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And then you add in the nuts Hunter closes the refrigerator door with his back and says, “Well, that was underwhelming.” And roast them over an open fire in your sauce of appleblood and ginger Luz shrugs, “I can be more transphobic if you want me to,” her words tripping with laughter. You want to keep stirring until everything is so dark it’s almost black; only the light of the fire should show you the truth of its color Hunter’s fingers clench around the plastic cup in his hand, watching the damage spider-web, and for whatever reason the lack of a pit in his stomach … feels like one? No, that can’t be it. It feels like the ghost that would brush over his stomach, his chest, his thighs whenever his uncle had finished with him, like the air itself had been bruised. Hunter had thought it was longing, once. Now he isn’t so sure. Hunter looks down at his shoes—the wolf slippers Camilla had insisted he get after she’d caught him staring at them for a bit too long. Once the womb is done marinating in the blood it came out of, The slippers have an open mouth he can bob up and down by gently kicking his foot out. “I guess,” he tries, and then the words die in his throat. you can add it to the pan “I guess—” He kicks again, hard enough that the bottom of his slipper chafes loudly across the tile. You tenderized it before you set it out to marinate, didn’t you, Hunter? Luz looks. Luz is still looking at him. Luz is still waiting for him. Good. Now we turn the heat up “I guess I don’t know if it’s —” Come here, you need to learn how to cook for yourself “—it’s because I’m like Caleb or if it’s because he wanted to fuck me.”
Here, now cut it – see, we want a little pink still in the middle.
The knife saws again through what used to be Hunter’s womb, glossy pink juice weeping out. His uncle had always told him that his “corrective” potions would shrink and toughen his uterus up into uselessness, would eventually make it heavy and chewed up with cancer.
It’s only good, then, that his uncle had helped him rip it out. It’s only good that Hunter had had to bite leather and push it out.
Luz catches her mouth in her hands. Hunter sighs like dropping his own corpse off his back.
She makes a strangled noise again, and Hunter realizes what it is: “Are you… laughing?”
She throws her hands out, almost tipping herself out of her kitchen chair. “Not at you!” she cries. “Not at you, I promise.” The words rush out, laughing breaking them like waves against the rocks. “But—Titan, can I say this and you won’t get mad? Or think —okay, I am taking this seriously, I promise, but it’s late and we’re friends—"
“That’s news to me,” Hunter says.
“Be quiet,” she says, an offhanded order. Another bubble-pop of laughter bursts through her lips. “But just the idea that Belos was so mad he didn’t get to sex his brother that he made a clone with a —” She hides her face in her elbow, holding her breath as she waves her hand vaguely in his direction. When she speaks again, it’s with a more even voice, but the smile can’t help but hang on. “—With a popola is soooo terminally bitchless it’s actually kind of galaxy-brained.”
“I’m going to need you to walk me through that again,” Hunter says, crossing his arms, “because I don’t know what any of those words mean. But it seems you’re making fun of my uncle, so you have my tentative approval.”
Luz snorts. “Thanks,” she says, and again he’s caught off guard— when did this happen? When did Luz become his … friend?
Is she, though? But on the other hand, it’s only right, isn’t it? Who else has gotten the dirty taste of his uncle’s mind inside of their mouth?
Friendship like two guns pointed at the other’s forehead. Friendship like 3 am in the kitchen, Luz editing something called an “ay em vee” on her laptop while Hunter scrounges the fridge for another pudding cup.
Friendship like trying to tell her he’d thrown up the ham they’d had for dinner because it had tasted like the organ his uncle had fucked out of him. Of course, that requires explaining that he even had one in the first place—the eating part he has yet to get to.
I’m glad you washed the meat, Hunter, His uncle had said as he dabbed at his lips with his handkerchief. They were sitting beside the fireplace in his room, drinking whatever was left of the wine.
Can’t say I much like the taste of myself, even when it’s off of your lips.
Maybe he should be more grateful that Luz’s five-track mind means he probably won’t have to.
Luz is drawing something in the notebook on the table. “C’mere, look at this,” she says. Hunter steals to her, leaning over her shoulder, idly clenching and unclenching the unopened pudding cup in his hand, the crinkly sound a comfort somehow.
“What is that?” he asks.
“The levels of Interdimensional SmartBoy Mind-Chess,” she says. She points to the top of the page, to the straight line drawn abreast to a hatch-shaded doodle of the Titan’s skull. “This is 1D, completely flat, brainlet levels. This would represent simply not being in love with your brother like a normal person.”
“That’s brainlet?”
“Yes,” she says with such casualness that for a moment he can’t tell whether she’s joking, and of course, she’s already moving her pencil tip to the square she’s drawn below. “This is 2D, slightly above-average intelligence. This would be coping with your brother getting a girlfriend by moving on, getting your own Gee-Eff or Bee-Eff, and then living a normal life where you don’t try to genocide an entire island full of innocent Witches because you don’t understand them and they get laid more than you. Now this,” she taps the flat cube. “This is killing your brother and doing all the genocide stuff I just said. Genius-level intellect, I’m sure you would agree.”
“Oh, absolutely,” he says, and the confidence in his voice sounds like his own again.
“And this—" she crumbles the paper up, tosses it towards the wastebasket in the corner of the room, and misses. “That was cloning your brother and making him trans so that you can sex him and it’s not gay.”
“We certainly wouldn’t want that,” Hunter adds, arms crossed, nose upturned. He wonders, vaguely, if Belos and his brother ever talked to each other like this, ever kept their voices low so their mother wouldn’t hear, and the shot of anger Hunter feels in his stomach is cold and good.
“Ugh, no,” Luz says, kicking back in her kitchen chair. “Can’t stand gay people.”
She cracks her eye open and he cracks his.
Hunter had raised the fork to his lips and tasted pepper and ash. His uncle had sat there watching him, waiting for his reaction like he always did, as though it could give something back to him, could give him some understanding that would finally make everything worth it.
Hunter finally lets himself smile. “What a fucking loser.”