Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

Seth and I chased each other, running like stoned dorks into the “mini desert” of open space stretching from the back of the shopping center to city limits — to the small, abandoned airport out there. The runway ended where a wooden electric chair, as big as a house, stood at the top of a mound of dirt. Ten people could have played around on that thing, and by many accounts they regularly did. It was an old art project from a different time, soaked with beer. Squirrel skulls lodged in the cracks of the bowed planks. A shaft of light beamed down on the electric chair from the sky and illuminated it against the dust till the whole world appeared yellow, creamy, and ashen around it. We raced each other to the electric chair, who will win? I don’t know it’s a race. Who will win? … I turn around and see sparks shoot out of your eyes. Birds fly from your mouth. Without a sound. I caught you as you fell and we fell silently together, almost like falling asleep, each pulling the other down, grabbing at whatever you can… I spent the whole night with him without actually looking at his face. I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of what I might find if I looked. In his eyes I saw stars fixed upon me — I had read too much already, no more looking. His mouth was the hottest place on his body and I sought it out like a little girl… I could recall the tiny pitter-pat of a radio playing quietly late at night and imagined I could be in the same room as its source, at the site of the song’s origin — and the oppressive moistness of it all. Now its vastness played in my heart as the small, barely discernable sounds coming out of that box, and it was one of the saddest sounds “ He’ll capture and hold you with his stinging velvet arms .”… He’d dug up a large beet out of a neighbor’s garden.

“I chose it because it looked like a heart, an anatomical one,” Seth said. “See?” he sawed at it with a serrated knife. “It bleeds just like we do. The only plant that’s truly alive.” We stewed the pieces in a pan on the camp stove. I feel flesh and marrow in my mouth. “There’s a reason heavy metal is pre-occupied with meat and blood,” he continued, toying with pieces of it in his fingers, “it’s because they’re warning us not to forget where our flesh comes from — ”

“But they try to shock us with blood. How could it be that waving a scrap of meat around on stage is going to make us feel sympathy for the animal?” The sound of him cartoonishly sawing at his own arm made us both laugh and we shelved the discussion for now.

“I always wanted to be the kind of person who likes that band,” a guy in the audience said. The guitar player bore down hard on his Big Muff, one of a dozen effects pedals hitched to a piece of plywood at his feet. The drummer swished up his blond bangs when he reached up to hit his ride cymbals. Let me in! Let me in! Sight lines burned across the venue, fastened to the band members. They returned our gazes. The drummer stared at me absentmindedly as he hammered away. It was a small venue and I happened to be standing right in front of him. I wasn’t sure what to do. This was one of the first shows of Hibernation Spectacle, a Vulgar Marxist doom-psych band that Evangele was involved in somehow. It wasn’t clear if he was their manager or just a hanger-on. Either way, the band was a good sport about it, letting him hang out on stage while they played. Evangele peering down at their set list with his arms crossed behind his back, or waving them around like a maestro during the loud parts.

All around us the town was falling apart, dissolving back into its prehistoric state. Dactyl had started sending the papers a series of antique postcards typewritten with his personal philosophy laid out like a rhetorical dialogue. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t cute, but people still laughed and forgot themselves. He wanted to let us all know that he was still dating, and that, more importantly, he was in love. Cops are out in their choppers tonight, looking for large groups of headlights traveling in clusters up in the hills: tip-offs of the local kids’ pathetic house parties. I fell to the forest floor, my eyes moistening with emotion, digging at the place in front of me to be released somehow. “Was there ever a time you could take all your shit down and party at the beach in a huge crevice in the sand?” Josh cried, “Are those days over?”

“It’s the Meth, you asshole, can’t you see that’s why they need to bust us — ?” Beer-soaked ferns and berry bushes… clumps of dust kicked up by tire tracks, the night’s blood let out on the thicket of grey moss… This forest blood, fizzing bulbous, enriched, gathering a grey film as it threaded down the banks. Rain would come and wash it all away. Rocks shifted in their places, leafy ferns slimed softly upon us; the moisture seeping up from the core; sulfurous fog of water beading up along the seams of dirt between plants. Salty pills of rain coated the thorny wild blackberry bushes. The bush cried out tiny white blossoms, blooms like a thousand pin-pricks, tiny whiskers shooting out of the black wild berries. Not shiny yet. I saw in each the faces of the many who came to Oregon to die. I felt it as I grabbed a low branch and shook out a dozen drops of blood for the many who came to Oregon to die. The wild blackberry bush consumed it all, lapped up this death, this gift that stained its own blossoms and caught like whiskers in my throat. I swallowed a wild pulpy mass of blood and tiny white whiskers gathered in the palm of my hand. My hand devours wild blackberries. We are all voracious for wild blackberries. We eat without care until the bushes are reduced to piles of whiskers and bramble. We eat all the blossoms, they plump in my mouth and I spit out half-formed blackberry babies.

Grieving teens sit on stoops, gathering like driftwood in the stair-wells leading up from the sidewalk on the way to the beach. Sad weirdos and their twelve-pound weights for bangs, their bulky sweatshirts muffling their prematurely creaky joints. Hundred-and-eight-year-old turkey vulture hatchlings wading around in the dusk, already so bloated with misery; their limbs held on with strings, they press their sweatshirt bodies together in the rain. We’ve found our way to The Highway That Eats People. Seven summers ago it ate four wasted teens who burned in a Lincoln when it wrapped around a tree while, not far away, Death sat knitting funerary lace by light of a cookstove. A crash is a rite of passage in this neighborhood, like striking the last match. They stuff themselves into their parents’ big sensible cars and go for a drive. The highway is hungry. They have to feed it. Of the four who died that night, three were jocks so it was a big deal in town. No one knows why the one non-jock was in the car but he burned anyway. Other than that there was once a girl who jumped off a cliff into the ocean and a couple of guys who took too much heroin, but usually when it happened it was all about the cars in the hills; it was a matter of the grieving teens feeding the highway with their bodies in the middle of the night.

A fence, no higher than my knees, contains a small race of miniature farm creatures, each part of a family with nothing more in common than their affliction. In storage for the county fair’s contracted petting zoo, they whinny and peck at the ground and charge at the fence and get mini-electrocuted. At night they sleep together in a big pile, sharing their endorphins, and suffer their plights microscopically. Their bodies are covered in flies and even the flies can’t resist them, slurping up their miniature tears… I think some of my boyfriends pulled a heist a couple of towns back. They suddenly have money but insist on jumping locals for blood and change anyway. I poured out that felt sack of bones, bits of china, sticks, and other odd pieces on the plywood footpath. It spelled good things ahead. Fortuitous journeys, I supposed. I turned the dog tooth over and over in my fingers, walking through the aisles of the giant video store like a bored shopper or maybe like a bored murderer, or maybe like both. Methodically turning objects over in that felt bag, guided by the minute clanking — I was getting close. This afternoon I woke to find Knowles softly petting Josh while he slept. They’re sweet and weird that way. Knowles spoke softly and said, cryptically, that the turning point for him was “seeing his friend’s blood.” What sealed the deal for me began one night a few years ago when Kim and I were heating up a couple of microwave burritos in the kitchen of our foster home. She picked pieces of paper towel off of hers and told me about how since she started taking her pills she felt more colonized than ever. Her fucked up anatomy was well known in the house. I don’t know, she just took a bunch of things she was given. And then the parade of side effects would begin. Oral contraceptives were a big part of the program. Not like she had fertile mucus to chart anyway, the result of some damaged cervical crypts… I could go on and on about Seth. We lived in a trailer sitting on a tuft of dirt at the edge of a long driveway leading to a house that didn’t exist anymore. In it: little versions of most household contrivances, a tiny stove with a little trap door for tiny tools, pockets carved out of the sides for stashing who-knows-what, damp, peeling sheets of “trailer tile” on the floor. Spores filled the air. To breathe was to let a part of the forest be absorbed into your body, just as the forest appeared to have chewed up this little trailer and spat it back out… Last night you came to me in a dream and we prayed for each other. I remember coming with you in my mind when we said each other’s names in the dark. I can barely remember the breathless look in your eyes, the gusts of meaning flowing between us and I felt like I wanted to be with you forever. We tested all the doors on the school buses parked in a lot adjacent to your friend’s house. There’s always going to be one left unlocked. Seth made a little bed for me at the back out of a salvaged curtain and a sleeping bag. I laid my head down in his lap as he was sitting cross-legged on this pile of cloth, fiddling with the trap of his pants for the token gesture of his fondness. He pulled me up to his kiss and we made out intensely and with focus. He kissed my hair and I thought of the time I spent two days caught up in a motel room with some guy who kept me freshly medicated. The drug made him voracious for my body but without climax, he itched with an ecstatic pang only partially sated by pushing me face down into the mattress, smothering me with his pleading gasps. I can’t remember when it was that I fell asleep around him — was it when I thought of you? Down a hillside that led so deep into a quiet, still part of the forest that was barely earth. It certainly didn’t feel like any discernable place. One day all the things I’ve lost over the years will turn up in the dirt surrounding my grave. There was so much to this growing suppleness in the wind that carried my thoughts away from the trailer where I once lived… There was other chatter amidst the yard of wilderness resting just outside our camp. Up the gravel path there were a series of terraces, of grasses littered with acorn shells and twigs for birds, bordered with berry bushes and thistle. The roots of a giant tree formed steps up to the neighbor’s redwood house. The driveway was unbelievably steep, even for walking. We fell away toward the creek at the bottom of the hill, creeping cold water defining the edge of a field against a stand of oak trees. We followed the country road out of the forest and into town, never straying far from the acrid pilings of the train tracks. It got more and more damp as we passed rotting subdivisions and it was raining by the time we made our way to the first of many neglected shopping centers along the edge of town.