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When I was 11, John, the middle school bully, told all the popular girls that I had a strand of string cheese hanging from my mouth and it looked like I was drooling. Cute kids with ski slope noses pointed and laughed, the dairy hair dangling and floating with movement.
Today, I do drool. Ropes of cheese from every pore like I’m escaping from the inside out. I am a house in myself–a kitchen, a dining room, a breakfast nook; I’m home and never hungry. The fuller my body, the richer I become until I’m the most paid motherfucker in the galaxy. Schoolyards can’t contain me–my body is a universe that destroys playgrounds.
I explode with the food of myself – all slick, all orange dripping grease. I ooze. With the feast comes wealth and the meals born from these organs build franchises with enough money to collect the bounty of an android bodyguard. If there is a hustle in the galaxy, I am behind it.
***
Middle school John grows up and he is all intergalactic arrears, outstanding debts owed to me and my jaws: pepperoni teeth, meat lovers for meat lovers. And why is it that the worst bullies end up in debt when they become adults?
Nonpayment results in hunger for space justice, and the day that he is taken into my cavernous ship, a sit-down fast food party palace, I make sure that the cheese hangs in cables down my chin and onto where my chest should be.
He stands before me, sandy-haired and neck bent, and his voice is loose water-worn stones. Middle school John asks for my forgiveness.
***
Among the beveled plastic glasses of my red-awning hut, I drown him in sauce; unleash my whole entire body—no consideration for constraints; no stays, no belts, no clothing to contain me. There are no classrooms here.
The liquid spills out: strands of sausage DNA, ropes of mozzarella RNA, stars of dough shaped by the loving hands of some stranger who gave me life. Cords and chains of a pizza body spiderweb into asteroids that will harden and become craters crashing into other planets filled with empty squares.
The black expanse of space is blotted with blood.
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She is the editor of HOOT Review and Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and a former genre editor at Lunch Ticket. Jane-Rebecca is the author of Better Bones and Marrow, both published by Thirty West Publishing House, The Guessing Game published by BA Press, and Thirst and Frost forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. She occasionally drinks wine out of a mug that has a smug poodle on it; she believes that the poodle is the manifestation of the television show Parker Lewis Can't Lose.