Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

I kissed him and on the other side behind his mouth I found blood blooming in a beaker of water. A hot resistance steeped in the shadows of a large doomed animal, a kiss and a drink of enveloping velvet steam suctioned to a large wilted flower. His sour presence, long shadows rising off the sand… This is forbidden! — what we’re doing is outlawed. You live on the beach. What are you doing here? “I followed you here.” His weight shifts on top of my body and my head spins and my mouth fills, my eyes are full, he’s kissing me and his eyes are filling my mouth my chest my memory, I’m flooded with dreams of death. Dreams of his death are racing through my veins. You’re attacking me. I didn’t ask for this… “I’m sorry I followed you. What am I supposed to say? Don’t go.” In the middle of all of it I felt the presence of another man lurking behind his eyes. I felt two men before me and I buckled under the pressure. They drained me together. They stole my senses but even then I began to feel one of them slip away. Like he had been dismissed the boy/ man’s weight lessened, he dimmed and I tried to hold his face in my hands: stay with me, stay here . I bit at his face I clawed at his chest in an effort to get him back. I felt myself devouring what I could of him to keep him with me but the presence of another man rose in him and I felt weighed down by a force that was irresistible and inextinguishable and could not be escaped, deeper and deeper into the quickening sand the whole beach shifting around me and I felt myself lose it on top of the mystery man and just as suddenly, inside the wooden shed I’d seen in the distance a shadow was framed by the open door. I felt him tear into my neck.

I woke up under many layers of the cast-down skins of old Eucalyptus bark. He had come to rest on top of me and was stealing my breath as he kissed me. This mystery man — the Warlock — tore at me and his breath was a dull magnetic lightening storm that drained and drained me. He slid off of me and bolted upright. I struggled under the shifting debris and just like that he was gone. The Warlock had found me. The taste in my mouth readily surrendered its evidence, I tasted my lips and his name appeared in my mind.

He begs for me. His voice slips and erodes as he speaks. Begs. His voice prowls me and breaks off and I wonder what has happened.

The smoky, salty pressure of his lips on mine makes me think of all the spent fires along the beach. He roasts and sputters just outside of me; I can almost grasp his presence, but feel myself lingering intimately at so great a distance I feel as if he is playing a game with me. He flashes near and far and it boggles my mind and makes me uneasy and growling with my face in my hands: Who are you?

Pink wire cage bits of fuzz caught in hardened glue beads… cane furniture, reed brown green clear glass worn in fine white scratches at the edges of creaking baskets, reed mats. Fan running at full blast, spare brown pants bunchy in the wrong places; the hook fly and pocket stuck inside out. Yellow light globe plastic egg sitting on the carpet… blue plastic straw with brown sugar crystals lining the spout… I was awake but my brain lay twisted among the rotten pilings and the weeds that stank in saltwater. The way I stood with one foot on top of the other made men take notice. I felt them looking at my ass, pulled up into an adorable little punching bag. I guess my own body even felt fucked up and serene as it pulled tight against my jeans. So this is what it feels like to be desired? To be folded up and put at the bottom of some secret drawer? I felt like I was close to unlocking the secret look of male desire, the one that says not “I want to fuck you,” but “I want to keep you.” I was sure it was a different look. There was a difference but it flickered in and out of my sights. But I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. I only had a partial view.

Had I ever looked at a man and said to myself, “I want to keep you?”

The impossibility of it made me unsure of what I wanted. His attention had left me confused. Edgy, wandering around playing the events in my head over and over and got panicky when they had already started fading away. The smells were gone, the colors getting flatter until the memory hung in front of me like a laundered sheet, stained with a bitter bleached cartoon of what had really happened.

Men who lived on the sidewalk washed in the ocean, at the edge of the septic tap water creek… Men on the sidewalk called out to me. All over town they followed me pessimistically with their eyes. I was never left uncovered by their eyes. I shoved my hands into my apron pocket and stepped carefully around their black and yellow boiled-egg eyes. My shoes swept the dust out from under their didactic signage and the sight of my bare legs sticking out from under my skirt thickened the straps of cured turkey breast hanging in their sweatpants. I wondered what happened to all their women, where did they go? Did these women ever see the sidewalk start to creep into the corner of those black and yellow eggs watering in the center of the men’s faces? Do they know where to find them now? On this band of concrete tethered between the living and the dead, the waking and the sleeping, the forest and the city — out there somewhere pumping their fists to music they’ve never heard before?

He is a small-g god, crouched hidden inside a host body, siphoning my breath through host lips, animated and full of borrowed electricity. He grabs at me, to hold me, but his hands are different and I can feel his spine through his shirt, which makes me think of death and mortal things and I am confused. Being combined with one that is not just “one” is disorienting and I try to find a way around coming to any conclusions because there aren’t any.

Grizzled men sang on the sidewalk. They clutched kittens on leashes to their chests and nuzzled the little things awkwardly. There were so many men out on the sidewalk today. Some wore their tanned hides like a badge of honor. They liked sleeping on the beach, but the post office lobby would do nicely too. The men teased me from the street, somewhat vague accusations about being a “kitten hater,” but the truth was I just didn’t want to linger there listening to their broken singing any longer. The men were gonna come for me, the main one bellowed. Where did you guys come from I asked, and why does everything in your life need to be on a leash? The men on the sidewalk said, Look girl, if only we could get up from our places on the sidewalk you’d see exactly what kind of leash we’d fasten on you… a short one! Ha ha ha. A thick one, ha. And then their cheeks got redder and their eyes got stare-y-er and their arms tanned at hyper speed and they leapt up from their places on the sidewalk and strained to lumber toward me, roiling around on the curb all tangled in a thicket of rag pants and pocketknives.

Surfaced in a strange man’s house. He painted the undersides of my body with hot soapy water where a sleeping bag was half-unzipped and spread over me like a big purple scar. Light seemed transformed, the irregular cloud of his strange funk like a man-tree sprawled over my body. I could hear the soles of his boots from far away. I licked at the last drifts of sleep, opened my eyes but couldn’t feel anything else below the neck. I looked down and saw myself sleeping but felt a lively burr of clear tiles clanking around in my chest. He dragged me out from under a midnight paradise and sat me up at the table for breakfast. The roads filled with rain; he shoveled gravel outside the door, piled rugs in front of the doorway. I set myself up in his beach lair and it was as if the floodgates had opened and he now had a reason to touch me with an urgency that before would have been blasphemous, abstract, and suspicious. I tore into him making a mess with ferociousness like eternal night.