Someone You Can Build a Nest In

by John Wiswell

“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.

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

This sends me

This plump, adoring woman was related to the gold-plated fish-drowner? The one who’d stabbed and poisoned her in her own home? It wasn’t possible. Shesheshen’s mind threatened to melt and leak out of her orifices.

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

How badly Shesheshen wanted to reach over Homily’s shoulder and lift her chin. That chin should never submit, especially not to humans who belonged dead under hooves.

Killing was simpler than a conversation.

Now Homily’s hands muffled a guffaw. It sounded even cuter between her fingers, like the mating call of a sad moose with a cold.

“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.”

After poking her head into a side room, Homily asked, “Where is Mother?” Epigram made a noise like a bowel movement had come out of the wrong end. “She’s at an undisclosed location. One she won’t even disclose to me. Do you believe that? She doesn’t trust anyone to not ‘taint her grieving,’ as she puts it.”

It would have been vicious, would have filled Shesheshen with a dark admiration for Homily, if not for the look on her face. With her cheeks smudged by finger streaks of her sister’s blood, her eyes had woken up. They were frantic as a moth on fire, jumping around the tent, to the knife, to the flap out of the tent, and to Shesheshen. It was the look of a frightened animal, destined to run or strike again.

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.

“You don’t ever dream?” “Monsters prefer lurking.”

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