In all the medical reports, we’d called it a state of partial darkness. How long had it been? Sixteen hours, twenty-four since exposure. I felt barely visible. I felt feverish, and I could recall a certain noxious odor flirting with the back of my throat.
 
“It lives in the meat, starved and sexless.” 
 
That was all the text message said this time. I figured it was someone I knew who’d sent it to me, someone with imagination and skill. A rebel, a fanatic, an accuser, not like the others, the ones who’d wigged out and fled the cubicles when the flies breached the room. It was chaos, all the screaming and gnawing and fat chunks slapping against flat surfaces, but I didn’t panic, of course. Not me. I’m less theatrical, more academic. I’ve always fed on putrification and agony. I was a product of apathy, all formaldehyde and grey slagging skin. I could feel it, just behind my eyes. THE SPIKE FEEDS THE PAIN … I knew this from the trials. We’d switched to solar, dosed the bottles too high. There were side effects: gruesome mathematics and irreversible equations.
 
“It LIVES in the MEAT.”
 
My mouth started to water. I wish they’d stop texting me. I didn’t create the problem, and I certainly can’t fix it. Nobody can.
 
Because
IT LIVES IN THE MEAT.
 
The meat off your bones, I will eat.

By Cheryl Anne Gardner

Yum. Red licked her lips and sucked at the piece of meat in front of her. It had been sawed off the pretty thing while she was screaming, and now she got to watch. “You’re lucky you’re skinny,” Red said between bites. “Not much left, now.”
Carnivore, cannibal, she liked to lick the girls, Red did. Caught her outside a rest stop. They never learned. Doe eyes, vomit glossed lips, she spoke to Red in sheep code. “Baaah.” Moving down to the recently cut thigh, Red dug her fingers into the muscle clawing through fat deposits, burrowing into tendons until she gripped something lean. Then she began tugging. Chained on the slab, shrieking blood from the lips she’d already bit through, she felt the teeth bury themselves in her slim thigh eating her live. She stopped gorging herself and pulled out a hot iron from the furnace to her left. There were female fibers stuck in her teeth when she smiled, her murderous face what gave her the name Red, she was stained, pallor was always a dull blood hue from her gluttonous feasts. Dogs had better manners than Red when ripping girls apart. She pressed the orange flat of the iron forcefully against pretty’s bleeding wound. Cauterizing it ever so slightly. Red laughed, she could keep the bitch alive for as long as she wanted, this way. “You’re too damn pretty.” Taking the still glowing iron and placing it over the nose and right eye of her little girl who wailed inhumanly as the metal heat melted her skin like Barbie too close to the stove top. When she pulled back the tool the girl’s nose was just a caved-in lump of flesh and her eyebrow fused with cheek leaving her blind and abstract. Red took her scalpel and starting from left corner of her mouth pulled it through, splitting the face further. “And they told me I’d never be an artist. You’re a fucking Picasso Barbie.”

By Emily Smith-Miller

She sliced him in slivers
left him bloodied
on her mahogany table
where she tasted his meat
in strips of red hunger lust
she ate his cock much like
she ate a fucking sirloin
but he tasted even better

By Jeff Callico

“That was a really fucked up thing to say,” she said while flicking her cigarette ash on my shirtsleeve. “I know it looks like syphilitic testicles in dick cheese sauce, but no one said you had to eat it.”

I was talking to Mollie, of course. Morbid Mollie I liked to call her when there wasn’t anything sharp nearby. It was Tuesday, black and still and pouring rain. We were at some depression era bar on the north side. Chinatown. She’d picked the place because she knew I hated the way it smelled when it rained — burnt pistachios, wasabi, and raw sewage. She was sitting at the bar, stabbing something nasty with a pair of chopsticks. Sleazy was her middle name. I hated the way she dressed in those Halloween Nun outfits; Nuns who’d obviously had enough fucking the cross in their spare time and were chewing the pews for a good old-fashioned cock in their mouths. You know the type: toxic with a capital infectious fucking “T.” I hated her. Hated her warm meat. “How many you got?” I asked about the suspicious burlap sack lying there, seeping a russet yellow liquid at her feet. I hated looking at her fucking feet too. Her toes looked like a deadly mutant outbreak of knuckles and flesh and hair, all jacked up and crammed into a pair of steel stilettos. I was starting to sweat. Good thing the bartender came by and asked me if I needed something stronger. I did, but even then, I could still taste the vomit and match light residue in the back of my throat. I was hungry. I needed to eat. Fresh or Frozen, I didn’t care. Mollie had what I needed … in the bag at her feet. My plan was to be direct. Cool. Calm. Direct.

“Whatcha got in the bag, Mollie?” I asked again, but she still didn’t answer, not yet. Her cigarette smoke danced around my words, and I just stared at the veins in her sagging breasts. I wouldn’t have enough money. I knew that, she knew that, but I was hungry. Snap off the head and suck out the juice. That warm delicious juice. They only taste that good when they’re young, fresh, but I’d settle. These were probably old and stale — rotted biohazard — from the free clinic down the block. I didn’t even have enough to pay for that even, but we always came to an arrangement. I’d pay for her dinner, and then I’d have to eat her out. She never said a word. She just smiled at me, stood up, grabbed the bloody bag, and headed for the alley.

By Cheryl Anne Gardner