This selection is included in NonBinary Review Issue #5, available here.

Under the whole wide expanse of an empty refrigerator, I sat next to the open door discussing sprayable butter with Cthulhu, his small one-porcelain-inch body resting on the top shelf. As I leaned in to receive an envelope full of kisses and pestilence, the air turned green and full of shade and I did not know which side of the nozzle pointed away from me: the one where I hold my hand out open and awaiting a gift of leftover and moldy grilled beetle and cheese sandwich, or the other, star and arugula salad. Neither existed inside the bourbon flint of my teeth, so porous and fermented like a firebreather's. But there were candles, scented like beached fish to make him feel at home, and a tablecloth made of human hair woven in the loom between my breasts. Somehow, he decided, he would wrap his wings around me like plastic wrap over an unfinished plate.

Ellie Slaughter is the author of the chapbook VIOLET (2015; available on Amazon), won the Roy F. Powell Creative Writing Award in Poetry (2011), and has been published in Anthropoid, NonBinary Review, and The Miscellany, as well as elsewhere. She is an MFA student at Lesley University and currently works as the prose editor for Sling Magazine while interning at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. In May 2015, she participated in Tupelo Press's 30/30 project. Currently she lives in Salem, MA with her daughter.