The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

  After the trauma: radiation has killed off most, their bones cover the ground. Powder-skin and husks of sow bugs blow up and down the street.

  I chose the path of the part that grieves. I implored the ghost to show me the missing door — the secret through which I could pass to another world. I pleaded for the secrets, I pleaded for the ghost’s return. But at every turn my voice echoed into the supple empty velvet night.

  A sudden remembrance of the lost language comes rushing back to me. All of it, the forest, the stones in the creek —

  Chamomile buried in the sack of briny intestine, aged into soft leathery pellets for tea… cow skulls overflowing with chamomile blooming with sweat in the full sunlight. Caught somewhere on its way to syrup or salt. Yarrow root pulverized into rough rocks with aged oak bark flaked into steaming mush. Add hot pond water for a forest tonic soup and you will see ghosts bending their backs low to the ground like white branches, scaly scraps of their own hides balled up underneath their fingernails. Their laughter is contagious.

  I shut up my mouth so fast! I started seeing dark forms dangling from all the branches, swaying ever so slightly…

  Elsewhere, a plastic skull, smiling, dipped in bleach. Brittle, boxed up in an old nail box with a stained vellum window. Thick leathery snake plant spears clapping at the side of the shed, weathered tongues full of wind.

  Mother hatched from the sea. Elevated by bubbles and the fizz of the ocean’s own brand of electricity. It was a far-fetched system but it worked. She was bound at the ankle. Tides came in and swept her messages away. No one knew to rescue her…

  Mother hatched out of a bubble in the sea. Foam that rose out of the tide. Her eyes were obscured by two smooth pebbles. She removed them and the sky poured in and dreamtime became waking time. The sun hung suspended in orangetime, of puffy, hot frost.

  The beach has been unlatched, un-tethered, thrown open to accept every assorted being who ever walked the earth, shadowy half-chewed animal people afraid of settling down. He rested his eyes on my naked body indifferently, with a warlike calm. Did we hate each other? We turned each other over in our hands, assessing faults and practicing retorts. Weargued all the time. We hated each other.

  At every turn he withheld a little from me and it drove me up the wall. All I could think about was what had been kept from me.

  “Since neither of us are fully human, do we at least together make a complete person?” I asked and I knew the answer already. I braided myself up into his body. He loomed large in my sights and the weight of his body was oppressive.

  “The answer is always ‘yes,’ just keep that in mind.”

  “I’m serious!”

  “There’s no way.”

  We traded appalled stares, suctioned to oozing particles in the dark. Room scraped with spilt wine shadows inching across, floor littered with half-chewed light bulbs lodged in silt.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “I can go wherever I want.”

  “Who do you want to be with?”

  “I can be with whoever I want.”

  Well you are here with me now. You came here having followed my taste, my smell; your memories of things that haven’t happened yet. Only that you carry souvenirs from times past around in your pocket to mark them by. This place was already set up for you. You just had to get here. Get brought here.

  You brought me here! You tricked me by wearing the disguise of a young man I couldn’t resist.

  But you’ve taken many forms in order to get what you want.

  Mossy turf lipped up at the corners like a smile. Small nondescript bugs milled around below. Torn leaves in meticulous piles that must have been placed by hand. All humans gone. The shells caught their breath and instead of waves I heard laughter choking in on itself at a small dark place at the bottom of the surf.

  He said, You thought you were satisfied with your indifference to what you wanted. Do you want me? I don’t know. I think the whole thing is perplexing to you. I think you want me to eat you. You’ve been waiting for someone to come along and really do it right for a while now — and having the upper hand, even at a time like that, is so natural and assumed you don’t even think about it anymore. But I can see the possibility of it not being there one day; I can see it in your eyes… I think you thought you could master men just by getting screwed over by them, but now I don’t think you know what it is you want. All this confuses you. What do you want?

  I don’t know what I want.

  But you want it bad.

  I don’t know what I want but I want it bad.

  The air outside whipped at yellow rocks on the jetty. All the birds went to sleep; all the spaces between rocks in the jetty were stuffed full of feathers.

  “You thought you could master men and what they did. But that part of you was just a baby — half-formed — and you ran away, thinking that you had the equipment to take on the world… So what happens next for you? Where do you go? Who do you see?… Nowhere?… No one?… Do you go to sleep?”

  I was still awake My neck bent back and revealed the skinned fruit, the peeled fruit open and stretching across the length of your lap. Open, ready to take a bite. I lay back, bent around your lap, a skinned switch resting across. No anesthetic. I wondered if I could ever bend back to my previous shape. My neck laid open and exposed to the froth of fruit flies tracing the vein in my neck. I could feel the infrastructure buzzing about on the inside of my neck and felt the dull thud of big blue veins going up each side like two seams. Inside a mass of quivering threads, a braided swamp of fruit flies. You bit and froth gathered in the seams of your mouth. Seams ran all up and down your neck as the froth moved into a light fluid of fruit flies. From this open fissure where my neck had been out cropped crests of meat and braided bone. Juices dissolved into a numb cloud of crisp, dappled mites, dipped in blood, buzzing through the outstretched absorbent terrain of desirous flesh. Leaking sponges creased in the seams where braided bone and calico cloth twisted into agate rock. High twisting beams of agate and algae spun in the buzzing blood. Hot clouds of summery heated air buzzed in drafts around my open throat. You took a bite and your mouth filled with drafts of heated, vibrating air, pink and chewy in your mouth. Neck tissues teemed with vibrating, clanking bones — the middle of a forest of skinned birches slashed and blackening beneath papery membranes. Pulsing clouds of hot blood mist echoed through the cave. Desirous little trap, caught mists between my teeth, jellied eyelids twisting closed.

  Ankles dipped in poison clouds of pink pulsing blood, poison bones sutured into ankle skins and tiny waves of pink stale mist of poaching fluid. Wading ankle-deep in poison. Hemmed inside a miniature pink pond to drown in the depths of misty powdered bone. You bit into the lumps of powdered bone, sacks like cherries steamed in gel sticking and gluing to knucklebones. Little traveling sacks of powdered bone scaled the length of my neck and popped out into your mouth. Echoes of laughter rained in sacks of powdered pink knucklebones, rapped against your chest — claw and tear at your chest, fight with this flesh. It gives so easily. You bit my knuckles, you extracted pink jellied knucklebones and swallowed small sacks of powdered pink clouds of fire mist. White mists of bone billowed up from your mouth. You spit there into that open craving place where my neck used to be. You bit and devoured whole sections of flesh, only to feed it back to me sitting there aching on your lap. Aching out of my open, peeled throat of sharp plaster fruit.

  The sun comes out. Creamed light spills into the cracks in my windpipe, hardening the braided bone and moss into wreaths of cracked shell. Clear tissue seals the porous membrane around my throat, tightening into a skin several sizes too small. Light spills into the hole where my neck used to be, devouring the purple shadows, drying to a sheen-less finish and creasing into a brand new skin, airtight, transparent —

  Now everyone can see the hole where my neck used to be.

  The pink mask fell from her face. Water gurgled into the cracks of the dried shell as it lay on the ground.
Others gathered around her with the thought that she might guide them, but she said nothing, only motioning for them to cover their own eyes and when they did she disappeared. In this way she dispersed her army of followers out of the foam that rushed around the fissures and crags of the fallen shell, those recruited to comb the surrounding hills for signs of the lady with the mask for a face.

  The Warlock beat hard-shelled crawlers into cracks in the floor, “You want to be with him again? Fuck. Go for it. He couldn’t have gotten too far. I bet he’s still out there, waiting for you.” He went to work gluing patches over tears in the walls where sapling branches pierced through the tarpaper and grew wild. “I think there’s a thing or two you’ll need to figure out about life — but you’ll learn in time. I can’t stick around and wait for it to happen.”

  “But you tricked me! You tricked me into coming here. A trap — ”

  “It’s not a trap if you can just walk away.”

  A bunch of kids screamed outside. He returned to the shed with stolen food in a cardboard lettuce box. You don’t want to leave, he said, I think we both know that. This is what you wanted, what you’ve been looking for — “You’re wrong!” — I do something for you. Perhaps you didn’t even realize you wanted it. Now it’s ruining you. “We will ruin each other then,” I said.

  You bit into a solid mass of ground beef artery in my shoulder. You closed your mouth around it and juices sprang into your mouth. Beach people hit bongos on the other side of the wall. Our pulses synched up with it even though we tried to ignore it. I lashed my tongue against the seam of wincing blood vessels up under your jaw. The slick of bone keeping bands of bundled veins tucked under your throat.

  We were a bad fit, wedged, as we were into a two-step of puckering esophagi, convulsing larynxes forced into line by the beach people playing bongos outside. Our throats hissed involuntarily, blubbery on the surface, itching with every twist and stretch. Involuntary radiant heat of bongo beats wheezed soupy through the wall. Don’t stop! Did you hear that? They stopped.

  I dragged you out, sleeping, lulled into paradise sleep by the big bongo gang. We’re taking it further than anyone ever could, we told ourselves.

  This place is bullshit! This shed is poisoning our bodies! We stained the rug, or the rug stained our bodies (couldn’t tell which), the air smelled and was paralyzing. My heart labored against the giant magnets. Sugar caught on my eyelashes. Granules got caught under my eyelids and stuck there, grinding away and I panicked as it etched insignia onto the lens.

  A few hours went by. Sucking on a peace pipe, I poked my head out of the little door, turned around a bit, slowly, cautiously seeking out the hippie kids. They were all stretched out on big rocks in the sun, looking slightly brined, birds having picked the bodies clean of hairs to reinforce their nests. Some had their limbs buried halfway inside the mouths of craggy rocks. Moths slept on their eyes, fluttered and shook their dust where they lay. The soles of their feet had been replaced with brown leaves with red veins running through them. Their bodies spread slightly in the salty heat.

  I went back inside and got in bed. As I lay I could feel the warmth of his breath and I knew that I was in close proximity to a massive presence, a body pulsing with hot blood hanging in silence at my side. The big oppressive weight languished in the air like a solid tone of black mist.

  He brought my hands to his face and kissed my palms.

  My hot breath stained his neck. I love you, I love you, he said with every breath.

  And?

  And, as if to bridge two continents, he went to sleep at my side, as if anything at all had been said before, or would be said after.

  I ate both of his hands, fingers, and moved up his arms. In no time I’d stuffed him all into my mouth. I finished and went to sleep. I had eaten the Warlock.

  I awoke under an avalanche of dead leaves. Massless, quiet tufts of orange smoke. The room seemed to float an inch off the ground on the low-hum muted wheeze of a fridge in the corner. Approaching the subject in the corner, Kim’s already economical body functions slowed even further. I laid a cold palm to her side and she shut down, holding her breath, waiting for me to go away.

  She was wet around her eyes, shedding tombs of it. There was some air chill to her tears, staining her collar. Steam billowed over her on the low platform where she lay like a rock, an island bobbing in a creeping sea waiting to be discovered. Huge cracks widened in slow-motion heaves of the eternal earthquake. I crawled along the damp planks feeling along for her body, a big wet nose wedged into the subfloor.

  “How did you get here?” I asked her. As she grumbled at me a wooden bowl half-full of food, mud, and rainwater flew across the room, nearly hitting me in the back before crashing to the floor. I turned around to see my house mom bent in the doorway. Kim turned over and settled in the shadow, in a crevice in the corner where I could only make out the vague shadow of her shoulder blade twitching.

  House Mom stooped over a series of crates, stuffing some scraps into her apron pocket. I had mistaken her for a large pile of clothing. I was startled to find her there.

  Even more startled when she started speaking. “Don’t touch her,” she looked up, blinking hard over and over at me. Some birds tweeted uproariously outside — I guess they were taking their bath. Her blinking, dry, puffy lids rather screamed out of nowhere. I felt like she was trying to communicate with me telepathically, blinking a series of blinks between thoughts, her shiny black eyes signaling me to read into the big holes.

  She stood over her dead daughter, speaking for her as if they were partners in crime. “The reasons why we did what we did were indecipherable. Who would want to know anyway?” Then, uselessly adding, “Don’t judge us.”

  What do you mean us? I don’t remember you ever being there for her. When she left, did you go out looking? I don’t actually remember you ever leaving the house, I said.

  This house!

  Don’t think hard, think deep! That tiny bag of bones squatting in the doorway had spoken! It looks like she had gnawed away at the ground below her long enough to have constructed something of a suitable dwelling for herself. She was proud and showed me by kicking a small wooden bowl of food and rainwater at my feet. “Mother, stop!”

  “Old Rags,” as she said she wanted to be called, went to mopping up the large pools in the corners of the room while an army of small black crickets piled on top of each other in an effort to stop her.

  “Don’t touch her.” Don’t make the same mistake I did.

  But we both followed the same path to this place, now what do we do?

  House Mom’s two arms jutted out from under her rags like two shafts of bottle glass. She moved around heavy and cautiously as if her body was full of rainwater. She looked tired…

  “I realize they had all taken me for the dead girl!” I said to my house mom, almost in one complete sob.

  But you aren’t. Don’t you realize? None of that shit ever happened to you. It doesn’t matter. You think too much. Obsessive!

  What do we do with her?

  Nothing. We leave. Don’t touch her. She’ll kill you. She’s toxic poison.

  She knelt down to where Kim lay on the ground Mother cares, mother cares… and with that she began to collapse into the guise of the one at our feet. I couldn’t stop any of this from happening, she just started melting until she was inside the body of the dead one, dripping out of the dead one’s eyes, those black pools of water with the white skin on top. The eyes blinked, the swollen pools strained to blink open and closed without spilling. But they spilled a little and streams of grey charged down the dead one’s cheek. The mission is complete, the story is over. The dead one speaks — and blinks — on the floor. Sealed up into a dull, new skin.

  “Mother,” I suddenly wanted very badly to save her — what was left of her. She itched a little, complained of tiny bugs’ legs prickling her skin all over as she fell into a pile of rags on the wood floor, orange rust rising in a slow cloud over her, blo
od and dust, hair mashed into pellets on the floor. I picked up what was left of her and carried her out of that place.

  We had both lived on the beach these long days and nights, our eyes spilling open in the pitch black, two bowls which saw nothing out of the nothing stretched out before us. A void appeared next to each of us in the dark, a voice pitted with sand. The silence of the darkness stuffed the voice into our heads; we swore it was taking place inside because we couldn’t fully identify its source. We had each incorporated it and moved on.

  She rooted around in the pile of clothes in the corner for a little while longer, but she was so tired. Exhausted, she collapsed into a pile of cloth with ribs sticking out, pulsing slightly with small private breaths.

  I felt around in the dark and my hands fell on a small beating body rising and falling like a seashell full of meat.