The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  That autumn it went like this: We? No: I.

  I walk alone and I am the last one.

  “I TRIED TO THINK OF SOMETHING BUT NONE OF it includes you.” I broke the bad news to the rest of the boys. Walking alone this way was more risky, sketchy situations would pop up almost every day. More than once I found myself in the deli of the nearest Safeway going Who the fuck are you? over and over again. Who the fuck is this guy? I asked looking around. Later I found myself underneath some drunk guy, and I was drunk too. I was too wasted to even come right, my climax ambled lamely along and left the door opening and shutting on my stupid prize. My mind ticked into oblivion, traveling so much faster than I could ever catch up with. His chest heaved hollow like a burnt-out husk, his ribcage trap. He used mine as a miter box to ease a saw into my chest cavity and sighed as it etched indelible marks onto virgin flesh. I left, forced to continue down that same haunted freeway, having to walk along with its phantom fissures opening up randomly before me, unable to shake memories of horror — death transmissions from fantasy creatures both near and far.

  Sleeping on an offramp with the rain falling around me. Baby, sometimes I’m so carefree, with a joy that’s hard to hide some hubby vomits into my ear. I’m getting tired of tracing the path of familiar ghosts, documenting the trials of my host body when all it does is die over and over again. It was Kim who talked about “being swept away on a tidal wave of romance” and I believed everything she said all these years — but now I don’t know — I don’t know about her. “That’s what it’s like being wired and in love… ” Her muffled sobs were still with me as I woke up on a trail down the road from some campground. Getting up I found sow bugs accumulated in camps under my sleeping bag. As a kid I once trapped a spider in a pillbox, on one of these kinds of days many years ago. After some time had passed my thinking went like this: Horror to open if dead, horror to open if alive. I woke with a start. What the fuck?! The abortion — that non-decision now but a seeping memory; it disgusts me more with each passing day. Now I know differently, that there are no accidents. There is only that new life coaxed out of not knowing, or forgetting to care. There is rape. But barring the latter, what if you did know? And what if you did care? Would things turn out differently? Would the world be a different place?

  I ran away, but you hunted me, following me like the shadow on the glass.

  Whispers in the hissing rain. It needs to rain to feed what has sprung up in the wake of this generosity. Greedy, greedy forest. No end in sight, just the hissing and the moist and full cracking of its boughs breaking. They stretched their arms out so fully and took so much that they lay down and died. No — here they die standing. Their arms fell off one by one. No end in sight. Their bark curls at the edges and falls; they rot while they grow. What a sight what a sound. Their boughs hiss in the wind. They break so easily. They get soaked, wither and die. They get heavy with rain, swollen with our love, wither and die. The sound of falling boughs echoes strategically through these woods, only we are here to know it, these leaves and I, hissing leaves feeding on hissing rain… Relaxed muscles piled up inside an olive green rain slicker. I sat, perched on a fallen stump, watching a white knob of fungus lose against a rush of cool rainwater. I had drunk a lot of water that I’d found in a neighbor’s barrel and felt unokay, tamped down on my wet log bench, contemplating my fate. It saddens me, the inevitability; this wheel must turn, return. There is no end, only endless endings surrounding us all. Silent days, deafening nights. Hissing nights. When the rain stops the sound is loud: a roar from the center of the earth that only we can hear. The tumor sobs at the center of the forest, at the bottom of a tree buried under a pile of moss. It throbs in the rain. It hisses too — our name. It hisses in my ear — my name. It called to me and I came to it and who knew what I’d find there but more rain. I drew two cards out of the deck, placing them side-by-side on the ground in front of me, staring intensely at the space in between. My eyes lost focus as I practiced anti-looking; instead of thinking, calling up a demon that lay buried in the center. The land had spilled out as organs from the giant mammoth-type creature. Slashed by a human, it rotted on the ground many, many years. Its liver sank gradually into the earth, and still lies as a petrified engine spinning in its tomb. The animal’s other body parts, its tusks and paw scales, formed a craggy topography. Its spine, the mountain range that holds the forest softly in its lap. Dusk. Above my head, resting in the treetops, a big bead of rain revealed a succession of nesting drops, each storm curling inside one larger, layers and layers stretched in a succulent sheen. The full moon a pearl casting down moonrays, tethered to the tumor in miniature at the bottom of the tree, a storm taking place from within a tangle of roots; the glowing sore fed on moss, fortifying itself, growing thick and iridescent at night. This tiny bead of rain, a treasure really, would be a worthwhile thing to dig for. Nobody heard it but us. It led us here. We followed its throb and it almost killed us — in miniature. I heard it, just outside the reach of my fingers, as I worked the dirt. The cast shadows of these woods changed as the moon crept across the sky. The illuminated net of gangrenous moss inching along the forest floor always knows exactly where I’m standing. I move and it follows my footsteps. Exasperated, I ascend to a sturdy bough, but the moss knows this and begins to climb the tree. It wants to live on me, to attach itself so I can feed it. Petulant, spoiled by the rain. Y’know, I said, I’m not like that other thing. I’m no good for you. Yes, the moss replied, I’m no good for you either, and shrugged and continued up the trunk. Glowing glob, net of shrugging moss. Get away!

  If I squinted I could see the future of these woods quite clearly. It looked to me like more rain.

  Her chipper, sing-songy way of speaking sounds straight from a children’s instructional television program, I’m baking a cake. I’m making a Taste Food Cake just for taste, one with white crust with flecks of butter, a smallish one, the dimensions of a roller rink, single level with chewy sponge and jelly gleaming in its own red carpet inside… We like sucking at the sides of cakes, siphoning off the reserves of cream and spitting it out on the pavement. We lap at the trimmings. Suck on the sugar-slicked decorations and swallow the jelly from between layers of chewy cream…

  House Mom fashioned homemade weapons out of firewood and clay. She had razors hidden all over the house. Many surfaces could be utilized as a weapon at the crucial moment. There were buckets of rocks by each bedroom door and giant fly-swatters as well as a spice rack of poisons in the hall closet. She filed her canine teeth into points and whipped the surrounding hills with her war cry. All over the neighborhood the sound of knives sharpening could be heard. She cooked bullets into most of the food and kept baskets of Ukrainian fireworks in the trunk of her car.

  House Mom stapled loose hanging pieces of her clothing together and sealed it to her body with duct tape. She bound her hair into an indestructible rope hiding several rounds of ammunition. Her mouth was covered in scars where she had tried to wake sleeping pets and her skirts were dusted with strychnine and cobwebs. Rat traps held her stockings in place. She painted the undersides of her fingernails with Wite-Out and decorated the big purple hogweed scars up and down her arms with permanent marker. The soles of her shoes were crusted with bone and pygmy goat hairs and she licked at the drifts of dried cream in the palms of her hands. Her teeth dried into clear tiles clanking together around the house…

  I thought of forgotten rooms, of walls collapsing in old apartment buildings, accordion-like, disappearing into a crevice in the dark. One day my house mom went into one of these collapsed rooms and found grey grass sinews itching their way through cracks in the floor, filling the room with tufts of itchy vegetation. They grew and spread into the elaborate lace-like fans and dusty cobweb blooms before wilting into flakes at first sign of morning. All of these memories made up some survey of the make-believe life I led as only a kind of version of living. I made myself remember: crime scenes are a kind of ruin too.

  My dream cat visi
ted me again. Now its black eyes were huge ports just waiting to open wider. No sign of when I’d be back to normal, or what that kind of tension would feel like. I felt “other than,” secretive. An alien from space sent to get some real truth. But truth only lived on other planets. That’s how you bought your freedom, traded for your electricity. I felt myself being followed, by how many and for what purpose I couldn’t tell, only that they were on my trail, and may even have surpassed me at some point to lie in wait, up ahead.

  Mister Mr Mr I couldn’t remember his name so I called him that, like an old TV show. “You know what?” he said, “I’m really starting to like you, sharing space with you, passing the time here when normally I’d be doing my laundry or sitting in my chair, not really doing much of anything for several minutes, just looking around, you know?” He was lying on his bed, his head propped up by his arm in a casual gesture. I feel guilt for the sudden rush of pity — not guilt exactly, but a pang that embarrassed me because a tenuous human existence was revealed to me in its entirety. Something about seeing his body from a distance, a whole self — opened up to the real possibility of being no more.

  When will there be no more of me? I fretted. Can others see it — in the gaps between gestures, words, in the blink of an eye?

  It was possible that the accumulation of past expired caresses clinging to my skin meant that all the men really wanted was just a giant fuckgrab with each other. I was simply the conduit for their wild desire. I was the gift from God that made their wishes come true. But for me being dead or deadest matters little; I could still bear witness to the annihilation of remote beings. Kim’s was the body as murder evidence; her tour of the countryside was necessary to implicate the right people involved in her demise. She said, Look at my body and what you’ve done to it. It’s fucked up it’s not working properly. You stabbed me so many times that now I leak out of everywhere. Fine. My blood stains your town. My red eyes can see the way you’re looking at me. My skin is mottled brown in patches where gore dried up. I wear rags ’cause in your rush to undress me you destroyed me. Somebody on the edge of town came across my sleeping body wrapped in a taupe backdrop, good for them. Mauve is the color of faded blood, taupe is the color of fresh bone — together the mushroomy aroma of murder baked and seasoned in the sunlight. My right leg is fucked up from a fall off of a train. My other leg has a scar from when I tripped down the stairs when I was ten. One of my arms is mangled, caught in a wild cat’s mouth, rammed repeatedly against the rough bark of a dead tree. I poisoned my liver from drinking too much blood. My stomach turned to stone from the pills I took every day when I woke up ’cause your dick gave me a headache. Everything someday will be gone except silence. The earth will be quiet again. I drank so much cough syrup that I went into a coma and I lost part of my hearing and my vision in my right eye, which is now obscured by a big brown spot. Some of my hair got pulled out by an over-zealous fan while he was fucking me in the ass. My pussy cracked in half. There was no one around to help me up. I had to soak my raw flesh in the creek when I got home but I still came out parched and white. Every time I breathe out my skin flakes off in a puff of crepe dust, this means my body gets smaller and smaller every time I breathe. Someday I’ll blow away. I will be everywhere, in the air they breathe, a voice in the sky… The more I stare the more I can see through things. Your image becomes a jellied screen that clings to my gaze but it obscures my ability to hear people telling me to stop. Trying to keep me from finding you, your body. Over the screech of a nearby freeway I will pray for you, I’ll call your name out loud. The evil that men do lives on and on. The feeling deep inside me grows.

  Within a few hours she came up in my dreams. I had images fed to me pretty much all the time, all of emptiness and suffering on the train tracks. Now if I stop thinking specific thoughts I can see her smoking on the bank of a murky Oregon creek, lurking around an abandoned shopping center in the middle of the night, living under a desk in an empty mortgage office, or sharing space with transient forces of evil with a few teeth and handkerchiefs on sticks who shoved her into a dark closet for days on end until she was just a little quiet. I can’t see with my own real eyes anymore because I grew up without aid of doctors or parents. Wild and pissed off, I started developing gangrenous tooth decay at a young age. Don’t know why for sure, but I have to heat any fluids that enter my mouth.

  The girl wanders up from the glass casket and follows items misseen, listens for guidance she half-hears. Finding the ghosts in things mis-heard, half-ready, un-thought. They guide her.

  I forced my cold hands around the clutch of pieces of my Locating Deck: tiny beads of hardened pitch, bits of cat bone, tufted heads of chamomile, pieces of broken china. I jiggled them and threw out a “spread” on the pavement in order to arrive at some basic truth, the message you sent for me to aid me in my search for the lost pieces. The picture started to crystallize in front of me.

  A girl borrowed a drag off a cigarillo standing in her boots, half in and half out of a spotlight affixed to the roof of the garage. It was sprinkling and she wiped her hair, parted down the middle, shiny and flat like a first-wave folkie. She had a sense of humor enough to ask the man to pass his smoke to her. It was the worst smell in the world, she thought, puffing on the wooden tip that tasted like it had been dipped in cologne.

  There was a lot of commotion going on in the big ’60s house, sighs like chimes echoing off the vaulted ceilings. A cluster of buildings, really. Indoor pool with an electrical problem so half the room was always pitch black. Guest quarters. Rooms filled with beanbags. Most of the main house had been turned into an illegal nightclub. The remainder, offices.

  Ready to go back inside? He asked her but she ignored him, pretended to not hear.

  There was another girl who was occupying her thoughts. She pressed her nose against the windowpane, a warm glow burned from within. Men milled about, drunk or nearly drunk. There were girls too…

  Infected hangnails made her swollen fingertips beat in sync with her pulse.

  Inside —

  Another girl. Orange froth gathered at the corner of her mouth. She spat brown shit out into the crowd. They proceeded to roar even louder demanding articles of clothing, a ritual sacrifice. She fitfully turned and turned on stage, unwilling to appease them even though she didn’t know what they wanted. She lapped at the fluid gathering in the corners of her enclosure, wept big fat tears in the direction of light pouring in from a single crack of the outdoors coming in through the skylight. It rained cubes of gold bullion, rendered fat that thickened and conditioned her taxed hide, turning her brilliantly impenetrable — a kind of space alien. She licked at it; the fat coated her throat and complicated swallowing and her breathing seized as her throat clamped down with layers of dull gold lead. She cupped her hand over her ears because she couldn’t stand to hear the demands of those victorious married men, throwing tiny whips at her side, goading her on with hoarse guffaws and free drinks. She dug into the tiny white flesh of her ring mate, a girl she only just met, but the girl already knew her name. She had been to the stage many times before and her missing jaw and eyeballs attested to it. She nibbled at the girl’s spongy flank for several minutes, passing her hand across a breast but found that to be missing as well. She didn’t make a sound but her mouth opened and closed and the air escaping from its tar pit trap said akhhhhhhhhhhh.

  What are you thinking?

  Help me. I’m a rock. I’m immobile, unmovable, resting pulverized on the ground.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asked over and over again.

  House Mom-slash-Lady Death sat in the woods. Her eyes rose as she stitched the burning blue dress, wide billowing skirts of flame. She stitched calico into blinding folds and killed the lights for all of you. She stitched tiny wooden dolls into all the creases. Their joints creaked as she walked and she could feel their confined thoughts drifting up into her nostrils like sour smoke. Ambling into town she landed under a man who froze when he first heard thei
r tiny cries. She pet him and his head filled with water and blood and he fought passing out, until he laid his head down on the skirts. She cradled his head in her skirts, stroking his face with them but he didn’t wake up.

  She found an unlocked car and made preparations to settle in for the night. Wide white-flocked blankets were laid down across the front seats. She held a homemade skeleton key in her bony fingers, closed her eyes but still saw flickering fire spout up in the undersides of her eyelids. Flames welled up inside her, growing and spreading all over inside that unlocked car. The little ones, the small wooden fire children sewn into her dress, had skeleton keys of their own; they crept outside and disappeared into town, suctioning themselves onto wanderers in the night like tiny shafts of skeleton keys turning locks of ancient significance. Hers was one of many tiny fires burning in parked cars.

  The tiny flicker of flame bending and stretching against itself, formed a single unending circle, a cold molten gaping mouth we fell into like two slash marks… she came upon the girl lying open on the cold ground. Everything about her seemed filled at the bottom with fainting medicine, heavy, sifting around her ankles. Pulverized aspirin. The girl sighed and it got in her mouth. She went deaf to every sound but the sifting and sighing. Her eyes were all fucked up. Were those fleas on the ground in front of her or little brown birds? The sky was coated in bile. “Do you like what you see?” she asked.

  The girl woke in a glass box in the woods, seeing but not moving. House Mom prepared a steaming dish for both of them at the fire. The ghosts of long dead animals have piled up on the ground surrounding the glass box for so long that things are growing out of them; they are supporting buildings, holding ends of bridges apart. The souls of dead pets piled up like leaves on top of the glass box. Were they begging to get in, or were they trying to keep her from not leaving?