It was Wednesday when her name and face popped up on Tinder.

I thought, that’s a cute coincidence, and swiped right.

It’s a Match!

You and Wednesday Addams have liked each other.

The Swamp Monsters’ barbecue was to die for. We’d been neighbors just long enough not to ask about the particular provenance of the hunks of meat they served. There are, after all, things you just don’t do in polite company.

I’m thinking a red suit. Yeah, a nice red to go with the cherry tint I got at the salon yesterday. Suits line this section of the market corridor, a few shining like mirrors in the overheads. Most though are dull and unflattering shades of green, grey, or brown. They sag on the racks like

[continue reading…]

I’ve never met a cannibal named Harvey. When my mother gave me that name, I suppose she also doubted the credential could ever find itself attached to those banal phonemes. But nay she was wrong; I am eater of flesh, connoisseur of the Homo sapiens, taster of gammy knees and tennis elbows. It is I who dines on the crème de la crème of the food chain—the dastardly human. Does that make me king of the food chain, then? An emperor?

Nobody ever told me why the scientists decided to answer the question, but they must have cleared out every orphanage in the country to do it.

The first hour of the experiment was the toughest. Kids headbutted me in the crotch, and I caught enough shin kicks to limp for a week. Bite mark scars still shimmer along my fingers. I punched their child-sized temples and mule kicked their soft little sternums hard enough to make their chests pop.