Animals Eat Each Other

by Elle Nash

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER. Copyright © 2018, text by Elle Nash. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nash, Elle, author.

  Title: Animals eat each other / Elle Nash.

  Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016039154 (print) | LCCN 2016039627 (ebook) | ISBN 9781938604430 (print) | ISBN 9781945814075 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3614.A727 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3614.A727 (ebook) |

  DDC 811/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039154

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First US edition: April 2018

  Interior design by Leslie Vedder

  Cover designed by Matt Revert

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  There is a cost to being special.

  Most people are not willing to pay that price.

  —Wal-Mart Vice President, 2010

  You can run as fast as you want,

  but you can never outrun your cliché.

  —Doppelherz, Marilyn Manson, 2003

  PROLOGUE

  MATT PLACED THE KNIFE on my face, pressing down against my lips. He wanted me to lick the edge of it, to push my tongue up against the serrated edge so he could watch the way the muscle in my mouth looked against the metal. With his other hand, he held my neck to the floor.

  The one who tied me to the coffee table was his girlfriend, Frances. Her hand was on my thigh, small and smooth and birdlike, occasionally caressing back and forth across my leg as I lay on my back, pressed into the living room carpet. Frances was naked and sat with her legs under her, tourmaline hair falling to her lower back. We were drunk again, their baby asleep in his crib in the bedroom down the hall.

  I squirmed my hips to get comfortable, inched my head left to keep my hair from pulling. Matt’s fingers, thick and callused, wrapped tighter around my neck. The pressure in my skull increased in slow heartbeats, the room fading into an inky black vignette. His eyes, the kind of blue you only see in nature documentaries about very cold places, stared into mine. I stared at the bridge of his nose to seem like I was staring into his eyes. At moments, I would catch his gaze and almost see a flash that I was a Real Living Thing, visceral and bleeding.

  I wanted to be validated, the way everyone does. I ended up between a floor and a knife, between a man and the mother of his child. This was before I understood what it was like to be held close, to-the-ribs close. Close like I was the only one.

  FROM DUST

  THAT SUMMER I WORKED at RadioShack in a dull strip mall, three miles from my mother’s place in Lamplighter mobile home park. We moved to Lamplighter when I was eight, after my father died from sudden liver complications, leaving us with a garage-sized inheritance of 1970s knick-knacks, old photos, and debt. My mother was a caretaker for the elderly, and although she worked through most holidays, her income alone couldn’t pay the mortgage on the rambler they had bought when they first moved to Colorado Springs.

  All summer, my mother had been prodding me to find a job. I’d just graduated high school and had no immediate plans for college, instead investing my time in a growing obsession with snorting Percocet. I was thirteen the first time I thumbed one of my mother’s pills, a Vicodin—only one because I feared she might notice it was missing. I remember carrying it back to my bedroom like a fragile tooth, and I placed it under my pillow with the same excitement that used to come from exchanging body parts for quarters. I brushed my teeth and washed my face in the hallway bathroom and when I came back, the pill was still there. I swallowed it with a glass of water, and at first felt very nauseous. Then a warmth spread from my belly into the rest of my limbs and I felt comforted in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It reminded me of a moment when I’d woken from a nightmare as a child and crawled into bed between both my parents, cradled by the largeness of their bodies and the smell of their sweat, both sweet and stale like old cigarettes.

  Jenny and I stood behind the linoleum counter at the store, waiting on customers. Jenny was a girl I knew from middle school, who had worked at RadioShack since her sophomore year and got me a job, too. The summer had faded into cool evenings on the cusp of autumn, and wispy locks of Jenny’s pastel blue-tipped hair fell from her beanie. Poised between the gray squares of economy carpet and the stacked electronics, she was the brightest thing in the store.

  That’s when Matt and Frances walked in. Jenny took them immediately to the only corner of the store where the camera couldn’t see them.

  Matt was tall, his head shaved so close to the scalp I could see the lines in his cranium. Frances stood next to him, her fingers wrapped delicately between his own. With her other hand, she held the tips of her long hair to her mouth. She constantly checked the reaction on Matt’s face as Jenny spoke to them, as if any move she made or word she said was subject to his approval. Her almond-shaped eyes were exaggerated by her thin, drawn-in eyebrows. Matt pulled out a tube of Chapstick and unscrewed the top. He puckered his lips and put it on, his cupids bow glistening in the dead-pale fluorescent lighting. I stared at his upper lip, the bulge and glow of it, until I heard my name.

  “Matt is a tattoo artist,” Jenny repeated loudly. I wondered how long the three of them had been watching me. “Show him yours!”

  I lifted my shirt to show them the tattoo on my stomach—a barn owl, feathers spread like fingers between my hipbones. I thought about the security cameras and what it might look like if my tiny gray figure lifted her shirt up for a couple of strangers, but since the camera couldn’t see them, I hoped it would be innocuous, like flashing a ghost. The tattoo itself was bare, only line work done three weeks ago. It was my first big piece, an impulsive decision after a dramatic summer break-up.

  I had other tattoos, smaller ones I didn’t show off. At first I was attracted to changing the image of myself, placing tokens on my body to center who I was or where I’d been. After a while, I began to enjoy the dry, dull pain and the way each tattoo forced me to confront my own commitment to be hurt over and over again. The first tattoo, a set of stars trailing down my spine, was the most painful. After the artist inked the first line into my skin, a shroud of dread held me in the chair. I couldn’t stop him. If I did, I’d be walking around my whole life with this symbol of weakness etched into my skin. When he dragged the needle down, he focused one hundred percent of his attention on me, and I liked that. The tattoo scabbed over so badly that the color mottled.

  After that, I wanted to go bigger, more detailed, in more sensitive places. Cursive words on the backs of my thighs: hopeless/romantic. A moon on my ankle, where the skin was so thin the needle felt like splintered toothpicks rubbing frantically against the bone. The decision to get the owl tattooed right on my stomach was physical proof of my control over my body. The wings feathered out toward my hipbones, and the tail pointed down toward the most interesting part of my body, or at least the one that seemed the most interesting to other people. My mother lamented how it might stretch if I were ever to have a child, but I told her I wasn’t worried about that. The outline had been excruciating. The c
loser the artist got to my pelvis, the more I clenched my abs against the pain. I’d made it through the worst of the thick line work; all that remained now was the color.

  The next day at work, Jenny told me Matt and Frances were interested in me, like I was a subject to be explored. When I asked what she meant, she simply said, “They want to get to know you more.”

  A week went by. Jenny gave me Frances’s number. I called, a landline. Her voice sounded thick and warm. She asked if I was free that Saturday.

  When I arrived, I located the garden-level window of their apartment and checked my phone. I was already ten minutes late.

  Their door was hidden from the street. There were nail holes on the doorjamb where the numbers were supposed to be. The frame was a gray muted blue, painted with acrylic, the kind that peels off with age. I placed my index finger against a hole on the hinge side of the door and a paint tag caught underneath my fingernail. The lip of it nudged in between the tip of my finger and the underside of my nail. The feeling of separation, of space between these two minuscule parts of my body, and the gummy yield of the acrylic filled my chest with a sense of relief. I pulled until the tiny string of paint snapped.

  Frances opened the door, the light catching her deep brown eyes. “Come in, come in!” she said. She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the house. Her hands were cool and small, like clutching a tiny animal. I felt as if I could squeeze too hard and somehow kill it.

  “Hey,” I said. “Frances, right?” I tried to smirk, and she smiled back, revealing a slight space between her two front teeth.

  “You can call me Frankie,” she said.

  Up close, Frankie’s skin was smooth and almost poreless. She had freckles across her nose and cheeks, and her teeth seemed unnaturally white. My teeth were slightly yellowed and I did too many things to my body that made it feel old and tired, as though I were dragging all of the mistakes I’d ever made behind me with each step.

  Frankie closed the door and walked me in. My eyes struggled against the light. The entryway led into the living room, where a baby-blue velvet sofa wrapped around two whole walls, oriented to a wooden entertainment center. A few hand-drawn pieces of art hung framed on the wall; I guessed they were Matt’s work. I remember the distinct feeling of their adulthood: a home with furniture, kitchen utensils, bathroom cleanser, a wipe-off calendar. When we’d moved to the trailer, my mother got rid of most of our furniture, and I slept without a mattress for some time. It seemed to take years for us to recollect the things we needed—sharp kitchen knives, a cutting board, a dented saucepan with tarnish crusted around the rim.

  Frankie’s sparrow hands led me through the kitchen. A stack of old bills, a strangely shaped bag, a napkin holder, and some stains littered the circular dining-room table. A hand-painted glass vase with dried willow branches leaned against the napkin holder. The clutter betrayed the neatness of the rest of the house. She pulled a chair out for me and I sat. Salt crumbs pushed into my elbows when I placed my arms on the table. I looked around. Aside from the high chair, there seemed no other evidence of a child.

  “Matt is dropping the baby off at his mom’s house.” Frankie pulled out a chair but didn’t sit. “He should be back pretty soon.”

  “How old is your baby?” I asked.

  I tried not to stare at her body. Although Jenny had said they were interested in me, I didn’t want to make the mistake yet of interpreting their friendliness as anything more than curiosity.

  “Jett’s about ten months old,” she said. “He just took his first steps last week.”

  I didn’t know if ten months was an exceptional time to learn how to use your feet to move your body. I stared at her poreless, makeup-free skin, thinking of what to say.

  I wondered how she felt about seeing me this close, an arm’s length away, where she could see the mistakes in my makeup or the pimples underneath, could smell my breath or skin or hair. I wondered if she felt the same pulse of heat about our bodies, the way I felt it. My hand searched along the bottom of the table for something to pick off, paint or cardboard or wood splinters. When I didn’t find anything, I picked at the skin of my thumb.

  “Oh,” I said. “That must be exciting.”

  She nodded and smiled. Her eyes lit up affectionately. “He gets more mobile every day. It’s always changing,” she said.

  I wanted to get close to Frankie. I always wanted that with girls, especially when they were older or seemed cooler than I was. I wanted to become her best friend, to feel her from every angle. As a result, I became nervous. I didn’t want to fuck it up.

  “There’s a show tonight,” she said. “We can go out when Matt gets back.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Sounds good. How do you two know Jenny?”

  “Well, Matt and Jenny go way back,” Frankie said. “Knew each other in middle school and everything.”

  The cuticle of my thumb began to bleed. I nodded.

  “I met Jenny when I started dating Matt,” she said. “What was that, sophomore year? Or freshman?” She asked as if I would know, like we were longtime friends with an intertwined history. Dust motes circled beneath the overhead light. “God, it’s been so long, it’s like Matt and I are practically married.” She laughed like she was trying to prove something. I laughed, too.

  Eight years later, I’ll look her up on social media and retrace the constellation of each event. I’ll laugh as I scroll through picture upon picture of their life after me—both hers and his, status updates and in her bio: To have and to hold. Married since 2003, a decade plus of matrimonial bliss. The year of our life together erased. As if she’d never called me Lilith, like she did the first night she saw me naked. As if nothing I’m about to tell you ever actually happened.

  ABSORBED INTO THE BODIES OF MEN

  MATT CAME HOME. HE and Frankie stood in the hallway, arms around each other, unmoving. His eyes locked onto mine, and it was like this that I saw something familiar in him for the first time, some flicker that made me burn between my legs. I quickly looked away.

  “Hey,” he said. “Cool to see you on the other side of the cash wrap.” He reached his hand out to me to shake and instinctively I put my hand out, too. What happened when our skin collided is what happens to sweat on a summer body, the way the heat turns everything wet into a hot, sticky vapor. His thumb reached up and over the whole of my hand. I touched him like chalk against a chalkboard, like I could feel each part of me dissolve against his skin. As if I wasn’t standing in their front room, shaking hands with a strange man, like this was some job interview to get fucked.

  Matt moved out of the entryway and into the kitchen to grab some beers. When he stepped away, Frankie kept her eyes on me. Did she want to be my friend? Fuck me? That was the first time she looked at me as though she might unhinge her jaw and eat me, which was both arousing and unnerving. She grabbed my wrist harder this time and led me back to the kitchen table.

  “You want a beer?” Matt asked.

  “Anything harder?”

  “We don’t have any liquor right now,” he said. “I can get Patrick to bring some later.”

  I wondered who Patrick was—a fourth player? Matt’s walk to the table was slow, setting Frankie’s beer down first, and then mine, next to the one he’d finished. I stared at the bottle and watched the way his hand slid from the neck down the body, gathering the slick condensation.

  “So, like, I heard you’re a tattoo artist,” I said.

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “What kind of stuff do you tattoo?”

  He leaned into the hand pressed down on the table, so his hip jutted out a little, almost brushing me. “Small stuff,” he said. “I do it from home.”

  Frankie pointed to the art on the walls. A screaming mouth that reminded me of Cool World. A lot of attempted graffiti, cartoon teddy bears with angry teeth and stoner eyes. The kind of shit every white boy from Colorado Springs drew in high school. I pretended to be impressed.

  He was wearin
g cologne, as though he cared about the closeness of our bodies. It was subtle and understated, like watered-down scotch. “I can tattoo you for free if you want,” he said. “Whenever you want.”

  When I was very little, before my dad died, a cashier at McDonald’s asked me if a happy meal on the counter was mine. My family had already gotten their food, so I said no and wandered back over to my table. My father grabbed me by the shoulders and looked me right in the face. His hair was this tousled shoulder-length mane, brown already going gray, and at the time he’d had a mustache. He said, “Whenever someone offers you something for free, you take it.” The seriousness of his voice scared me.

  I didn’t understand yet that desperation was a trade I’d learn, too.

  “He doesn’t work in a shop,” Frankie said. “But we can tattoo you for sure.”

  She said it again—“we.” When couples are together long enough, they speak as though they are one creature. I wondered if that was a thing only women did, as if we were absorbed into the bodies of men, molded inside of them with only the indigestible parts of us left over. I thought of my mother and how unmolded she had become since my dad died.

  My first memories of her are as a homemaker. We ate dinner at the dining room table every night. Then my dad would watch TV as she did the dishes. He would complain about the noise of the water and she would bring him a Seven and Seven. After that, we’d all watch The Simpsons together before the evening news. His glass would empty and he’d shake it like a Yahtzee cup, the ice rattling around inside. My mother would fill it again, and another time. When the evening news came on, she’d ready me for bed.

  After his death, my mom and I ate off TV trays in the living room. We ate microwave dinners, pizza Hot Pockets, and boxed macaroni and cheese. Sometimes she would make Hamburger Helper. She worked a lot of evening shifts. I learned how to unlock a deadbolt and use a microwave. Her weight crept up—rapidly at first, from antidepressants and anti-insomnia drugs, and then later it evened out. If she wasn’t working, she was asleep on the couch with the soft glow of the TV on her skin while I sat cross-legged on the floor, eating from a greasy paper plate on the coffee table. Her excess weight led to joint pain, which led to Vicodin and Percocet. Eventually, we stopped eating together.