Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

Do you feel the storm too?

And I said No. I can’t.

She always seemed kind of embryonic. Reverting back to some liminal state launched into motion when she left the house, as if the building itself was keeping her on an upward path, evolving into a real person. Running away she seemed to just start sliding back down. She fell and collapsed at the bottom of the food chain somewhere in the spring… In this secret room with no doors there is a golden wilderness, where everything is priceless and wild. I coveted a scrap of bone said to be from the Donner Party, incinerated with marks of butchery visible to the naked eye. Other pieces turned up in the dirt along the way. Pieces I couldn’t quite place: bits of china, a petrified crust of bread, dice, a wad of Scotch tape folded into a flattened ice cube. Other objects that weren’t recognizable but still clanked around in my pocket, bits of wood, glass. Taken together they were my Locating Deck. I jiggled and threw it out onto the table and read it. The lost pieces led me like a ghost guide through the forest and through towns and through parts of towns that reeked of death and fresh, urgent things I couldn’t put my finger on.

I knelt down to where a patch of clover stood against a moist retaining wall. Father son holy ghost I said as if I knew and tapped each nodule on the clover’s head. I grew feverish at the thought of tearing one of the leaves in half, making four leaves, as if sinking into a realization of what that meant for the first time. Connecting the four leaves with the stem, and the dreaded five-point cross — the pentagram — popped out. What did that mean? I drew sketches in my mind of each possibility and its number. I thought of the little bag of bones resting these long winter days and nights in my apron pocket. I counted them out and muttered the names and origins of each as I wound my way around the dirt paths this side of the Northwest Rainforest. I dreamed of wheat. Bushels of large well-kempt tubes of flaky stalks. Strange, because I had never felt or been in any proximity to wheat and wondered why I would dream about a grain of cosmic significance. I saw little brown birds shaking at the ends of long tufted heads of wheat. Were they one and the same? A rustle of feathers hewn by the scythe; a pulpy bushel of flaky stalks?… Please stand clear of the lady’s shadow I heard out of the corner of my sight, and awoke. So the wheat was a person then? A human mother? Angel lady come to save me? Late at night at my old family living room I woke up and sat in the middle of the couch. Plastic dust rose off the hairy blue carpet like a quiet and perilous vapor. The cat rooted around under a blanket until it found some lost remnants of old food on the floor, maybe nothing more than a salty patch from who knows what source. Against what I would have considered to be an animal’s best judgment he licked at that spot on the floor for a long time. I pulled him away with his tongue still stuck halfway out of his mouth. But cats don’t really have mouths; they have what’s more like a compact little salty bear trap. Outside it was brighter, orange street lamps banishing all life on the street below. The spotlights’ hard beams fastening down a deadness out of the dead of night. I found myself outside, towering over the worms that turned up this time of night on the street, unaware of their fate at the hands of a daylight world they didn’t own. I began to feel some measure of guilt for not cluing them in. They’ll just fry like the rest when the sun comes up, like all the worms of history; they shouldn’t be any different. And perhaps they would come to know this site intimately after all. By being sizzled into the surface the worms would become it, in a way, like nothing else could. I stared at nothing in particular and felt my eyeballs boring holes through their soft pale skin. Do they deserve this? I walked up to the rainwater barrel behind the neighbors’. I steeped an unrefined tea out of assorted blooms, sticks, and pebbles surrounding one of the gravesites on the hill. I walked back down; an air of predictability pervaded the driveway; juices ran down in among fissures and pooled in dark reservoirs at street level. Microbes living on the little pebbles are supposed to make you psychic — if they don’t lock you into the static scaffolding of your own goddamn skeleton first.

Poor little girl, ran away for good; ran across a revolving path of gravel, concrete, and asphalt, in and out of towns and subdivisions, until on the fourth day she fell down near the county line. Happening upon a vacant mortgage office in a woodsy area she managed to creep inside, licking her wounds. There were other outlaws already inside and they immediately jumped on her with sedatives in hand. She was out of commission for a week after this incident, abandoned when the other kids caught a rail car out of town. No one found her for days afterward even though her feet were sticking out of a closet door, but she escaped again, wriggling out of a headlock and running down the street. Luckily, there was no shortage of vacant couches in the neighborhood. She chose one couch, probably the wrong one, because for a week she lay there without a sound. Bound up in this silent house she sensed that it had always stood there, surrounded by parking lots on all sides, electrically pulsing all like-minds into its thrall. Lying there, aware of human movements traced over walls, but no sound. It seemed that people were everywhere, shadows tickling and prodding at her sight. In this room there had never been day; the afternoon died with her capacity to throw up toxic vomit on cue to melt the door handle to escape. And what about these Night People who kept her captive for all this time? Who gave her nothing but fluids and straw; who ate away at her fingernails and caused the sun to rise and set on her at will? They kept whispering in her ear that “the middle of the night is inside,” but she could still barely hear it. Hibernationalists, they tried to take her down with them for the season, but her mind wouldn’t shut up, so fretfully it ticked the days away. Learning to become alchemists they returned one day with fluids for her, a sugarwater blend that had her lost for hours in a haunted crevice of the couch. One day, feeling like I was getting close, I edged cautiously around the corner in my mind. She spoke to me in a dream about some guy she met who unlocked her psychic potential to the extent that she was able to wrestle it out of where it lay to hand it over to me, emphatically adding that what I was looking for was buried “a little off the tracks in Salem.”

We walked to Cockbuster. Since the last time we’d been in there they moved all the videos to the far corner of the store, an obligatory gesture at sustaining what used to be the main goal of the enterprise. You guys suck! we cried, sifting through little white cases. I loaded up my pockets with snacks. The blue and yellow carpet reeked and the clerks all slept in the front. Half the store was dark so we hunkered down back there, crouching behind a display whenever cops shined their Maglites in the window. Murph ripped at the edge of the carpet and kept yanking on this flap and then we found initials carved in the cement floor underneath. I guess the initials were from the construction people who built this useless place… Suddenly we heard a cataclysmic shotgun blast and we stood up to see one of the clerks standing on top of the register with a broom in his hand swatting at something up on the mirrored ceiling. He kept swatting and banged out most of the other lights left in the place. They cranked up the Cockbuster stereo and howled and busted lights all over the place. “Get it! Get that fuckin thing!” What are they talking about? We wondered what the fuck those assholes were doing over there. “Ha ha!” The clerks screamed and swung, but we could barely hear them over the scraping sounds of what they had playing over the store’s sound system… At the basement rock show there was much discussion among the muddy Krishna Punx by the stairs about whether or not the cross was indeed a highly simplified glyph of two persons engaged in sexual intercourse. Other whispers around the venue speculated about whether or not tonight’s frontman would pull his cross out of his pants. And there was yet other chatter as to whether or not that even meant anything at all at this point. Did they not know that there was something missing from all of this? It nagged at me. The pangs of this particular lack whipped up the biggest, bloodiest crisis-froth, rising to the edges of the scene’s busted corpus. Or maybe it squirted out of the scene’s nose because it was laughing so hard. This is progress, I thought. They have won. Real-life has been successfully shackled and hogtied and displayed in the city plaza — as if this image itself hadn’t already been sufficiently tampered with. I just want it to be real — I’m ready to make it that way … And as I said these words the skuzzy vacuum sucker that spat blood all over my hair raised itself on its elbows, pulled out an extension cord, plugged up the hole where its belly button had been, popped 38 Excedrin, and quietly died.