We Shall Be Monsters

Written By: Seven Standen

My final victim tasted like burnt nicotine and saccharine peppermints. He started keeping the individually wrapped mints in his pocket after I told him, on our first date, I hated smoking. I would’ve preferred he quit the habit all together, as the sickly sweet peppermints didn’t obscure the bitter flavour. Rather, it added to the nausea I felt when kissing him. His slobbery tongue forced its way down my throat, until I choked on the unwanted appendage, and his lips suctioned onto my teeth, like an invasive dental machine. He seemed intent on eating me alive.

It was our third or fourth date when I lured him back to my narrow, dirty apartment. He didn’t seem to be perturbed by the cramped hallway, lined with rotting trash bags, or the low, stained ceiling of the living area. The soles of his boots trampled the curling edges of the filthy rug without care. There was no comment on the smell. Over the last decade, I’ve learned men don’t notice the faint iron tang of blood, which clings to the trapped air of the building, when they’re distracted by arousal. Rather than their using their noses, or other senses, they let their dicks lead them around. Thank god for their stupidity, because no amount of scrubbing on my hands and knees removes the pungent scent. Pot pourri is hardly enough to cover the thick, meaty smell.

Reflecting on this irony with hindsight, perhaps I can forgive him for the mints.

He was in the final stages of ambulatory intoxication. When I pushed him back towards the couch, he stumbled and swayed. In an instant, his knees buckled and the cushions caught his bulk. Drunkenly, he laughed. I did the same, making the noise more careless and flirty. Fireflies

have been known to mimic mating dances to lure in males and devour them.

“Wait here,” I told him, with a suggestive wink. Earlier that evening, when we were drinking red wine at a sleek bar, I led him to believe I had bought lingerie for the occasion. He knew I identified as male. He knew I was pursuing medical transition. But he treated it like a sprained ankle or a preference for coffee over tea, something minor he could move past. He insisted I dress more feminine because he found it sensual — a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he said. He couldn’t deny his urges, he said. Tonight’s lingerie, blue and frilled, was purchased online to please him, to keep him nice and placid. He’d reacted to the screenshot of my order confirmation with the burning hot face emoji, tongue out, sweat on the forehead. We were texting discreetly at the bar, sat beside each other.

He found it easier to communicate with me from behind a screen, the same way we had when we first met. Gaining his trust was difficult because he had two failed marriages, an addiction to pornography, and the usual social inadequacy of so-called ‘lonely’ men. After transferring from the dating app where we met to real life, he still preferred to text me rather than talk. Sometimes, I

wondered if his slow responses were because he was looking at lewd photos and videos of femboys while we were together. Perhaps he was only pretending to be interested in me, the way I was pretending to be interested in his regurgitated theses about Pulp Fiction.

When I returned to the living area, he was invigorated by his phone. When he looked up from the screen, eyes unfocused, it took him a moment to notice the baby blue lingerie. His slowness irritated me, given I was making myself uncomfortable for his benefit. He didn’t appreciate my sacrifice enough. The brassiere hung like two empty plastic bags against my flat chest, slightly transparent, and the elastic waistband of the panties dug into my beer belly. Curly hair protruded perversely wherever it could find an escape route. As he stared at me, disappointment tugging the corners of his lips, I felt like an alien specimen under observation. My hands were tucked coquettishly behind my back. He didn’t see the knife until it was too late.

Lunging at him, I missed the heart and sunk the blade too far to the right of his chest. It got wedged between his ribs and I had to waste time prying it free, giving my victim time to react. His mouth opened to scream. Grabbing an embroidered pillow, I pressed it over his comically alarmed face to stifle the noise. They recommended smothering as the most painless method online, but I hated how long it took and being so intimate for the duration of my victim’s death. Ripping the knife free, I plunged it into his chest again and felt something give under the force. At the time, I thought I pierced his puny heart, not his lung. His panicked breaths, sending shudders through the entire body, peaked and then slowed, until there was no more movement. To make sure, I waited an additional minute before getting up to change, leaving the knife in his flesh.

Blood had sprayed like a geyser from the initial wound, splattering me and leaving dark splashes of various sizes on the rug. Unlike smaller dots left by the previous man, I didn’t think I’d be able to pass these stains off as red wine spillages. It would have to go, along with the lingerie and the flowery pillow. My annoyance towards the man — although, at this point, I should probably call him ‘the body’ — doubled at the inconvenience he had caused me. With the rug written off, I experienced no qualms about pushing the body onto it and undressing it there.

Reporters speculated about whether I have necrophilic tendencies. But the interest aroused in me by men’s naked bodies was far from sexual. Their anatomy was so alien, yet intimately familiar, like a twin I had never known. Simply, I removed the clothes because they were an obstacle.

With my first victim, I was so nervous about carving the meat into chunks, I couldn’t pierce the skin. My knife glanced over the corpse’s rubbery coating. Not enough force. When I finally succeeded in slicing across the breast plate, peeling away the chest like chicken skin, I gagged. I

salted the fresh slivers and fried them in oil, eating the crispy strips like bacon. It made the sensation more tolerable, a post said. In the hours it took to disassemble the body and store the wrapped parts in my refrigerator, I paused on several occasions to vomit. I was sick, but satisfied. Over the course of a week, I followed recipes for meat preparation, until nothing remained.

Future victims were impressed by my culinary talents, perhaps thinking I could be fashioned into a good housewife. Beef bourguignon and roasted lamb leg were among my best dishes. Like a pig farmer, I fattened them for the kill. I lied about wanting to attend French culinary classes.

I looked for the promised changes to my body and was disappointed. While it supposedly took as long as months to observe any differences, I spent hours studying myself at length. I despaired. I worried about embarking on my transition journey far too late, damaging my chances of passing as a man. Then, around the four month mark, I noticed the hair. It was black and coarse, on my knuckles first, then spreading up the length of my arms. The burnt taste came back to me as soon as I saw it, remembering how strands had stuck between my teeth. I felt stronger.

Truthfully, I felt even hungrier than before.

By my final victim, the inhibitions which previously kept me from tearing into flesh with a blade were long gone. The dead men were no longer unfortunate sacrifices, who I felt some sympathy towards while I drew them into my trap, but means to an end. I was so close now. Growing nearer to my true form filled me with a feverish fervour to get there faster, to finish the job I embarked on so many years ago. Sometimes, the sharp knife felt a clumsy tool to wield. It got in the way.

After the initial cut below the shoulder blade, I tore his arm from the socket and bit into the pillowy flesh. I had the strength of a hundred men. Beyond the initial bitterness of wet blood bursting onto my tongue, his arm tasted no different than a chicken leg. I crunched through the humerus bone without cringing, spitting out any hard chunks too large to swallow. Cooking, seasoning, pausing to taste a spoonful had become redundant. My overwhelming hunger was an urgent necessity which didn’t allow time for anything beyond biting, chewing, and swallowing.

Before, I would wrap the body parts in innocuous brown butcher paper and store them carefully inside my refrigerator, like expensive cuts of beef. With scales, I measured precise portions, making sure to eat small amounts at a time. It was careful and cautious, desperate not to let my appetite get the best of me. I wanted to stay in perfect control of my body. Now, the ferocity at which I tore out a string of blubbery intestines alarmed the small, sane part of me which remained — it was tucked away somewhere secrete in the back of my mind. But the cerebral had given way to my animal instincts a long time ago. My racing thoughts were reduced to television static. My hands seemed to be controlled by a force larger and more powerful than me. I was numb to anything except the gaping hunger and stuffing my mouth full in an attempt to appease it. 

The only ritual I maintained was leaving the shrunken, wrinkled genitals until last. It was debated online whether this symbolic gesture — biting into the forbidden fruit at the end of the feast, treating it like a chaser — made a difference. There was no reason to take chances.

Towards the end of the feasting, I started to awaken from my trance and become aware of my body again. My stomach bulged outwards as if impregnated, which caused acid to quickly rise from my stomach, and my fingers were wet with blood. Fragments of bone and cartilage laid on the rug where I had spat them, still coated in glistening saliva. Worse were the sensations inside my body: dull teeth which ached from chewing, a throat rubbed sore by constant swallowing, and a swelling nausea throughout my whole body. Sweat poured from my every pore with the effort of digestion, like a snake who had swallowed a live mouse. I was soaked through and spent, bodily exhausted as though I’d experienced the best sex of my life. My body crumpled to the spoilt rug.

Drifting in and out of a restless sleep, I have no idea how long I laid there and waited to acclimate to the stuffing. It seemed impossible to fit the entirety of one human body inside another, like a thought experiment with no clear answer, but I had done it. Like a nesting doll with braided hair and painted cheeks. Blown up like a balloon about to burst, I fought wave after wave of nausea, lying in a pool of sweat, and waited for my organs to rupture. Somehow, I fell asleep again. 

I awakened on my final day of freedom, feeling some relief. While my body felt wracked with flu and my head throbbed as though I had a hangover, I no longer felt the pressure would tear my belly in half if I sat up. My insides weren’t packed beyond capacity with dense meat, as though I had passed a large bowel movement in my sleep. Desperately in need of a drink of water, I was driven by my madness to stagger to the bathroom mirror instead. Gripping the edges of the porcelain sink, I fought the strong urge to vomit, which wasn’t helped by the brown stains in the basin or the thick clump of hair clogging the drain. My breaths were deep, but unsteady.

Catching sight of myself in the cloudy glass made any discomfort disappear in an instant. It was everything I had been promised and more. My round face had been growing steadily sharper and now the unshaven jaw was pronounced, coming to a prominent point at the chin. The dark hair no longer fell in little girl ringlets around my face, but was combed back into loose, bedraggled curls starting above my high forehead. Taking off my shirt, I admired the broad shoulders and flat chest, the nipples sitting comfortably on round, brown areoles. No breast buds. The swollen stomach had receded to resemble a middle-aged beer gut. No more curvy hips, no more wobbling butt. My strong legs were covered in the same crude black hair as the rest of my body. It crept from the waistband of my shorts, into my belly button, and spread like a forest over my chest. The crotch of my shorts bulged obscenely, pulsing with new life. No mouth-like slit. It was complete.

I was a Frankenstein’s monster of my own creation, consisting of the body parts I had stolen and consumed. They had become me, joining together piece by piece, until I became the perfect man. A homemade man, created solely from the flesh, blood, and bone of others, but more intricately designed than any made from natural means. I was sculpted carefully from God’s image.

Tearing myself away from my reflection, where I could see myself reborn at last, was painful. In comparison, everything else in the squalor apartment looked mundane. Running my fingertips over my fresh body was only thing capable of soothing me as I washed and cleaned up the remaining mess from last night. I felt an orgasmic shudder of delight each time I glanced my reflection in the surface of an elevator door or the curve of a wine glass. I was floating.

It wasn’t too late to change. My life could finally begin.

When the police arrived at the apartment that night, I blamed myself for getting increasingly sloppier with each kill. Destroying the evidence became more burdensome and, somehow, less important as I progressed through my transformation. I stopped caring whether they caught me or

not, as long as it didn’t happen before my metamorphosis was complete. No jail cell could compare to the body I had spent my life trapped inside. I doubt my impression of naivety when the officers arrived was particularly inspired, though a convincing performance wouldn’t have saved me regardless. Somebody had traced the bloody rug back to the building, then matched the hairs and skin particles they found to the samples I provided. 

The officer told me the name of a woman they were looking for. A name I hadn’t heard in years.

“Nobody by that name lives here,” I answered, honestly.

Confused, he informed me the lease to the apartment was under her name. I agreed. There was a brief standoff while the police insisted I stop being difficult and I assured them I wasn’t hiding a woman in my home. Perfectly willingly, I confessed to the murders of twelve local men who had disappeared under suspicious circumstances, but reiterated my victims had only been men. I had never harmed a woman. This routine continued at the station, where they interrogated me for hours. In the end, they declared the woman was missing, likely dead. The men, dead at my hand. There were no remains to be found for any of the unlucky thirteen.

During the investigation, they found my old driver’s license. It was embossed with the name of the missing woman and featured a photo of her staring miserably into the camera. Her curly hair was limp and lifeless, her face drawn. Under sad eyes, there were huge purple shadows. She was a nobody, friendless and exiled by family, and vulnerable to being taken in by a conniving madman.

It was concluded, by the jury, that the license being in my possession was undeniable evidence I had killed the woman, in addition to my other victims. Doubtless, I had cannibalised her remains too. People took it in turns to throw the word ‘monster’ around the room like a baseball.

My hysterical, bubbling laughter filling the rafters of the courtroom was attributed, by the reporters present, to my guilt, rather than what it truly was — a joy unlike any I experienced before.

Seven Standen (he/they) is an aspiring writer, who has previously been shortlisted for lifestyle writing awards by the Student Publication Association. His work has been featured in The Boar, Raconteur, Empoword Journalism, and Gair Rhydd. He currently studies Public Health at Cardiff University.