Animals Eat Each Other

by Elle Nash

  “I want to meet up,” he said. His breath was hard. “I want to see you.”

  I was quiet for a second. A part of me felt angry. I had gone from thinking of him hourly to thinking of him only every other day or so, or when I felt particularly lonely, when it was quiet at night. Another part of me, the romantic in me, knew an opportunity like this would not come along again.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Right now.”

  I swallowed so hard I worried he could hear it.

  “Frankie?”

  “No,” he said. “Just come over as soon as you can.”

  At home, I showered quickly, shaved my legs, ate a snack, and shit from my nerves. I paced in my bathroom, paced in the bedroom, back and across my full-length body mirror, staring at my skin in the sun. I grabbed a few pills from my mother’s stash and set them on my nightstand. I put clothes on and took them off again, making a pile on my bed. I put on perfume. I applied makeup, took it off, frantically reapplied it, and then stood up, examining the foxglove tattoo on my thigh, seeing how it had healed, lotioned my legs, and put on a skirt. I tousled my hair so that curls came down either side of my neck.

  When I got to the parking lot of his apartment, I checked my makeup again and got out of my car. He was already standing outside waiting for me, leaning against a wall. I was not prepared to see him, the way that he would look, and my nerves got to me. I realized I forgot my pills on my nightstand.

  Matt smiled, all his teeth showing, cheeks pink from the wind. I hoped my holographic lip gloss sparkled in the sun as I walked. His freshly shaved head was like a goddamn peach. I wanted to devour him. I had forgotten how badly I wanted this, how much it hurt to look at him.

  When I got closer, I noticed a cut on his left cheek.

  “What happened to your face?”

  “Frankie is doing an overnight,” he said. “DV. She’s in the tank.”

  I wondered if this was why he had spent so long ignoring me. He told me their fighting had gotten worse. She started getting physical, he said, and scared to retaliate, he just took it. If he tried to leave, she would block the door.

  “Last night I couldn’t anymore,” he said. “She came at me with a broken glass. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, just to make her stop.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “I just remember clenching my teeth and going don’t ever fucking touch me again, and that must have scared the shit out of her, because she called the fucking cops on me. They showed up and I was the only one with physical evidence of abuse, so they took her. She was screaming a lot, and I kept telling her to stop resisting. The baby was crying. It was fucking chaos.”

  I stood for a moment looking at his eyes for any omission of truth. As gentle as he was with her, I had wondered this about men who held the monopoly on violence, what the response would be to a woman who was violent. It wasn’t hard to envision Frankie there, in the hallway of their apartment, barking at him, flailing a broken piece of a glass she’d most likely thrown at a wall.

  I was never taught that women were inherently weaker than men. I had learned it through sex, through Matt’s fist at my neck. Men are taught to manipulate the world around them. Women are taught to manipulate men. I loved the violence of Matt, the pulse of it beneath the surface of his tranquil skin. It looked better on him. Frankie’s violence was unrestrained. It was ugly. I knew this, and as a result I used it to my advantage.

  “So she’s just, like, in jail?” I asked. “Where’s the baby?”

  “Jett is at my mom’s house. But yeah, they took her for a twenty-four-hour hold, I guess.”

  I leaned against him, could still feel the shower humid on his skin. His body tensed at first and then relaxed.

  “Can you just come ride with me for a bit? Maybe spend the night?” he asked.

  I feigned sympathy. I wasn’t sure why I was there—did I like him anymore? After three months of torture without him? I looked at the slate-colored Malibu reflecting the old apartment buildings behind us, the abandoned church, the 7-Eleven across the empty parking lot. I felt more nervous than I had in a long time, which at least was something.

  “Sure,” I said.

  When we walked to the car, I had this image of myself, separated from my experience. He got into the car first, and I tilted my hips as I went to sit down, the tattoo on the back of my thigh flashing hopeless before it made contact with the leather seat.

  He pulled out of the parking lot and it hit me that this was the first time we were truly alone. An awkwardness rose in me, as if things had somehow changed and we were two new people on our way to some grand adventure, not the same ones that had been fucking in front of Frankie. I counted each breath down, reveling in the newness, placing my hand on his thigh and thinking, “This is the first time I am placing my hand on his thigh.” The corners of my mouth pulled back and I thought, “This is the first smile I have shown him.” We stopped at a red light and he glanced over, leaning in as if expecting a kiss. I leaned toward him and thought, “Perhaps I am the first woman after all.” He smelled of beer and milk, his tongue soft like an animal in my mouth. His hand moved up my skirt and I felt reborn, my hands on the hard part of him. The novelty I chased, warm underneath his jeans. We stayed in this moment for what felt like a few minutes until a car horn blared behind us.

  “Shit,” he said. “Green light.”

  I laid back into my seat, my guts aching.

  Our view was the curves and crags of a low green mountain and the road in front of us. I realized he was heading up to Gold Camp. I felt like his girl. Like we could still have been in high school. Gravel popped underneath his tires until we got to a pull-off section hidden by a portion of rock. I bit my lip, and he changed the CD out to the one I had slipped him in the returned book. NIN. I unbuttoned his pants, pretending I was the only girl to ever do it. My face this close, the smell of his sweat mixed with the air of everything else, the sour of his body and the cotton of his jeans.

  I gave him head and thought about Frankie. I wondered what she was doing, what jail was like. This competition, like I was the one who was the mother of his child. Daddy.

  His hands graced my upper back and that dissolving feel hit my shoulders and spread through the rest of my body. I emptied against his skin and let his presence permeate, making up for the months I hadn’t seen him. Fucking or making love or neither, I didn’t care anymore. The music in the car so loud it reverberated with harsh twangs. I thought about the way I grabbed Jenny, leaving marks in her skin. Matt sucked his lips and I bit them. I pulled on them with my teeth. I let go of his lip and kissed him again and pushed my tongue into my mouth, I tongued his teeth. He bit me back. I wanted to fuck him the way he had fucked me in front of Frankie. Hatefuck.

  I traced my hands over his head. When he came to and looked at me, between our bodies where the heat was happening, something snapped. We stopped.

  “Did you come?” I asked.

  He nodded and pulled the condom off, looking for the tear. The car smelled heavysweet with the stench of wet latex. We both saw it at the same time, and he looked at me, throwing the condom and the wrapper out of the car window. He looked down and sighed.

  Something fractured inside me. This crescendo was so disappointing. I didn’t know how it happened. The car was the same. The road was the same. Matt was still the same person. But there was something that finally felt cold in me, a shutdown. When I looked at him, I saw that he had a woman, a kid, responsibilities. Things that I didn’t care about or comprehend yet. He had places he was going to, a future. These were things I did not have.

  We left Gold Camp. I traced my fingers along the leather edges of the seats in the Malibu, followed them up to the glove box. Matt looked over at me as I opened the glove box, papers, ice scraper, an old book injured with water. The heart I gave him was in there, underneath all the trash. It seemed appropriate to hide it underneath something so like myself.

  Colorado Springs ascended b
efore us as we hit Cheyenne Mountain Boulevard. Smoke curled up from the paper factory. I was reminded of the first time we rode up here, with Frankie, blasting Manson through the night with the dome light on. As we drove on, I looked in the backseat to see what I might look like if I were Frankie, staring back.

  But I wasn’t Frankie. I was Lilith.

  He drove me back to his apartment building behind the highway barrier, and I stayed the night. His mother brought Jett back over. He mentioned needing to work in the morning. We went to bed early. I slept next to him, both of us alone. I texted Jenny throughout the night and had nightmares that Frankie would come home and find me there in the bed, that she’d drag me out by my feet. The phone kept vibrating with each text from Jenny, and I could tell it was keeping Matt awake, annoying him each time it happened. I finally fell asleep around 2 a.m.

  We woke the next morning to his alarm. I felt groggy. The baby stirred, but we stayed in bed for a few long minutes and I tried to savor each part of the moment that I could—the smell and feel of his hair against my lips, the stubble that had grown in on his face overnight. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back.

  “You should get the morning after pill,” he said. He wasn’t sad when he said it. It was very matter-of-fact. “Frankie told me she wants to leave soon, but I can’t fuck everything up right now.”

  I put my hand on his lips, felt the warmth. He turned his face away and I moved my hand to his. He did not respond.

  “Frankie’s leaving?” I asked.

  “She threatened to move back to New Mexico,” he said. “With her dad.”

  I stayed silent. I wanted to remember this exactly how it happened. In the light of the sun rising into the room, my free hand picked at the overlap between two small pieces of fabric in the blanket, a tiny thump against the mattress each time it gave way. I stared at my other hand on his face, which almost seemed detached from me. I could not feel his skin. I followed the squares of light with my eyes and then glanced at the alarm clock flashing green and blue. Frankie would be coming home.

  “I’ll go the pharmacy,” I said. I lingered for a second before getting out of bed, stupidly waiting for an offer of money to pay for it, but he didn’t make one.

  MAN LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN THE LIGHT BECAUSE HIS DEEDS ARE EVIL

  I DECIDED TO WALK to the pharmacy. As I walked through the neighborhood, I sized up each house in my mind, their traditional 1950s ranch styling. One story. I tried to remember the home we lived in before my father died, but I only had remnants. A red door. Two steps down from the stoop. I remembered a giant sand pit in the back, a big yellow dog that had died when I was very young. The dog would dig deep holes into the sand pit, and I would crawl inside them, feeling hidden and safe.

  The houses were old. An old woman on one side of the street came out from behind the back of her house on a gas-powered lawnmower, riding into her front yard. She waved at me and I smiled back, lifting my arm to shield my eyes from the sun. Another retiree on a lawnmower across the street. Having a lawn seemed like such a waste, but I fantasized about being able to have a garden. I imagined myself with Matt and wondered if he would be the type of person to mow the lawn once a week. If the stability of a lawn-care schedule was exciting or incredibly dull. Maybe, for the right kind of woman, lawn care was a noble act.

  The sound of cars along Chelton drifted over the houses, reminding me that this was not a small suburban neighborhood, but part of a larger town of people doing things with their lives, making money. People who had places to be and things to do, unlike myself. I wondered, if I was the right kind of woman, if Matt would have been less concerned about my becoming pregnant. The fear of it began to set in when I considered all of my failures and the freedoms I was not ready to give up. I had nurtured my drug use as if it were a baby and felt an infantile need to protect it. I often forgot to eat or supplemented my caloric intake with beer. I had visions of a child bursting out of my body, me alone in the wet and dark of it, a bleeding baby in a puddle with me. I was unable to nurture even myself, still needed someone to take of me. Child rearing child. My obsessive fears of aging kicked in, and I wondered how much worse I might look after pregnancy, this big unknown, how I relied so intensely on my body to get what I wanted. I saw how disinterested Matt seemed in Frankie. Though he was tender with her, I suspected this was more out of boredom than out of respect, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was the wrong type of woman, the type that did not deserve to be treated with such tenderness but with the full force of sexualized violence, or a violence that men reserved for other men. I enjoyed so much of the choking, the roughness between us, the bending myself to please him, but also considered that I did not like myself. I could not decide if the two situations, my hate for myself and my desire for pain, were related. To be equal with others you have to add or subtract from yourself, and I found myself unable to do either.

  Maybe childbirth was the ultimate self-mutilation. If I did end up pregnant and did not end it, I suspected Matt would not be there for me and that I deserved that. Matt did not want to see what my blood looked like if it also contained him.

  These were the things I considered as I walked into the Wal-Mart pharmacy at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday. The directions on the box said I should prepare for period-like symptoms, and I was thankful to have something like pain to look forward to. I sat on a curb in the parking lot, debating what to do. Matt had said he wanted to be with me and I wanted to trust it. But the caveat was this pill, a broken condom, a question mark that could complicate things further. He only wanted me if I was hassle-free. I wanted to move out of this town, to pack up a car of belongings and leave with him, the way that he had claimed he wanted. But there was no evidence from his actions that this was anything but fantasy.

  Yet, I still wanted to be complaisant. I did not want to complicate things if there was still a chance. I took the pill out of its blister package and chewed it up and swallowed it without water, licking the bitter pith off the backs of my molars.

  My phone rang. Matt. I figured he was calling to check in on me.

  “Hey,” I said. “I got the stuff.”

  “Oh good,” he said. “I was just calling to tell you that you are a filthy whore.” I could hear the shape of the sneer in his mouth when he said this. It took me a few seconds to register that he was even speaking English because it was so unexpected.

  “What?”

  He didn’t wait for me to speak but instead spoke over me and blurted everything out.

  “You’re a fucking whore and a home wrecker, L. You’re disgusting. You will never be like Frankie.”

  I realized he was insulting me. Something pierced the very center of me and began to rip wide open.

  “Okay, but—”

  “This is one home you will never wreck, you fucking cunt.”

  There is a way people damage you, a way they’ll change the structure of your DNA, the way your brain is wired. I stared at the concrete barrier ahead of me, landscaped trees, a wooden fence that divided Jenny’s neighborhood from the Wal-Mart. A shaking began inside of me. It started small at first and then spread to my limbs until I was contracting every muscle in my body, pulling my neck taut and my mouth into a wide-open scream. The sound of my voice reverberated so loud I could hear my eardrums doubling back on themselves, something tearing inside my head. I threw my phone against the asphalt and it broke into three pieces—battery, back cover, and the phone itself scattered onto the street.

  I thrashed my arms at my knees until my forearms burned numb. I ripped the scabs off of my body. Robitussin would be good right now, I thought. But instead I did what I always did, which was make things worse. I grabbed the phone, quickly put the battery back in and slid the cover on. I called back, but got only an answering machine.

  “I just don’t understand why,” I said, and hung up.

  I wiped snot on my shirt and tried to clean my face. I thought about closure. If he hated me, this meant it was all over. It meant no mo
re waiting. It meant no more purgatory. I was free to leave, to get the fuck out of Colorado Springs without him shaping my life for the first time in months.

  It was finally over.

  I walked back into Wal-Mart to buy three bottles of cough syrup.

  Back home, I was busy massaging my fucked-up face, naked in bed, when my scratched-up phone rang. It was from Matt and Frankie’s house.

  “Lilith,” the voice said. “This is Frances.”

  My breath stopped and I waited, holding my stomach in my hands. The voice was the same business-like voice she used the first time we met. All the walls, everything I’d ever done to try and get to her, I failed. I had failed to make her love me, the way I’d failed to make anyone love me.

  She must have come home from her overnight and found out about me staying the night. I ran through a list of the things I brought over, wondered if I had left any evidence of myself behind. I immediately guessed that Matt’s call was him saving his own skin. She’d put him up to it, calling me names, telling me to stay away.

  “You are a disgusting slut, okay?” she said. I nodded my head although she could not see it. Her voice was so flat, as if she were reading from a textbook. It echoed from the phone. The whole time she was putting up with me for the sake of her boyfriend, and now she had her chance to say what she’d wanted to all along. “If you ever come near my family again, I will fucking kill you.”

  The voice disappeared after that.

  I stumbled into the hallway to get a glass of water, my mom drinking Seven and Seven in the living room. I peeked my head around to see if she was awake, which she was, barely. Maury Povich was playing on the TV. I walked quietly through the living room and entered her bedroom. I noticed the unmade bed, the dank smell, the smell of a body that smokes cigarettes and how nicotine sweats out of her pores into the sheets. In the corner, files tossed here and there on a desk, a vanity full of dusty jewelry boxes of unworn, expensive pieces. A couple of empty orange medicine bottles sat overturned on the nightstand next to an empty bottle of rosé.