My favorite internet word is “meatsac.” It’s so much more visceral than “body.” So much better at conveying the experience of being a jumble of flesh and fluid. “Body” sounds too cerebral. Body is a word that can mean a collection of anything—body of work, body politic, etc.
Meatsac is always about the base, animal existence. It’s the precise indentations of your fingernails when you clench your fists. It’s the appendix that swells to bursting. The hair that falls and collects in the drain.
The valves that gulp, the tubes that squeeze. A skintag, a rash. A tremor, a gash.
I want this issue to be felt somewhere in your connective tissue, in those nooks between muscles and bones. I want a throb to start up, somewhere beyond your heart, where no such feeling existed before. These are meatsac stories.
Will you pause to catch your breath reading “Pomegranates” by G.M. Mitchell? Will you clutch your breast reading “Milk” by Caitlin Devlin?
In “Eyeballs of My Eyes” by Abigail Guerrero, what is the exact word that makes you flinch? Is it “carbuncles,” or “nerve,” or “knife?” Sometimes you must say goodbye to your flesh, sometimes to the flesh of your flesh.
This issue has an underlying theme of how and where we hold love for our family. When and if we can let go. In “iron & garlic & salt & blood” by Nico Martinez Nocito, the walls protecting this reimagined Rapunzel rise higher and higher.
The hamster in “Meatball” by S.L. Harris is the physical tether for a struggling mind. Make sure you keep contact for the full hour for the therapy to work.
The erotic-but-heartbreaking “The Alien You Love” by Jonathan Huston, uses science-fiction tropes to capture the experience of surviving a toxic relationship.
I’m proud of myself for assembling this issue. Body horror is all too effective because of my innate squeamishness. I’ve fainted in more than one doctor’s office. But the usefulness of meatsac fiction is that it underscores what forbidden knowledge your own body holds. About you and those around you.
What quivers through those layers of epidermis? That shiver you feel up and down your spine is the product of your evolution, your own nature, screaming for you to stop.
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Ⓒ Rebecca Halsey