Animals Eat Each Other

by Elle Nash

  “Why is it such a big deal, are you hurt about it?”

  The banging continued until I heard Frankie’s voice rise into a guttural howl.

  “Don’t patronize me. I have to clean up your mess all the time, over and over again, I have to clean up after the child over and over again. Do not make this harder on me. You can take your shoes off or you can eat dinner outside.”

  “Jesus. You were fine earlier and I don’t know what happened.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  I heard footsteps toward the door and panicked. I jumped as quickly as I could to the side of the door, in between the apartment and the hedges, as it swung open violently.

  Frankie’s voice, now unmuffled, said, “Here’s your dinner, bitch!” And then something ceramic broke against the front walk. She seemed unhinged and free, like she’d had to perform for so long. I could see Frankie’s face contorted into anger. She looked like that a lot now: her brows knotted, the muscles in her body tense, her whole face in that new way, the stranger her. “If I had a fucking shotgun, I would have shot you by now!”

  The door stayed open what seemed like a long time. I hoped she would close the door and this would all go away. I couldn’t decide if showing up as if nothing had happened was a good idea, or if I should leave and go home for the night.

  I had two paths. One was toward righteousness. If I went home and waited, I could come back when Matt was at work and comfort Frankie. We might sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee while I asked if she was okay, while I prodded, shared the experiences of my own tumultuous family, gradually worked her open. I would highlight the ways in which we were alike, conjecture that we were both women and thus somehow similar, facing a common enemy. She could find repose from her anger within me.

  I imagined it in my head: us being friends. Being able to gain her trust. If I could comfort her in her time of need, she might be willing to let me in.

  The other path was the one I was more familiar with. It was the path of sex. I could feel the manipulative part of myself light up like a highway at dusk. I felt sorry for Matt. I wanted to be the girl that was subdued for him instead of angry. I remember thinking how harsh it was for her to say that, I would have shot you by now, how violent it seemed, despite how physically violent Matt was during sex. I played the situation over and over in my head, the movement of the muffled voices, the door swinging open, the plate breaking against the concrete. And then how it was quiet for so long. Matt’s voice said something low and inaudible. The door closed. My phone vibrated in my pocket as the door was clicking shut, and I almost died from the noise. It was a text from Patrick.

  —hey dude

  Real casual.

  —matt and frankie fighting, I responded. they always do this?

  I contemplated telling him where I was, hiding in the hedges. It felt comical. I worried it might make me look like a coward or some kind of stalker.

  —should i leave you think?

  I put my phone on silent and placed it in my lap, in case he texted back.

  It had been silent for several minutes. I decided I should knock, to check in on them. I stood there for a few moments catching my breath, then heard what sounded like a scuffle and an angry scream. I opened the door right as it happened, just in time to see Matt holding her by the shoulders.

  “I hate you!” she shouted, and then “Stop,” from Matt.

  The light was shining onto that long dark hair of hers, the halo of it around her head. Her amber eyes, I couldn’t look straight into them. She stood there, Matt holding her, and they both looked at me. It was then I made my decision.

  SELF-DECEIT IS NOT UNDEFILED WISDOM

  THINGS CALMED DOWN OVER the next few days. I didn’t ask questions about the fight, and neither of them talked to me about it. It was reminiscent of the fights I remembered my parents having, shouting about his drinking problem and how much money he spent on irresponsible things. Matt and Frankie simply moved on, as if nothing had happened.

  The three of us lay together in bed. I woke up slightly as I heard Frankie stir, but I kept my body faced away from them. I was on the edge, facing the wall. Frankie was farthest from me. Matt lay between us.

  I heard Frankie whisper, “Daddy, I’m horny.”

  He said, “It’s three a.m. I have work in the morning.”

  She said, “I might have to watch a movie in the living room or something,” whispering so the baby didn’t wake up. Her whisper cloyed its way into my chest. My heart rate spiked with the thrill of voyeurism, like I was witnessing something I wasn’t supposed to.

  The weight of her body left the bed and I heard the soft pads of her feet move to the hallway. The milklight of early morning melted through the blinds in the bedroom. I stroked the new skin of the foxglove tattoo between my thighs, the scar rippling gently like silk.

  Matt rolled over to me. His breath was hot and slept in, heavy and milky like the light. He pressed his lips against my neck, pushing harder with his mouth until his lips opened up beneath the weight. I felt the hardness of his front teeth against my skin. He bit a little and said, “L.”

  I moved myself up against his body and made a noise like I was sleeping, a soft mm sound.

  “I want to see the color of your blood again,” he said in between a whisper and hum.

  He said, “I really like you, Lilith.”

  His hands crept around my waist, the whole of my backside lying perfectly into the whole of his front side. My back curved against his chest, his stomach, my ass in his crotch, down to the warmth of his thighs against mine. I tried to get us to fit closer and he pulled me in tight. What it feels like to be held close to the ribs.

  I mumbled a little. The riled-up beating of my heart went into my lungs and throat and ears, but I kept my eyes closed. I wouldn’t let my voice betray me. When I responded, I wanted him to know I was aware of what he was doing and that I was okay with it, as if this slight betrayal wasn’t anything unusual at all. I whispered back, “I really like you too, Matt.”

  His body pressed harder, fitting his knees into the crook of my own.

  “No, girl,” he whispered. “I don’t think you understand.”

  I turned my head around to look at him. He wasn’t smiling, not even smirking. He wasn’t staring at my third-eye spot. He was staring directly into my eyes. I was close enough that I could see the way his eyes moved back and forth between my right eye and left, reading my face for a response. His tenderness was both jarring and intoxicating, and felt like a glimpse into the private life he had built with Frankie. I envied it desperately even as I had his full attention, a deep sucking desire to hold his words inside of me—words that Frankie would never know—and tongue them gently in the soft tissues of my gut as if those words, his tenderness, might one day disappear. Matt had told me there were nine tenets in Satanism and that the first of these was indulgence, the fifth one being vengeance. Maybe that holy fear was letting go of self-judgment, of accepting what was an innate truth about human behavior, that we are just animal, nothing more. In all of us, there is light and there is dark. We feed that dark part of ourselves through daily actions, and a syntax builds to create the person you become.

  I figured it would be the closest to inside each other we’d ever get. The real inside, not vagina inside. The inside with all the guts and glory, where the fear and love lives. There’s something about closing another person out that hardens what you have. We lay there embryonic. You and me against your girlfriend. You and me against the mother of your child.

  That’s why Frankie named me Lilith. She saw me for who I was, the dark and rotten feminine.

  I was the bad woman.

  It was predictable.

  Perhaps because it was much easier than being good.

  In their bed, Matt and I alone, I turned all the way around to face him, my knees between his. I grabbed his hands and placed them on my ribs, wanted to feel him squeeze so I couldn’t breathe. I moved back and forth with my hips sli
ghtly and he moved a hand to my mouth. I tilted my chin down and sucked on the tip of his finger.

  “You’re the devil,” I said.

  “The devil isn’t real,” Matt said. “Black magic and all of that, it’s not real.”

  The dawn was creeping in, a soft shade of pastel blue that washed across Matt’s pale skin.

  “What do you mean, like animal sacrifices and shit?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “Satanism isn’t really about that. It’s about the dark shit, the untouched parts of your mind.”

  “The places where the light don’t touch,” I said.

  “It’s experiencing for yourself the bad things you’ve done to others.”

  Some erotic feeling in me stirred and then flowered. I felt powerful, predatory and scared.

  That’s what drew me into Matt’s embrace: acceptance of the dark part of myself, the rejection of the light. The pale blue surrounded us, our bodies an illuminated text in the milk light bed. We were there, alone. This is what it would be like to be just us.

  The toilet flushed from the hallway and I remembered Frankie. Matt took his hand back. The baby stirred in his crib. I turned away and pretended to be asleep.

  The day after, I showed up to Jenny’s house with a bottle of vodka and pills in my backpack. I ran from my car to her front door and knocked frantically.

  Jenny’s neighborhood was in a place I wouldn’t walk around alone at night, next to the oldest Wal-Mart in Colorado Springs. She opened the creaking screen door and let me in.

  “I have something to tell you,” I blurted out breathlessly.

  “What’s going on?”

  I took the crumpled bag of liquor out of my backpack and handed it to her. We moved into the dimly lit kitchen of her house, the soft light making her look sweet and inviting. Her mom was working, I suspected, and her dad asleep. We didn’t have to go downstairs just yet.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said, “but first, drinks.”

  Jenny poured vodka into two coffee mugs. I thought about the holy fear Matt described. Did he live with it or was he free? Did he accept his dark parts wholly and unrestrained, and could I? With clothes on, he was so calm. Slow, thoughtful in his actions. Restrained. He had a sense of patience with Frankie and his kid. Underneath was something else. I considered his potential capacity to inflict emotional or physical damage on me. When he had pulled me closer to him, it felt so good I wasn’t sure if I cared about the consequences.

  “Jenny, I’m obsessed with him. And Frankie is so crazy I don’t know how to deal with it.”

  She grabbed a plastic bottle of Cherry Coke from the fridge and untwisted the top.

  “Matt is easy to obsess over,” she said. “He just has that way about him. But he and Frankie have been on and off since freshman year of high school.” She poured soda into each of the cups and then handed me one. “That won’t end easily.”

  Something in me was changing, even then in the kitchen with Jenny. A part of me was opening up, and while I could see the end of the road and new that it would lead to pain, instead of retreating, I wanted to walk directly into it. Pain is closer to love than indifference, right? I wanted to walk directly into it.

  “On and off isn’t good for relationships,” I said. “They’ll never last.”

  “How long are you willing to wait?”

  I took a sip from the thick lip of the mug and set my cup back down on the counter, remembering the pills. I pulled two tabs of Percocet from me bag. She shook her head at me.

  “We have to do that downstairs,” she said.

  “It just seemed so intense, you know? Like a forever feeling,” I said. “I could fuck him forever.”

  She leaned her elbow against the linoleum counter. Her blunt bangs were a little long and they fell in her face, dark roots growing from her scalp.

  “So? I could fuck you forever,” she said. She took another sip of her drink. I loved this, whatever we were doing. She leaned in close and pressed her lips against mine, still wet from the drink. It felt so easy with her. I thumbed the pills in my palm as she kissed me.

  “Look,” she said. “I think you should follow your heart if it feels right. But I don’t know what Frankie would do. In high school, she fought girls over Matt. Like, beat the shit out of them.”

  I pouted my lips and imagined Matt’s presence in my body. “But I like him.”

  “I know, sweet cheeks.” She tugged on my sweater and led me downstairs.

  THE OTHER WAY TO SURVIVE THE WORLD IS TO GO TO RAVES

  IT WAS THE END of winter, and we were dancing in the middle of the night at a warehouse off Marksheffel Road. I had persuaded Sam and Jenny to come out with me. We’d taken ecstasy and the sweat sparkled on our faces against the backdrop of flashing lights. In the center of the dance floor, people packed in shoulder to shoulder and Rabbit in the Moon played ethereal lava music with a thunderous house beat. Each body in the room swayed together like a single organism. The subwoofer was a heartbeat threading through the crowd. The warehouse was wet and musky and the smells of our bodies mixed and pulsed.

  What’s so beautiful about ecstasy is the start of it. There’s a swollen feeling that slowly flickers into your chest and then burns through the rest of your body. It feels like doing a new drug all of the time, like an extended, slow-release orgasm.

  Matt, Frankie, and Jenny went to sit in some alcove with pillows and string lights, leaving Sam and me alone on the dance floor. I wished it was Matt who had stayed behind, but I took the chance to kiss Sam on his neck and then gently on the lips while we danced. Still, I didn’t want to miss out on anything Matt was doing. I led Sam with me to the alcove, where we found the three of them sitting with a new guy wearing a Dr. Seuss hat and a flashing necklace. He had dark hair and a really big smile. The new guy, who called himself Tasty, sat between Jenny and Frankie. He pulled out a small dark vial and asked us all if we were rolling. My lips curled up toward my cheeks and into the clouds.

  My eyes widened when he poured whatever was into the vial onto a house key, moony in his shining hands.

  “It’s K,” he said.

  Matt took the first hit. Tasty held the key the whole time even though his hands were shaky. He’d put it right under someone’s nose and the powder would disappear like it never existed.

  Tasty got to me next. It was intimate. The heat and skin of his hand gently scraped my cheek as he put the key under my nose. I closed the other nostril just like everyone else and sniffed until the powder was gone. Everything smelled like dish detergent for a second before the world got soft and spongy and sweet. I felt like a bag of marshmallows, plastic and all, expanding and melting inside of a safe, hot microwave. Sam liked me and Jenny liked me and Matt was telling everyone I was his girlfriend’s girlfriend. In that moment Everyone Loved Me and I didn’t want it to change.

  I leaned into Frankie and felt closer to her than ever before.

  “I have to tell you something,” I said. Our hands touched and instinctively each of our fingers began to writhe in sensation, dumping endorphins into our bodies.

  “You can tell me anything, Lilith.” She smiled at me as though someone was teasing her.

  “When I heard you guys fighting, I wanted to come in and rescue you.” I don’t know what motivated me to say this. The sentiment was hollow, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. “I just really care about you, I want us to be friends and more than friends.”

  She gasped and then pulled me close. “We are more than friends,” she said. She began to laugh and stroke my hair. I moved my hand to her neck and her skin was so soft. I knew the entire moment was contrived but I didn’t care, and I continued to tell her embarrassing things about how I longed for her companionship. She kissed me and I felt like a door had been unlocked somehow, but I knew it wouldn’t carry through to morning.

  My phone flashed—a text from Patrick. I ignored it. He had been texting me more every day. I had been sending smiley faces after each text and was always n
ice. But right now I didn’t need him. I didn’t need to work an angle because everything felt so perfect.

  Tasty asked me if I’d ever had a Seabreeze before. I said no. He moved us so that we were sitting cross-legged and facing each other and I smiled. He put a Vicks inhaler in his mouth and started rubbing my face in a really nice way.

  “You can’t kiss me, okay?” he said. I nodded as he massaged the fatty part of my cheeks. He started blowing air from his mouth, metabolized by the inhaler. I closed my eyes against the astringent feeling and imagined myself on some beach, a place I’d never been. Suddenly, it felt like there were many hands massaging me, rubbing my shoulders and arms, releasing tension. Then someone, I think Tasty, reached out of the dark and pried my eyelids open, breathing hard into each eye. A disembodied voice that sounded like his told me to breathe in deeply, and when I did, the ocean feeling filled my mouth and nose, burning like a cold fire. When I touched my face, my eyes were leaking hot liquid and the ocean feeling spread across my cheeks. I fell back into someone’s arms and disappeared into myself.

  I heard Frankie’s voice against my ear, but I couldn’t see anything. She placed her hand on my hand and then pulled me up out of my seat and into what felt like a whole new world. Walking was floating. We moved together the way two wind currents might gently meet on a calm summer day.

  It felt like a different Frankie. Our mouths fell into each other as if I was with Jenny. How I wanted things to be, easy. How it was a secret but it was our secret.

  My vision came back slowly and the intense ocean feeling faded. We did another bump of K. The rising feeling in my chest stopped just before the climax, rode out slow. Back in the alcove of pillows and string lights, I made out with Matt, moving my mouth and tongue around the whole cosmic world. Frankie was on the dance floor, moving in between Jenny and Sam.

  Everything was right and in tune with what needed to happen. In the heavy music, Matt yell-whispered words I couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I shouted.

  Matt moved his body into my body and put his mouth right at my ear. This muffled, blown-out speaker sound came out of his mouth.