Someone You Can Build a Nest In

by John Wiswell

Neither of them wanted to be the kind of cold that being alone made you.

She’d ingested hearts before. This was the first time her body had grown one. If her body became dependent on it, life would get so much harder.

She did not feel sentimental about it. The heart had to go.

“Well, there is nowhere I would rather be.” “Why?” “Because you’re here.”

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

Her doting monstrous bear wasn’t a freak like herself. She was a dwindling species driven from her home.

Her mother hadn’t kidnapped him and forced her eggs inside him. That couldn’t be true.

You don’t sound confident enough

He must have wanted it. Otherwise she would have to face things about herself that she couldn’t.

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.

“She’s fine,” Ode said as though safety was a nuisance. “She’s in her tent, where I should be.

Is she the monster

She’d known about her daughter’s demise almost as soon anyone,

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.

allosexual virgins

??

A sort of mutually failed cannibalism.

It was malfunctioning worse than before, trying to leave her for Homily.

Um. Is it homily??

“I never had a partner with whom I didn’t feel obliged to perform that.

Oh!! Queen!!! I’ve decided I love you homily

The thing that had grown inside her wasn’t a heart. It was an egg sac.

Oh yuck

Had that creature stolen her meal? Or was that creature her meal?

But she didn’t want to be natural. She wanted to be herself, and to let Homily be.

Homily would die for a family with Shesheshen because a lifetime of slowly dying for her own family had fooled her into thinking this was right.

Their entire little love story was built out of things that Shesheshen had to take back. How did words explain something like this?

No matter what her creator had done, these fangs were the heirloom of a proper monster.

In answer, Homily stirred from under the cover of the robe. She remained facing away, still half-hunched against the chill. Her body language under the robe was closed off.

Bet it’s not actually her

I do not like being near anyone most of the time. Because of the harm they can do. Whereas you were worth being harmed for.

I want to live long enough to see you heal.

Epigram wasn’t nearly the size of her sister. It was shameful she’d ever mistaken one for the other.

Yeah that was genuinely stupid of you

Homily took in a staggering breath that tripped her words. “There is no curse? There never was one? We hurt you for nothing?”

It was so much clearer a declaration of affection than any of those speeches spun by poets and playwrights, and stuffed into the mouths of actors who pretended to be enamored.

One could only pretend to love in language.

“I am sorry,” Shesheshen said, licking Homily’s sister’s blood off of her upper lip. “You were not using her body for anything.

girl

“Have you been eating people behind my back this whole time?”

lmao

You are not a nest. You are more.”

I was fed lies until I thought they were food,

Now they forced the citizens of Underlook to remain in, trapped with monsters and politicians.

since apparently it was romantic to be inconveniently distanced from the person you loved.

From what she knew of civilization, all children were parasites. You were supposed to grow to like that about them.

Shesheshen was not a figment of anyone’s dreams and could not fight dreams on fair terms.

Your family shouldn’t have built a household out of your pain.”

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.

She did so much with just two arms. What a spectacular creature she was.

They were the right words. They wouldn’t have been if Shesheshen had said them, and they were right, all the same and instantly, because Homily had said them. Anything she said was the right thing.