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?”

Here came her worthless words. “I do not know what you call it. The thing that is not flesh or bone or organs. In the panic, I needed to make sure the greater thing was safe. The demonic laughs you make at things that are not jokes. The way you ask to touch me without words. The pleasure I get from riding next to you. The talking that I mind less than talking to others. The willingness to be harmed myself before letting you be harmed. You feeding me soup by the spoonful because I cannot raise a hand. 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.”

The heat beckoned them, draping over them like the ghosts of so many forgotten dead.

Nothing was allowed to disturb the Baroness, not even the remains of the lives she burned.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” 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.”

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.”

One didn’t build a body out of a single kidney. You took several kidneys, and yards of intestines, and at least one pancreas. Getting a body to walk took so many organs and rigging and support. Slaying grief would be no simpler. It could not be solved by a single action. It required a life of choices and events. They had to form an organism. How was that done?

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

As a pathetic homunculus of three species, they waddled home together.

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.