Her belly, it moved. It was swollen and she was tied to the chair. Newspaper was pasted to the windows in a tinged yellow sick. An inch of water soaked her feet making them pruned and cold, despite the sweat leaking from her pores. Her belly shuddered again, she felt bile in her throat, tasted something climbing the esophagus lining. She rocked in the chair, but her legs were tied too.

She was alone. The flower dress was brown from puke stains. Brown from other stains. Something was crawling, crawling inside her. It moved and she vomited on herself, choking out an unmentionable. It was the first but there would be more. She’d swallowed the egg sacks. She was perfect they said. It plopped in the water and began floundering around, then went straight for her over saturated feet burrowing its pincer in her souls and eating out the meat. She screamed but her air passage was blocked as another clawed its way up and gagged her. Ejecting it from her mouth, she screamed because she could feel the rest of them hatching, moving , eating her insides as they hungrily declared life in her belly.

Some kind of pregnant she was. Pregnant of putrid insects, maggot-esque children feasting on her digestive tract. She felt herself being eaten from the inside out, carved out by their sucking mouths. They were dissolving her.  And the other two had started at her feet. Blood seeped through the brown dress spreading as silent tears moved down her face, leaving tracks in the grime. The hatchlings began to spill forth from her ruined cavern and she mouthed the word ‘mother’ as their sectioned bodies and sharp legs started scratching off the flesh from her thighs. Bony stumps were her consumed feet and her calves had their mouth marks moving upwards. No one would know, eventually, what had been tied in the chair.

By Emily Smith-Miller

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

Marcy was not herself today, her mother said when the school called. She was under the weather and she could not play with the other children. Marcy’s mother began to suspect that her daughter was not herself very early on that day. Walking up the stairs Dolores Trundleman smelled something ripe. It flared her nostrils and she gagged in the back of her throat, heaving at the top step. In the hallway the stench began to swell.
 
Reluctantly, and in fear of the retching odor, Dolores peered down the dim space cautiously. A faint orange glow was coming from the floor. Creeping towards it Dolores’s stomach turned and she vomited on the beige carpet. The glow illuminated something foul, something stinking, something dead. Then she realized it was not something it was several things piled up.

Groping for the hall light she flipped the switch in anguish, wanting more honestly to run back downstairs to her master bedroom and phone her husband to come home immediately, for something was horribly wrong. With a faint ‘click’ Dolores stared in violent stillness at the grotesque heap in front of her: half rotted animals were neatly stacked in front of an EZ Bake Oven. Roadkill waiting to be cooked, with maggots wriggling free on the floor, exposed internal rot festering in with putrid black mold and once vital organs spilling dryly out.
 
DING! Dolores’s tensed frame spasmed into the wall, knocking a family portrait from its perch behind her to the ground. Mitchell wore a tie Marcy gave him for father’s day, it was red with tiny black flowers on it, it matched his black suit jacket and pressed white shirt. Dolores had donned a tasteful red cap sleeved dress to match her cropped auburn hair, and Marcy, Marcy was dressed in white with a black sash smiling angelically at the camera. Her dark curls springing about in delight, much like now as she stood in the hall facing her mother holding their half devoured house cat, Claude, in her tiny hands like a turkey leg. She was eating out of his belly, stripping the fur off where she could. She didn’t even notice Dolores who had now slumped down to the carpet and was creeping away from her child, towards the stairs.
 
Marcy was not herself today, Dolores told the school, it was probably the because of house cat she ate. You see Claude had worms, that could make any child sick. Dolores needed to stay home and take care of her. Marcy was under the weather. 

Mitchell wouldn’t understand. Only mothers understood their daughters. That’s why Dolores would have to let him down gently, so that she could take care of Marcy. She walked back towards the stairs, Marcy was sitting on the steps with Claude’s worm licked intestines wrapped around her like a sash, and she was nibbling at them like bloody candy necklace. 
 

“Look Mommy!” she said, “I’m wearing Claude!” 
 

Dolores smiled. “Yes you are sweetheart, he looks lovely on you. Can mommy have some?”

She pouted her little mouth and tearing a chunk from her accessory said, “No mommy Claude’s mine.  Just like Daddy.”

By Emily Smith-Miller

This blood in your veins
you speak of as simplistic red
but your bile makes it black
the taste of it on your tongue
a dark reality no one understands

 much as your own lust for blood when it oozes from pores
excites nerve endings into frenzy
a taunting your flesh craves to death

By Jeff Callico

I love the way you smell,
The way you taste of sweat and leather, and I love the way your hands feel on my body,
The way they take me,
The way they bleed me.
 
I love the way the blood hits the wall and splatters like cooking grease as the whip bears down against the soft ivory flesh of my back. 
 

Again comes the pain,
And then harder,
And then again.
 
There is no humility in it,
No sin,
No salvation,
And no acquittal.
 
I am an addict.
 
Had written it twelve times in that blood on the wall.
 
Addict, addict, addict …
 
Addicted to the pain,
Addicted to the shame,
Addicted to all the whitewashed tears that fell like clots of blood upon the paper when there were no more lonely words to write in the darkness.
 
I love you,
The way your flesh rots my soul,
The way your bones waste me.
 
I love your shadow,
And the gravestone you took me on the very first time we met.

By Cheryl Anne Gardner