Animals Eat Each Other

by Elle Nash

  That was the fear I had. I didn’t know if it was holy.

  FROM FEATHERS

  FRANKIE HAD BEEN CALLING me Lilith since the first night I came over, since the night Matt grabbed the words hopeless and romantic on the backs of my thighs with his thick hands. She said it when she tied me up, whispered it to Matt when she told him what to do. Like a pet name, as though this were part of what being loved felt like.

  I was a pet though. It is important to remember that. What it means to be chosen first is different—to be under the arms of someone, close to the ribs. Right up next to the chest, but not in the heart. Lilith, a pet who isn’t from the body of man. Every time Frankie said it, I believed it a little bit more. I started to be it, started to be Lilith, whoever she was. Something about me slipped away, a letting go. Lilith. Each moment the name left her mouth, I liked to imagine I was someone or something else, a hard candy softening my edges against each curl of her tongue. I imagined myself disappearing granule by granule into the pores of her body. Whenever she tied me up and watched as Matt entered me, she watched as though I were a flower, something delicate to be seen and smelled and caressed, and every time he entered me, I didn’t need to see myself in the reflection of his eyes. I could only see him and Frankie, myself an object to bring them pleasure. Benign neglect, how peonies thrive.

  Frankie was in charge. She dreamt up the world and the world complied. I liked it. Frankie was the center of the mandala, turning us around her. She was always holding my hand, letting me let go a little more each time, into a new me. Frankie didn’t name me Lilith because it was who she wanted me to be. She named me Lilith because it was what I wanted to become. I wanted to know what it would be like to carry a bad habit all the way through.

  I think Frankie knew it would happen, that my presence would disrupt the daily harmony of their lives in a way that was out of her control. She may not have known when it would happen, but she knew that it could.

  Matt and Frankie took me on a ride up to Gold Camp Road in Matt’s brand-new Chevy Malibu. We stopped at a gas station first and grabbed snacks, bottles of Diet Mountain Dew and ropes of beef jerky. I got ranch-favored sunflower seeds even though, after a few dozen, the ranch dust flavor started to taste like vomit. I would eat them until the tip of my tongue split with tiny blisters.

  Matt loved his Malibu. Slate gray, leather interior, always vacuumed clean unlike my own trashy car. I found the cars of men to be fascinating. There was so little else they seemed to consume in this way in comparison to women—I collected clothes in big heaps and then grew tired of them, but hung on to them as sort of prize. The same with makeup, some of which I’d had since I was nine years old, some I inherited from my mother, makeup kits with bright pink blushes so old the powders became rocks, hardened with talc. Cars were utilitarian but also revealed something about the person with the keys. How deep and low the engine growled, how nice the rims looked, how smooth the gears shifted from third to fourth or fifth. The Malibu was a subtle expression of Matt’s personality I came to admire, and by extension Frankie’s, since she, too, was associated with the car. We rode around listening to Marilyn Manson on repeat.

  Frankie flipped around from the front seat and said, “Do you like this song, Lilith?” playing “Mobscene.” She pressed a button to skip to the next track, “Fight Song.” She asked over and over again, “Do you like this song, Lilith?” and sang all the words. She turned on the dome light, making the dark outside impossible to see, flipping around every time she asked a question so she could look me in the eyes. I felt the aesthetic of the word each time it left her lips, imagined the supple ways her tongue touched the roof of her mouth or the top row of her perfect white teeth: Lilith. How much it carried while being so effortless.

  I practiced my trick again, the third-eye spot. Frankie said the name at the end of every sentence: Lilith, Lilith, Lilith. I felt like a foreign reactionary playing spy. I wondered if she’d heard Matt and I talking about Satanism in the living room, if I had overstepped. Maybe she saw that I could get too close to Matt, too close to her family. I could get too close and that was why she named me Lilith. A girl invited from the dirt of Frankie’s private Eden, Frankie whose life was so entwined with Matt’s that she came from the bent rib of her lover. Perhaps Frankie was not devoured by the man of her life the way my mother was; it was that she came from him, saw herself as part of him, was so sturdy in his skeletal embrace that she, at first, saw no threat in opening their tannic hearts to me. Lilith was a separate being. That was what Frankie wanted: to close me out. The sinews of their courtship threaded so tightly together that I was merely present to play harp on the tendons of their singular body.

  I didn’t know all the words, but I tried to play along as best I could. Every time she flipped around, all hair and eyes, fingers gripped to her seat, I’d force a smile. I’d crinkle my eyes, squint them just a bit to make it seem real, and put sunflower seeds in my mouth, wishing they were Percocet.

  Where I seemed to fit in with them was wherever Frankie put me. Frankie was the one who tied me to the coffee table with Matt’s never-worn ties. Frankie was the one who tied a blindfold over my eyes, who brought me another beer and another, who felt up my thighs with her tiny bird hands. Who whispered to Matt what he should do to me. I mean, I wasn’t getting drunk for nothing. I felt so lonely during that whole process. I didn’t know who I was becoming at that moment, and because of that, I latched onto whoever I could and molded myself into what they wanted. It was the path of least resistance.

  I had been having problems with my birth control, which became apparent a couple of months into my relationship with Matt and Frankie. My period would come for twelve or seventeen days in a row, and then it would go away and come back again with no warning whatsoever. I was taking the pill every day, but after bleeding for ten days I decided to quit all together. I told Matt and Frankie about this, and we resorted to using condoms.

  I would still bleed at random, most often during sex. Matt did not seem put off by this at all, and neither did Frankie.

  At first, I felt unattractive and dirty leaving stains, and the extra step of having to put a towel down was not conducive to my illusion of sex as an extraterrestrial timeless world in which only we few existed. The bleeding would come unannounced, without pain or cramps, and sometimes mottled brown rather than the attractive deep red color that blood generally was. Frankie constantly reassured me that she didn’t care, and I thought both Matt and Frankie’s casual disregard for the nature of my body was because she was a mother. Despite being uncomfortable, it felt better to sleep with them than to worry about being rejected by someone else.

  We had developed a routine. The arrangement would generally begin with Frankie and I fooling around. We would kiss, and then she would touch me, either with a toy or her hands, and then she would kiss Matt. Sometimes she would tie me up, and then Matt would penetrate me first while Frankie watched. She would hold my hand or keep her hand on my thigh. I was usually on my back, facing away from him.

  The first time he choked me, it was unexpected. His hand cupped my neck, and as he enclosed his grip at the highest point of my throat I could feel the pressure of him harden within me. This excited me more than the choking itself, so I didn’t protest. He thrusted more vigorously, and as pressure built inside of my head, I imagined my face growing beet-colored and froggy as he finally came. He seemed satisfied with himself, and I wondered if he mistook my open mouth as a sign of pleasure rather than a need for air. I know that humans are animals, but in those moments it seemed that the animal inside him was closer to the surface. I wondered if the animal inside of him was more carnivorous than most. Inside of his eyes, there was a wild pale blue like a wolf on a hill at dawn. His gaze was unnerving, and if I caught it in the right moments, I felt like a kind of prey.

  His sex with Frankie was gentler. He regarded her with a tenderness normally reserved for injured animals or children.

  At times, sex between us wo
uld be so vigorous that I would bleed and something in Matt’s face would change. One time his eyes went mannequin blank, glossy and dark, as if the very spirit of his life had escaped him. It was either at the moment of his orgasm or just before. His eyes rolled into the back of his head in the same way that mine did when he choked me, like he was making an attempt to look in on himself and see what was contained within. Matt had just shaved his head again, a soft sort of Velcro blond. My fingers pressed into the muscles of his shoulder and slid up through his hair and bent his face toward my chin. I felt the sharp strain of tendons in my neck against his teeth. He let go and looked at me. I was reminded of the way snorting painkillers feels. A warm bloom began in the center of my head, in the sinus cavity, before spreading like wet, warm fruit smashed under something heavy and hard.

  There was the dissolving body feeling and the sharp pain of teeth and the thrust of Matt inside of me all at once. The force of hands holding me down. Something spilled from my middle as if I were splitting in two. Matt pulled out of me and said blood and grabbed me harder, grabbed the skin on my waist with his fingertips so hard it left small half-moon scars from his fingernails. Some small tug of my heart pushed words into my mouth, asking hit me or harder, only for the hope and trophy of a bruise that might form the next day.

  I forgot Frankie was there, grabbing my thigh. She’d often place her hands over the wings of the owl tattoo until the presence of her touch dropped off my body like melted wax. That, or she masturbated next to us with her eyes closed. What did she think of herself or Matt in this moment? I remember watching pornos where the girl would close her eyes as she was being fucked and keep them closed during the whole process as if to say, “I’m not here in this strange room, and there aren’t cameras, this is just a person fucking me.” I sometimes forgot that the three of us were in this strange game together, that she was prey or she was not.

  I closed my eyes as well, and forgot I was trying to be a part of some young nuclear family, a girlfriend to a couple with a kid, a girl who lived in her mom’s trailer and snorted her mom’s Vicodin. I forgot that I was just a girl working at RadioShack who had slept with her manager, that I was just a girl, that I was me, that I was anything except for the thing Frankie named me, that I was anything else but Lilith.

  TRANSCENDENTAL LOVE

  FRANKIE AND I WERE watching the baby while Matt was at work. Patrick and his girlfriend Maya, whom I hadn’t seen since we all went to the Satellite, came over with beer and ice cream. Patrick and Maya had a baby, too. We sat around and bullshitted on the couch and watched the two kids play with plastic toys sprawled out in the middle of the living room.

  Patrick usually bought us liquor when he came over. He was twenty-one, and it seemed like he had a lot more connections than I did when it came to finding weed or harder recreational drugs. At the hotel, he had asked for my phone number when Maya wasn’t looking. I gave it to him, hoping he would hook me up. I also hoped he would be a good source of information on Matt and Frankie’s relationship, as if he might inadvertently show me cracks to exploit in order to get closer to one or both of them.

  Patrick hadn’t texted me much yet, but I liked having his number in my phone when neither Matt, Frankie, or Maya knew about it.

  At Frankie’s house, Maya revealed to me that her parents did not know Patrick was the father of their baby. She had told them the baby was from a one-night stand. I asked why. Maya waited until Patrick went outside to smoke a cigarette and then told me that they were first cousins.

  I hadn’t guessed that they looked so much alike because they were related. Maya had three sisters and a tight relationship with her mother, something I envied. Maya wanted Patrick to live with her. I wondered why they didn’t just run away. I didn’t understand that family was a thing that kept people rooted. It must have been hard to keep those kinds of secrets.

  I watched both babies as they played, taking toys from one or the other, throwing things, sharing. If Maya and Patrick stayed in the city, the kids would grow up together like siblings.

  I couldn’t imagine staying in the Springs for my mom, who was the only real family I had. Maybe if I’d met someone and started a family. Even then, I wasn’t sure if I could ever be a mother. I was an only child and selfish and inside of myself a lot, and I liked being that way. The way Jett spilled his food and then reached for Frankie, crying for someone to clean up his messes. The way he reached up when she walked by.

  Jett was a thing that needed her. Jett was a thing that clung to her clothes and skin, clung to her hips, deeper than a tattoo. The way her body was shaped, her hips careened outward, the place where the child sat. He shook his plastic toys violently, threw them, broke things, tore paper. A chaotic animal. I used to think babies were fragile and weird and that you had to talk to them like they were something else, something dumber than you. They know when you think they’re dumb or different, they pick that kind of stuff up. They unfold the way people do. It was too much, to take care of a thing like that.

  Matt came home from work. Frankie and I sat on the living room floor cross-legged, Patrick and Maya on the couch. Jett was in Frankie’s lap. I had a tiny basketball that squeaked. Jett squealed and tried to crawl toward me. He looked up as Daddy walked into the living room. I rolled the tiny basketball toward Jett, and as it stopped right in from him, he picked it up with his cherub fingers and stretched his arms out wide into a V, the muscles locking up so hard from excitement they shook. I laughed. I wanted to show Matt and Frankie that I could be useful, I could fit into their lives.

  Matt stopped in the doorway. For a second, it felt like we were playing house—like Jett had two mothers and this father who worked. I wonder if in the past, people did live like this. Sometimes it felt tribal to be this way, as if we were a group of degenerates, isolated but entwined.

  Jenny told me I was crazy to believe that I could ever be part of their family, some permanent fixture, the same way she said it was crazy to think Maya and Patrick would ever run away together.

  I wanted to say she was wrong. For a time, being with the three of them was the only way I wanted to exist. I told Jenny that because I positioned myself as an expendable person, I never got jealous. I never allowed myself to feel jealous, to feel what it would be like to be number one.

  I was an object in her eyes. I was a tool. Every time I heard the name Lilith, pieces of me slipped and gave way underneath her perception of me. I didn’t need to prove I was better or more deserving because I knew I was expendable and let it be. Girl from the dirt.

  At first.

  It’s inviting. It’s inviting to a man who struggles with his spouse, latent loneliness, to a man who doesn’t think long-term. A man who is obsessed with immediate satisfaction. Maybe I am projecting. The ultimate prize is someone who is unattached, who is not going to ask you to do menial tasks or subject you to their near-constant depression. It’s inviting to spend time with someone who asks nothing of you but your presence, who does not ask you to invest anything other than your time. A girl who only wants your company, who is “down to fuck.”

  But it wasn’t real. Which I guess we should have been used to, me and him.

  THE WAY TO SURVIVE THE WORLD IS BY MANIPULATING EVERYONE AROUND YOU

  IT HAD BEEN ABOUT six months since we’d started “dating.” I was at Matt and Frankie’s house almost every night I wasn’t working at Radioshack. And when I was, I came over after my shift. The relationship had grown from me as a sexual object to me as something more useful, multifaceted. I helped with dishes, cleaned or watched Jett if Frankie needed to shower. As they became more comfortable with me, they began to fight. Or maybe they had always fought this much, but they were no longer afraid to reveal their flaws in front of me.

  Sometimes, their fights looked like harmless bickering, but soon their comments became more pointed and hurtful.

  One night, I arrived at about eight, coming over after a shift. I hadn’t eaten yet, but knowing their schedule, I assum
ed they’d either have eaten already or just be sitting down before putting the baby to bed. I put my hand on the cold knob to turn it, but I heard faint yelling from the other side of the door and decided to wait. I stilled every muscle in my body and slowed my breath as much as I could. It was a private moment, I thought; better for them to work things out before I came over. They were expecting me, but I figured they’d lost track of time.

  I heard the deep bass of Matt’s voice and then the rising screech of Frankie’s. The yelling moved past the door, from one end of the apartment to the other. My heartbeat quickened every time. I wondered if one of them might come to the front door and swing it open unexpectedly, their angry faces seething at my spying. When I was young, I’d listen at my parents’ bedroom door after they’d put me to bed, willing my ears to take in as much as I could.

  Banging from the kitchen. I tried so hard to make out what Matt and Frankie were saying, wondered if they knew how loud they were being, if they cared that someone else could hear. How we act when we know we’re being watched is so different. I stilled myself until my muscles ached, cupped my hands, and pressed my ear against the door.

  “You don’t have to repeat yourself, I heard you the first time.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Are you okay? Is there something wrong with you?”

  “Stop. I’ve told you this time and time again—”