The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  I left him after grabbing a few fast food biscuits and a packet of honey butter, two exercise tapes, a bunch of felt appliqués, glass beads, a glow in the dark spider ring, a brown leotard, and some paper flowers. Love is the new gold the man had said… Hot breath and stubble wear holes in spots already taxed from stress, where it ached the most. My pale blue star, my rainbow, how good it feels to know you’re like me… I felt sad, a confused pang for the small pet I could consume visually in one swig. Me, I went on and on, disappearing down into the covers. Something about seeing both the beginning and end of him, the totality in one gulp, made me feel like I didn’t want to be there when the container became problematic, prone to breakdowns — or worse, died with the liquid contents still sitting inside. He got a kick out of it when I cornered him, pinning his body to the wall with a harness. It was amusing because it was so lacking in risk. He exploded out of the hold in an array of pent up maneuvers… Mark my body with this moment forever, I can’t stand it, I’m cut so deep. I know how it is sitting in an old house where horror is magnetically coded on the walls, recorded for all time, how when you walk by the room plays like a cassette tape. Finding a tape as evidence of the crime cannot be denied. Walking through the haunted house my brain operated like a VCR, acting like a remote viewing player as the ghost-show played for me. The organic and mechanical meet here in my body.

  These were antique thoughts, marked by a non-specific dread… My first impulse is to go to sleep. My second impulse is to have sex with it and my third impulse is to eat it. That’s how my mind works. But the three are not quite as fixed as you might think; they’ve been boiled down, chiseled out, and refined, painstakingly handcrafted over three centuries resting at the bottom of my brain. The three are like the finest three-line poem chiseled in gold at the foot of a roaring majestic waterfall and I’m sure as hell not giving them up, not for the world. I need them. They’re mine. I’m sure you’ve seen my three pieces of gold flash across the faces of most of this journey, they flashed across my face as I stood in your doorway. I ate pieces of gold like the Spanish forced their heathen children to do. They fell down and died… And in this strange shack, wedged under the glowering scraps of a prehistoric beach cave, your silhouette hung in the doorway. It was as if you’d stolen all sound from within the confines of this space between us in order to trap me here. I cracked up; flies seethed in a vibrant warlike blanket covering every surface, pressing themselves into folds, taking the shape of what surrounded them. You moaned and tore into me, getting more and more psycho on me. Losing your cool, you begged me. You didn’t care anymore. I turned into a piece of enchanted pulp in your arms, falling into a guise that was achingly familiar. You held my head up with both hands and made me look at you while I wavered on the edge of consciousness, going in and out every second, “stay here with me,” you said. I fought passing out, staring hard in one fixed direction. You held me up while I slumped and my knees buckled. Stay here. I fought, passing out; my face fell from your grasp. All I remember from that strange night: crying coming crying coming crying coming, locked in a horrible embrace.

  A warlock had found me!

  He was so old. So goddamn big and unwieldy. With eyes bigger than his stomach, a neuroses that fueled a huge appetite. His mouth burned for me and I fell inside. I imagined the old man camping out in the mountains, taming a wild dog, coming to rest on the still-sunny side of a baked earthen pallet of dry land under a redwood tree. He sat and told that tree everything, he figured it deserved it. The wolf-dog stared blankly and the old man thought it to be the typical response of all people — including wolves and dogs. He itched feverishly around his eyes with a fingernail. Out many days and feeling a little crazy because of it, he stumbled down the hill and found a woman there cooking at a diner that was so infrequently visited she had run out of most things some twelve days ago. But she made him something and he ate and after that he had her too, in her little room on top of the restaurant. She took and took — so much it scared him. She was crazy too. They put each other into a deep sleep and it has lasted these long winter weeks… He knew he was among the chosen few. Not many could’ve made it this far. But he had come largely without purpose.

  He was cursed with sick thoughts. Confused, he left a sachet of his own trimmings of brittle chest hair with the woman as a token of some vague shared meaning she found unclear and downright gross of him. The man felt resolved to his fate on his last day as fully human, part of society. He had barely escaped being burned alive in his mobile home trailer. He ran into the woods with the scraps of turkey jerky and a roll of copper wire, his only remaining possessions, in a bag. His hair was singed and his eyes hurt. His brain felt compressed under a hot black weight. He trudged up the hill and felt like a different person. He paused at the top and took in the expanse below. It was consumed by a thick petrifying smoke. It was only a couple of minutes before he realized it. The whole world can burn.

  I’m burning with desire for your touch. Aware of lying flat in a cushion of sleep, nothing but birds pecking at specks on either side of my enclosure, aware of there being no sound, I turned and reached for the nearest lung to suck from. Inject me… mmmmm, water tastes good… My teeth vibrate as I grit them hard against the blackening broth of sky above, evidence that my throat was making noise even though I couldn’t hear it. The trees rain phlegm on me in an abysmal storm that is taking place at the threshold between two dark worlds: the living and the dead. My eyes snapped open and I heard drunks yelling down at the creek. Walking through town I noticed tiny numbers encoded on every surface. Strange dates on bridges and tiny plaques like metal scabs all up and down telephone poles. Cryptic codes I would never know encircling hieroglyphs made for some race of secret vagabond police. As night descended I squinted into the horizon and thought I saw the world as it was 300 years ago.

  Surfaced in a strange man’s bed. Always draped with some damp sheets, or maybe a sleeping bag unzipped lengthwise. I buried myself deeper. Light seemed to vanish completely amid the heavy, dark cloud of his strange funk, that man-cloth smell like wet bear fur. I had walked so far that I felt like I would never be able to leave, no matter how long I slept. I had a feeling we would be here forever, chained to the furniture of our den with felt wallpapered walls heavy and moist. I dragged myself out from under the rail car and went out walking after midnight, looking for you. What total hell to be a real teen. The realization made me think that perhaps I have never really been one. But it didn’t matter, I was going out to Walgreens to bring as many of them as I could find back to the camp. It had been raining for a week and all the dead, mangled cat-rats I found on the side of the road had filled with water, like mottled fur bladders plugging up cracks in the shiny gravel. I knelt down by one who I originally thought was still alive and stuffed it into a bag for rehabilitation. I soon realized that it was a stupid idea and regretted it immensely, but kept walking. I walked for an hour and a half before I saw another person. A motherfucking cop jerk and I ran into the woods when I saw him. I found a small cardboard box on a fence post and transferred the cat-rat body into it so I could use my bag for sticks. I’ve been walking for so long I felt like my spine was gonna break, so I crashed out under a big tree. But it got worse and I had the paranoid fantasy that there was something out in the woods watching me, getting closer, but always hiding behind trees or along where some cars were parked. For a while I stayed with another guy I knew who lived just outside of town with fibers and streaks like great big branches of veins threading up each arm. He lived in a great big house full of ex-cons, all choking down meds that didn’t belong to them. Escaped, elevated by lightening bolts flying through the air a weird whoosh over and around the trash cans, rattling them like empty mussel shells. He’d been away for a while and his battered relations to other humans carried over to the painful way he hugged me. We trapped ourselves in his room and tore away at each other, an echo of an echo, laughter and screams filtered through droplets inching down his back; we were the so
und of aliens, all wound up, unreal. He slumped over the velvet heart in his lap, one or more addicted, jobless vagrants scratching at his door. Later in the day we found them sitting in a line along the living room wall like deflated canteens in the mid-day dead hour. Sleeping potion bottles strapped to their bodies, vaporizer bags punching in and out, up and running sugar swirl gas clamped between yellow teeth. Burning halfway down their windpipes. Nudged an arm and whispers like fucked dirt, shallow breaths all in sync. As I fell asleep outdoors I told myself that nothing would ever actually get me so long as I was out cold — in a dream I told myself that our kind doesn’t die. The carbon monoxide from heavy traffic cutting through the neighborhood to avoid rush hour gave my thoughts a new urgency and I fell into a contagious bout of self-pity. The pieces rattled around in my apron pocket as I neared the site. They were activated. I knew I was close. The pieces threw themselves against the confines of their enclosure, inside the patch pocket taped to my chest, appearing from the outside like a large pulsing cartoon heart, thumping away irregularly.

  I happened upon a handful of stately Victorian houses standing hugely vacant on a dark, sandy street. No one was around and it didn’t feel as if anybody had lived here for many years. Certainly not since I’ve been around. The earth fell silent and I darted in and through them, contemplating my next move. The houses emanated their own strange otherworldly heat, unlike that of animals or people. A kind of body heat by stasis and I can’t really describe it any better. A proto-electricity. At any rate they were more or less alive and I jumped in and around and hid in odd corners where they creaked and strained to enclose me.

  Outside I noticed an absence of footprints almost immediately and sensed that I was in the presence of a force more ruthless than I could have imagined. A flock of green ex-pet parrots flew overhead without a sound. Wind swirled around so carefully, its heat barely touching my lungs. I breathed pure thoughts and prayed the rain would take me away from this place soon. I ran to the backyard of one of the oppressive structures. I could hardly imagine what I saw in among the torn remnants of a berry bush, feeling my knees pressing into the dusty bramble, lying flat, thrown open like a cask. I opened a jar and flies flew out and got lost in a mess of my hair. I felt them beat their wings around the back of my neck. I was at the center of the world, at one of the special places…

  A rail car stood open in a frozen yard, steam of smoky ice resting in billowing rock formations on the tracks. Sunrise, red-woods surrounding us all. I crept in, feeling with my hands in front of me along the damp planks until my hands fell onto the heaving bones of a ribcage rising rapidly in the dark. It spoke of riches unknown to any other traveler. Of course it spoke softly of you, little pet. I wrapped myself up in the remnants of a linen dropcloth and the car sprang forward, climbing to twenty mph as we slept at opposite ends of the cell. I woke up to that same loud pinging noise coming from town and made my way to the Walgreens just before morning. I looked around in some mags and slipped into the backroom, snacking, making a nest for myself high up in the rafters. No one noticed me up there and when I opened that box the next time the cat-rat was just bones. As I walked they rattled around in my apron pocket. The closer I got to the dense wet crush of ferns and other soft greens at the foot of a redwood tree the more the leaves seemed to be making a hissing sound, vibrating oddly in a dustless quiver so quiet I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t listening to the rush of psychic blood at my temples instead. Walking with my head getting heavier and heavier, the exposed trail broke down underfoot, big cracks forming as I made my way deeper into the heart of the forest. I carried broken ferns to a place in the ground and I laid them down as a place for you.

  It was for her that night fell so fast. She landed in that spot in the middle of the woods and lay as light rain fell all over her. Wetting the papery ribbons of her dress and staining the leaves in the lowest branches hanging over her still-closed eyes. She lay open on the cold ground. She didn’t notice as the beings began preparing a bed beneath her as she lay. She couldn’t hear them.

  House Mom stoops over a pile of clothes shaped around a log, tending to the pleated sweatshirt tucked around its “waist.” Other small lumps of clothing are arranged around her like fallout. The little lumps sing and vibrate on the floor and dance around in circles on a sheet of steam coating the concrete floor. House Mom thinks of everything and has set out bowls of rainwater for the lumps, who absorb it into their folds.

  House Mom collects rainwater in wooden bowls set outside in the yard. The grey packed dirt has not seen rain in some time, the canopy having grown so thick, but the bowls fill just the same — there is rain enough at least for wooden bowls. The girl watches from inside a glass casket set down in the middle of a clearing in the yard, dried leaves mounded up all around. She presses her hands up in front of her, suctioned to the lid of the box. Dried chamomile fills the bottom to the glass box, stuffs her pockets, and has been pressed into the toes of her shoes. Chamomile sleeps in her hair and fills out the parcels where her breasts used to be. House Mom tends to the dried leaves surrounding the glass box. She straightens the sheets of ice guarding the pond and mends their cracks with a mixture of mud and chamomile.

  A trail of smoke can be seen from near and far as House Mom tends to the fireplace of the small shed early in the morning. She pours white wine over the hot rocks in the fireplace and goes to sleep under a cloud of butter broth. She arranges the small lumps around her close and the big one guards the door at her feet.

  Leaves pile up at the door. Leaves pile up on the glass box in the yard where outside at night two palms are pressed to the glass, sleeping, ready to spring.

  House Mom loves the girl in the glass box very much (misses the girl in the glass box) and is tending to her and her slumbering chamomile pods like you would tend to a fire that’s keeping you alive. The fire that’s putting out a signal far off into the surrounding hills:

  Mother stands on the beach and animates all the little lumps of cloth with every breath. Her breath sets them in motion, sets out currents of electricity animating those dozens (then hundreds… thousands) of little lumps of cloth, sending them quaking through the forests and fields and towns on the edge of the woods.

  He sighs and weeps for you. The silent song of feathers spinning solemnly in the morgue moonlight… a grievous roar sounds from high up on a perch in the silence of winter passing into death. You cannot hear it. Just know that it happens and it’s for you — it’s all for you. You keep me alive with the spiral water in the glass. Of night and the water of violence, of longing that will never be forgiven, it marks the glass like acid. There were some whispers among feathers that this was the right part of town for longing. The right time of the day in this death-dappled region of earth. The sun a stone setting on the plate etched to the horizon.

  I’ve been getting the feeling that I’m being followed. “You!” I shout, turning around… My dream cat came for me, but this time it was an ugly little thing. Half cat, half rat. It looked like it had been mangled in an accident. Its snout was long and deflated with fragments of bone swimming around inside, black, wet, and cold. Its eyes were dull and dark bone polished black. Could it see? Probably not. It was grey-brown. The most vivid thing I remember is it coming up to me and taking my fingers in its mouth. I could feel that it didn’t have any teeth, and it was cold and wet in there. I recoiled in horror and tried to get away from it but the cat was quick and darted around the whole yard, wherever I went. It chased me everywhere. It was so fast I couldn’t even see it anymore. Rather, I felt it darting around, following me. And suddenly I began to notice deflated cat carcasses everywhere, under dirt that I kicked up running — but they were all petrified rats, all grey powdery fur. The cat’s name was Ratzl.

  Resting in a man’s bed, unfamiliar smells of dryer sheets — lying in a dirt plot I could feel my heart beating in my back. My throat seemed to close. Mother sat in the window. Toxic fumes made the world fuzzy and blurred with a revolving vagueness. Ti
ny shining stars burned sweetly all around me as she sent them down to settle on the earth. They bore their way into the dirt, slowly worming around until they found secret tufts of moss and there fed, and grew. I was sick every day now. Practically immobile, I vomited violently at every turn. I tugged at my raw throat and coughed forth an owl pellet. My eyes pounding out of my head, fighting passing out I tore at it, breaking it open with my hands I discovered the fine white bones of my dream cat. I had eaten him!

  I LAY DOWN IN SOME TALL GRASS GROWING through a fissure in dry concrete next to an onramp. I went to sleep with my arm extending out into the northbound lane. Thumbs up. No one ever stops. I woke up sometime later and the light had changed, wincing over the tops of some burnt trees… My body had been moved several yards down the road. I noticed this only after raising my half-worm-eaten face from the pavement, heavy and winey, glancing back to where I had been several hours/days before. I would be moved several more times, from one cot to another, from the back seat to the front, from a familiar bed to a different man’s — and would only notice when I woke. How shifty they had been, to move my body while I’d been away, my head heavy and winey, filled with regret.

  Seth and I sat on the low narrow couch at the rear of our trailer in the woods — so long ago. The space heater in the corner sputtered bad breath out into the small room. I reached over and tickled the roof of his mouth with my index finger. He laughed and did the same to me. We were drunk. We fucked with my hands over his face.

  Bleating, horrid calls to the streets… passing by towns slowly, descending toward the hot, humid afternoon-hell in that secret place, searching out some semblance of normalcy out of the shallow night, your fractured thoughts occupied by that fateful hour of afternoon. Possessed calls piercing the night, you’re caught in its thrall, head pounding, looking for answers. It’s all wrong, you’re all wrong. You’ve been here before.