Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

I LAY DOWN IN SOME TALL GRASS GROWING through a fissure in dry concrete next to an onramp. I went to sleep with my arm extending out into the northbound lane. Thumbs up. No one ever stops. I woke up sometime later and the light had changed, wincing over the tops of some burnt trees… My body had been moved several yards down the road. I noticed this only after raising my half-worm-eaten face from the pavement, heavy and winey, glancing back to where I had been several hours/days before. I would be moved several more times, from one cot to another, from the back seat to the front, from a familiar bed to a different man’s — and would only notice when I woke. How shifty they had been, to move my body while I’d been away, my head heavy and winey, filled with regret.

Seth and I sat on the low narrow couch at the rear of our trailer in the woods — so long ago. The space heater in the corner sputtered bad breath out into the small room. I reached over and tickled the roof of his mouth with my index finger. He laughed and did the same to me. We were drunk. We fucked with my hands over his face.

Bleating, horrid calls to the streets… passing by towns slowly, descending toward the hot, humid afternoon-hell in that secret place, searching out some semblance of normalcy out of the shallow night, your fractured thoughts occupied by that fateful hour of afternoon. Possessed calls piercing the night, you’re caught in its thrall, head pounding, looking for answers. It’s all wrong, you’re all wrong. You’ve been here before.

Orangetime and that other world caught between the living and the dead. Caught on videotape trying to get some answers from that silent glare way up in the ceiling behind the register. Outside a man lays inert and sweating on the sidewalk, people on the street poking at him.

No one notices the negative space around life. Surrounding this town, between trees and businesses. Around the chatter of the afternoon; around our rustlings in your room, the negative space tracing the contours of your insomniac sleep of the undead… Walking down your street I passed by your house. The window was open and from out on the street I could see you, very small in the little wooden window frame lying down on your bed. It was noisy outside but I could tell it was quiet in there like nothing could touch you. A hot patch of air was hanging down on you, low down and all around you like a careful cloud while you slept. Wind whipped at my ankles and I could hear it gathering all the power of the neighborhood up with the dust and leaves. I had walked for two days to this spot. Pressing my hands against the sidewalk — your sidewalk — brought back all the soot and sticks scratching along the surface. My gaze fastened on a leaf rising on the wind and it brought me up to you, seeing you through your window but you can’t see me. Oh Seth! What am I doing out here without you?

Let me in, baby, I’m tired out here. I walked so far. I’m desperate for your love!

I found an open window and crawled inside —

My face suctioned to oozing particles in the dark, seeping grey languid memories chewing nostrils bristling with acrid-smelling flesh, pure inedible stain of memory, we nibbled at each other. I’m beginning to see you for what you always were, a nice boy whose whole life was spent avoiding potential scams. I knew you never had anything to do with any of this. I’m not so sure now that you even ever left your room. But now that you’re back there, amongst your things, it just seems so right .

You sweet sweet little pony-man. Why did I ever think I could keep you?

Birds and twigs scampered around on the wooden floorboards leaving scratches in the dust at my feet. Your blood had dried in tan crusty pleats all over your stomach, all marks your ex-girlfriends had made in an effort to get to your soul. I guess I never thought of you that way. Listen to my heart, you said, as I petted your forelock in a downward motion with the palm of my hand… The most tragic room in the world! No one would ever know.

Solid grey sheets of dusted cobwebs connect leaves and shoots. A thousand forest flies buzz their wings in the tall trees. The cats are in hunting mode today. Elsewhere the stolid hum of a dirt bike sneers off in the distance. All this, mingling with your fridge — that vibrating plastic trap — makes the whole place seem like it’s ready to blow. Any given slip of paper can only be folded in half exactly seven times. I read this once, but thought of it again this morning, not quite awake, but y’know not quite sleeping. And it’s true, I tried it over and over again and each time seven is the magic number.

Taste me as a way of being me . We hide inside our thoughts and wrack our brains trying to come up with something to say. There is nothing to say, this is it. That last bit was all that was left.

I got in bed next to you.

It’s all right .

The sky darkened on one of our last conversations. The one where he asked, “What’s important are feelings — do you have any?”

“Not really,” I replied, a little surprised there had been so little resistance on my part in letting that out of my mouth. “I’ll be your robot, c’mon.”

“That’s bullshit. That’s a cop out and you’re a lazy fraud,” he cried, rushing toward me.

There’s no way to really end this discussion gracefully, I thought.

“How can you live like this?”

“I guess I just keep thinking that one day it’s going to catch up with me and I’ll just be devoured by the crisis of the century. Until then it’s business as usual.”

“You can’t live this way — people don’t live this way.”

He tacked that on as if I aspired to join their ranks. The truth was, I was lazy and stubborn — a control freak of the highest order and I was never coming down. The story about the robot that woke up feeling human feelings was the most epic disaster of them all.

Cabbage moths, animal tracks: fresh? Old ones. Sand on the beach makes holes for my feet.

I singed my hair with long white candles and covered my face with tar. I lived as if in mourning on the edge of a lake. No one messed with me. I baked my own bread out of acorn meal and gathered flower seeds in the middle of a many-stringed storm of red raindrops at the top of a hill.

Further away at the mouth of a beach cave there was a large sea anemone, a static guard I wasn’t sure was even alive, only that it sat there like several hundred pounds of raw meat, salivating. Oregon beaches are like some space landscape, total unreality. Finding some dog prints in the sand I followed them up a trail to the edge of a ravine full of stinky feathers trapped with sand.

Rough rocks ground underfoot and cracked into smaller and smaller pieces with each move I made.

Mother hatched from the sea. The breath of a solid white shell enclosed her. She was cursed to walk up and down the beaches, tethered at the ankle by a stretch of kelp half a mile long held at one central point below the water. Her leash lay curled around a rock. She was bound; her hair swirled around her like an ancient cloud, banishing all sound.

In our twisting at the length of our restraints we began to recognize each other. Out of the mutual language of dead dust, dusted years, the two of us would never be the same.

She looked in the mirror and saw her future-body staring back at her, emerging out of the cloudless glass, a shadow inching across and blinking through two eyes like plastic eggs. She had hatched into a perception of her own future-self, however much it remained still tethered to her dreams, cast to the bottom of the ocean on an anchor of kelp, stones, and bubbles.

Passed out in a fever fog, under a black sky and the beach, where the only trees were horizontal brown stalks sorted and skinned by the tides; carbon dioxide seeped into my brain and poisoned me with its noxious dream coma — all I can call my own is this. There is nothing else in this world I can claim. I own this sickness, this poisonous fog. And I own these thoughts, orange and sticky.