Animals Eat Each Other

by Elle Nash

  They were so willing to spurn their girlfriends. They did this, put their relationships at risk, when they both had children, that supposed ultimate proof of true love. I felt so confident and sure of my place, like I lived on a pedestal. I felt like a goddess, a wild demon woman. I felt like Lilith.

  I was already committed to this thing with Matt, had already decided I would use any means to get between him and Frankie. I wanted to let go of the holy fear, the Puritanism. I wanted to serve Matt for myself and for him and not for anyone else.

  On my lunch break, I was walking to the grocery store when I saw the brake lights of a familiar slate gray Chevy Malibu pull up to the entrance. A short brunette popped out of the car and ran into the store. I realized it was Frankie. Before the car could pull away, I ran up to it and peeped through the driver-side window.

  It’d been about a week since I’d seen the two of them together, three days since I saw Matt alone. His elbow rested over the lip of the car door and he was wearing this Dickies work shirt with a gray crew neck underneath. God bless a man in Dickies.

  “Well, howdy, stranger,” I said.

  I glanced at Jett in the backseat and then back at Matt. He bit his lip and said mm, this short-burst moan before he opened his mouth.

  “Hi, girl,” he said. “What are you doin’?”

  “On break,” I said. I learned over into the car and licked my teeth. Cars behind him started to pile up in line.

  “Shit—” he said real long, broke it into two syllables like sheee-yet. “Get in.”

  I looked at the entrance and didn’t see Frankie. Matt’s glance followed mine and he winked.

  “Come on,” he goaded. “She’ll be waiting for me in the store.”

  I loved the inside of his car. Leather seats, fancy blue lights everywhere. A good car meant a man with money, which really meant a man who was attractive was a man wasting his money on stupid shit. He pulled into a nearby parking spot and looked at me like I was supposed to know what to do next. I got on my knees in the seat and leaned over the armrest, smiling, moving my ass. Matt grabbed my face in his hands and pulled my mouth into his.

  “Aren’t you scared,” I mouthed into his mouth.

  “Shit, yeah,” he said. Our mouths together, like darkness touching itself. He kissed me hard, quick, as if to make up for our short amount of time.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” I mouthed to him again. I pulled my face away from his pouty lips. Even with the windows down, it was hot in the car. His hands moved to my body, grabbed my waist, my breasts. I looked over at the baby in the backseat.

  That night, I lay down on my dirty carpet texting Jenny about my interactions with Matt and how fucked up it was he wasn’t leaving Frankie yet.

  —i don’t understand what’s taking him so long

  Jenny shot back,

  —i told u tho

  I called their house with a blocked number in case Frankie answered, so I could hang up. I stared at my body as the phone rang, in a full-length mirror placed sideways. Watched my body writhe amongst the trash on my floor in red lingerie. I tried to see myself as Matt might see me underneath him.

  “Hello?” It was Matt. The phone always took the bass out of his voice, but he sounded so close to me on the receiver.

  “Hi, Daddy,” I said. I had wanted to say it to him for so long, but the word sounded foreign in my mouth and I immediately regretted it. My body thrashed with the burn of a mistake. “I just wanted to hear you,” I said. I felt embarrassed, and touched the red lingerie all over my body. “I’m not wearing much.”

  “Hm, really?” I could hear him speaking with that smirk he had.

  Whatever was happening inside my body, these feelings, meant the love could last. Something told me he loved me, too. There was a pause. I imagined him taking a tube of Chapstick out of his pocket and applying it to his lips, the Cupid’s bow glowing like a diamond.

  “Tell me what you’re wearing,” I cloyed.

  “I can’t,” he said. I could hear Jett crying in the background, Frankie’s voice saying something.

  “It’s Patrick,” he said to her. And then, “Look man, I gotta go. Dinner with the lady.”

  He hung up.

  DAUGHTER OF SWORDS

  I CAME OVER TO Jenny’s with a bottle of vodka, asking her advice.

  “You need some kind of power to help you with your shit,” she said. I thought about the billboard on Chelton Road. Every time you drove east, there’d be this big sign that said PORN in big block letters on it, which an image of a white man’s hands bound in the same thorny wire that crowned our lord and savior’s head.

  “Jesus?” I asked.

  “Fuck no,” she said.

  Jenny flipped the tarot cards over one by one. The backs were blue with white flowers. She arranged them in the shape of a cross, and then added a pillar of four cards.

  We sat in the basement amid a dozen lit candles. I poured vodka into my usual coffee mug. We were hunched, knees up to our chests, sitting on the floor with the cards laid out between us. I played a game. She’d flip a card over and I’d take a drink.

  The card in the middle of the cross was a barn owl, like the one tattooed on my stomach. In the card, her wings were splayed wide and there was a sword in her clawed feet. Jenny called this card the Daughter of Swords.

  “This woman is too rational,” she said, pointing to the card. It didn’t sound like she was talking about me. “The Daughter of Swords thinks too much, she cuts away any emotion in her life. She’s afraid to let her feelings control her.”

  “But all I do is chase my feelings,” I said.

  “Maybe what you are doing is running from the real ones,” she said.

  Jenny delicately touched each card before flipping it over. I felt ashamed and jealous that she could know so much about me when I didn’t understand why I was doing what I did at all.

  On top of the Daughter of Swords was a card with an image of the Baphomet, the same one I saw on the Satanic Bible. In the card, the Baphomet’s hands were pointed in the same way—as above, so below, solve et coagula.

  “This card is about your own bondage,” Jenny said. “You’re letting yourself get trapped in a place you don’t need to be trapped.”

  “Are you sure?” I looked at the image of the card, the way it covered the Daughter of Swords. The Devil, was he smothering me? Or was it a sign that Matt and I would be together?

  The light of the candles moved shadows across Jenny’s face, her bangs in her eyes. She looked concerned. She pointed to a picture of three people holding three cups, but the card was upside down, all the shit spilling out of the cards.

  “This card says there’s a third person involved,” she said.

  “No shit,” I said. “Frankie?”

  Jenny picked the card up and stared intently. She took a sip of her own drink and scanned the rest of the reading.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not sure.”

  I never told Matt or Frankie that Patrick had asked me out. There were already too many complicated things going on. I didn’t want anything to change just yet. Whenever I saw him and they were around, I’d pretended nothing happened, and he did the same.

  Jenny moved her hand across a card at the top of the pillar. Her fingers stopped at an image of the Tower of Babel. A crown on top of the tower was being struck by lightning.

  “This is the final outcome,” she said. “Whoever that third person is, it’s not a good idea to keep pursuing this thing with Matt.”

  I took another drink. Fire billowed out of the windows of the tower. Two people were falling to their deaths. One person in the card seemed to stare at me, their hands up in surrender, accepting their fate.

  I woke up that morning in Jenny’s bed to six missed phone calls. My mouth had that candy vomit hangover taste.

  “Fuck,” I said. 11:34 a.m. “Fuuuuuuuck.”

  I was late to work.

  Jenny stirred, wiping the sleep from her eyes,
her hair poking up in cute ways. I wished I could look as good as her in the morning.

  “What’s up?” she said.

  “Gotta fucking go,” I said. I slid out of bed and threw on a dirty pair of jeans. “Mind if I borrow a work shirt?”

  She shook her head and pointed to her laundry hamper. I rummaged through and pulled out a black polo, a little old-smelling. I slid it over my head anyway, too impatient to throw on a bra first.

  As I ran up the stairs, I checked the missed calls.

  Frances

  Frances

  Frances

  Frances

  Frances

  Frances

  I hopped in my car and stuck the key in the ignition. The air was crisp but warming up a little. I called Frankie back, but no one answered. I didn’t leave a voicemail.

  •

  The store was busy when I showed up. I got through the first four hours of my shift without stopping, keeping my head down, hoping Sam wouldn’t say anything. I kept checking my phone for Frankie’s call, but no one called me back. Around four, I saw Matt walk up to the store through the glass. He pulled the door open, hands in his hoodie pockets, looking down at his boots. From behind the counter, Sam said, “Can I help you?”

  “I got it,” I said, walking over. “What’s up?”

  It’d been at least two weeks since I’d seen him at the grocery store and a week since we’d last talked. My body burned at the sight of him, and my hands shook, though lately they were always shaking. I spent so much time waiting to hear from him that the lack of him made me crazy. He was the one with all the control, the one with the secret to keep. When I looked in his eyes, I saw something different this time, a kind of sadness, I guess. Some guilt. A strange kind of anger. He didn’t put his hand out or on me like we knew each other.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I put down the games I had been organizing.

  Matt shook his head, this tiny little shake, and looked down. Sam stood at the counter and looked at Matt with one eyebrow raised.

  “I’m gonna take my fifteen,” I said. “Be back in a sec.”

  I led Matt outside and around the corner, just to the point where Sam couldn’t see anymore. The sun was setting over the mountains. We were in the same spot we stood when he first told me he loved me. It made it all a little romantic. But Matt wasn’t feeling romantic. He looked tense, like somebody had died.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked, impatient. My stomach turned and I felt a little nauseous.

  Matt leaned against the wall and didn’t say anything. He pulled out a cigarette, his hand cupping as he lit. He let it go, handed it to me, and pulled out another one.

  “Frankie’s breaking up with you,” he said.

  “Just Frankie?” I said. I almost laughed at that. “Like, for both of you?”

  He nodded his head, eyes closed, like he couldn’t look at me when he said it.

  “Patrick was missing last night, you know,” he said.

  “The fuck?” I said. “Missing? Where was he?”

  “Look, I’m not good at this shit,” he said. “I know I’ve been lying to Frankie and all, but you’re just lying to everybody. You lie to your boss, about your boss, you lie to Jenny, and now you’re lying to me.”

  He put the cigarette to his mouth again and sucked in.

  “You’re lying to yourself, Lilith.”

  All the ways that he fucked me, the hard way, the honest way. An empty hunger rose in my body.

  “You’re perverse,” he said. “You know? I should have known better.”

  “Better than what?”

  “The messages. All over Patrick’s phone!” he said. “You were talking to him this whole time? Maya came over and said you guys have been flirting for weeks. Do you just fuck anybody?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. I tensed the muscles in my throat. “I was with Jenny last night.”

  Everything was failing. My constant attempt to get us together and alone, trying to figure out our great escape, to figure out when he would leave Frankie behind so we could run away together, the way I had suggested for Patrick and Maya. Because that was a love full of bliss, with all their crazy cousin-fucking, transcendental love, the lies, hiding, and of course, the ultimate manifestation of their love, the baby. Their illegal Lilith fucking love.

  Nothing was real.

  “Sure,” Matt said. “Sure, Lilith. Fucking Jenny too, I guess. Do you ever tell yourself the truth?”

  I hadn’t told him about Jenny yet, but I didn’t think that he would care as much as he did. A hot buzz of embarrassment washed over my face. He cared, and that was exciting. To be possessed in some way. And now he was breaking up with me? Not him, but Frankie. And she sent him to do it? After all the time I spent getting him to sneak around, working up to being together, his fucking promises. The chance had come and instead he was breaking up with me. That was perverse.

  The six missed calls made sense now. Frankie was the decision-maker. It had to be her. He was just doing her bidding, letting her control him.

  With that, he stormed off. I ran after him until I got to the door of RadioShack.

  “Matt!” I yelled. “Please don’t leave!”

  “Come get your shit later,” he shouted back. I watched him walk to his Malibu, hands in his pockets, head down.

  Everything I’ve heard about the night before they broke up with me is heresay. Bits and pieces from Jenny, from friends of friends.

  What I heard was Maya stormed over to Matt and Frankie’s. Frankie was her closest friend, the only other mom she knew. Frankie was also the only person Maya talked to about her relationship with Patrick.

  This is how I picture it: Maya is there in the dining room. It is the same dining room I sat down in the first night I met Matt and Frankie, magazines and salt crumbs all over the table, high chair against the wall. The light is the same yellow light you always get when the sun sets, when it leaks through the blinds and shows how the dust has settled on every surface, how nothing is how it seems in the dark. Matt is sitting in the chair he always sits in, and this time Frankie is sitting in the chair I usually sit in because I’m not there. I’m in Jenny’s basement, tongue deep in all that is holy about her. Maya is sitting in Frankie’s chair. She’s breathing hard, shaking, upset. She’s saying things to Matt and Frankie about the messages she found and how she can’t get hold of Patrick at all. When Maya mentions the prospect of Patrick and I together, something changes in Matt. He gets jealous.

  This was something I never understood about what brought the whole thing down until now, just now when I’m telling you. When I said jealousy fucked things up at first, I meant that about Frankie. I thought it was about her, how she couldn’t be honest about her feelings and how that made me better than her. The lack of honesty made everything spin out of control. I got too complacent in that, I got lazy. Honesty is hard. Matt pulled me closer to him and I let it happen. I wanted that. It was warm and easy.

  Now that I sit here telling you this, this wreck that defined me for so long, I am laughing so hard. Because it’s in this moment with the yellow light and the dust and Frankie sitting in my chair that she sees it so clearly on Matt’s face. He’s jealous.

  Matt was jealous. He thought I was going behind his back, of all things, the sweet twist of a knife he thought was in someone else’s back. Frankie saw the jealousy on his face like a stain, like the one I have lived with all these years, this mark, this curse of Cain, the fractured piece of shit heart they left me with. Lilith.

  Jealousy is the admission to yourself that you are replaceable.

  In that moment, Matt felt betrayed by what he thought was my lying, my perceived “unfaithfulness” to his irreplaceability.

  Nothing lasts.

  Maybe because Frankie had known him all those years, she could see his tics better than anyone else. She could feel it rise on the skin like electricity, see the hairs prick up on his forearms. Frankie could read it
on his face. The kind of rage that burns so deep, a hole in the shape of me is left inside of him. He thought I was his and only his. I was no longer special Lilith but a common whore.

  When Frankie called me that night, when she called over and over again and I didn’t pick up, it must have confirmed for them some truth. Some alternate reality where everything was meant to happen exactly as it did.

  THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME AROUND

  I SHOWED UP AT Matt and Frankie’s to return Marilyn Manson’s autobiography. Inside it, I placed a CD that I had burned a song onto—a song that I’d picked to encapsulate that entire year, just one. I picked this song to torture myself, because I liked the song a lot, and knew I would listen to it over and over again whenever I needed to be reminded what it felt like to hurt. The song was Nine Inch Nails’ “With Teeth.”

  Matt opened the door and kept it close to his body and face, leaning out so I couldn’t see inside. Frankie must have been home. I felt relieved that I did not have to face my fear of her somehow knowing all the wrongs we had committed, all the things we had done behind her back. She just knows about the jealousy and that’s it I kept repeating to myself, over and over. After all, our transgressions weren’t that bad. We kissed, we talked, we touched a little. It wasn’t anything that hadn’t been done before. It was only what happened inside of our bodies, the feeling centers, that had changed, and there was no possible way for her to know what was happening there. That part was under the skin, where she couldn’t reach.

  When Matt looked at me, I had to stop a smile from forming. He wasn’t smiling and I did not want to come off as inappropriate. His mouth was terse and upset. The bags under his eyes were puffy, pronounced. His head was shaved clean again. I could hear the baby making noises somewhere in the apartment. The TV was blaring.

  Matt sighed and I heard the clang of dishes in the background. The man might as well have been married. I started to pick my thumb bloody and wondered when one of us was going to speak. He just stared at me with this book in my hand and the first thing I could think of was what I always did, which was to make things worse.