Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

Messages from the immobilized seared through the airwaves, piercing the membrane through a small radio playing quietly late at night. Their stale grey eyes were closed in hibernation; the swallowed voice caught like a ball of wax in the throats of the immobilized. The sleep of the dead — from which they do not wake easily — penetrated by the enlarged fang creeping into the flesh as it is given, coolly, in the dead hours of the morning. The smells taken in by the immobilized pasted together the lapse, the jump cuts, the forgetting. The wash of memory pierced by that fang and its smell like fat burning on the stove, like lust plastered on your burning body, black like the smoke that escapes your mind through your breath. Your mouth an oven of lust, love smoldering in the dark like a growling stove, black smoke leeching out from between your teeth. You seethe from between your teeth (you seethe from behind my eyes). Black smoke creeps along the skin of your burning body in a tangle of mists, secrets, whispers.

He’s the one who stoops in the corner and laps at the foot of your bed. He is unforgiving of the limits of mercy, such lapping only reveals that much more death, that which dashes the flash of life from your forehead in a burning smile. He laughs smoke clouds, he laughs and smoke clouds his eyes and he laughs . He reaches for your burning body and he falls deathly quiet, smoke laughing in the caustic shadow on the wall at his back. Jerking with every convulsive swoon of pity. Diseased shadows spill over the bed. Out spill black bones onto the table and black bones in patterns of a secret code for which the key is obscure — perhaps it is “white.” Out spill a tangle of black bones like shadows of bones. The table quakes, casting negative shadows in white up through its surface, mingling within the tangle of black bones, the dream lurking in the crevices in among the tangle of black bones that quivers as squirrel skulls pop out of negative spaces, some turning black themselves.

The tangle of black smoke stands between us, that cushion of lust as we lap away at the burning at our sides. The black of your eyes is a poison pond I fall into as it falls into me without a sound, the silent torrent that shapes fissures and aches like a pox on your blackened body. The sound of sand burning blacker. He’s something new. Desire in exile. Black smoke of desire. Burning bodies of cream, yellow tide foam echoing up through a skin of steam in the sky of fire.

This realm of no return is a prison. We’re locked to the bed… Vaults are everywhere. The walls of this room are pockmarked with vaults, accordion-like seams for shadows and gathering places for the smoke that prowls the room. Every surface is covered in graves. Steam gathers and catches under brass grave markers that chime through the room when they are full. The sound of metal warming and expanding echoes in creaks and snaps across my field of vision. The graves are full, bloated with black smoke. Heat bangs at the door with fists of fire mist.

The Warlock smelled of all the spent fires in blackened pits up and down the beach. Little spines of broken sea kelp were trapped in his hair. You really live on the beach? I asked, and I knew the answer already.

He bathed in the ocean and rolled up his various clothes, first light of morning. He wasn’t going to give me anything. Silence coming from his part of the beach. He stared a little at my fingernails, which were pink but not at all shiny and said nothing. His fists grew at his sides when he saw the way the gulls salivated over what little scraps of food he had gathered, piled on the shore while he waded in the break. He would pummel those things when he saw what they had looted.

I was unprepared for this. I saw flies repeatedly smash themselves against him. Dead flies piled up on the ground at his feet. He had pummeled them with his fists. Piles of beaten flies lay like black raindrops.

He lumbered toward me and I stepped back almost aware that I should be running, and fast. But I felt the same impulse to remain, feet planted within snorting range of the enormous black horse. He was so close that his mane blew in my face. Shadows of black birds pooled at his feet, flaking into the sand. Brown stumps of sea-beaten driftwood twisted into fence posts, caging me. I was aware of some event vaguely earthless that brought them here.

Bees fell out of the sky. The ocean waves beat quietly against the jetty as sea lions and bands of kelp echoed quietly through the waves. Birds beat their wings against the waves; sea gulls fluttered and opened their beaks noiselessly against the approach of noontime… All over, animals are seeing through things into what rests beyond. They see through you and they see through me. All over, stones and dried kelp stuck together; sand stuck to the sides of birds, to the sides of rocks at noon. Sand burnished with patches of shade; cracks in the sand steamed up with thoughts of this impossible drift caught at the bottom of the world, this panel of land between water and silt. Silt of sand paste at water’s edge. Snakes and crabs grab what they can from the quickening silt, extracting pieces of kelpskin with their tongues and scoop-like mouths. Moss gave way to sand; moss devouring, making the sand a part of its futuristic body. Twisted gnarls of knotty bull kelp, twisted pressurized fibers straining against the unreal sun; dirt and twigs caught under giant foaming leaves, curled over into small caves at the bases of trees, foaming at the mouth: The forest and the beach at once. The forest fell from the bluffs above, down to the beach and there kept growing. All the sand crabs, looting worms’ and seagulls’ entrails, maintained their world underneath this beach grove. The roots made their way into the saltwater waves and rot and molt a layer of bark and then turned out sea snakes. Bare roots bred sea snakes; they slept in the knotted roots. They shed and molt and took off with a single stroke; salty snakes matted into the sides of sea-moss-crusted rocks teeming with salty custard swimming with snakes. Hissing rocks sparkling with salty sea snake eyes, big black sacks of coins twinkling in the heat. Fallen trees made homes for sea crabs; tide pools hosted large dollops of flesh like the undersides of horse hooves. Only those gulls and crabs and stones buried under this miniature forest knew both above and below and gazed up from the underside of these trees, up through roots and trunks into the uppermost branches, x-ray sights cast upward from under ground… He dragged me to his place in the sand surrounded by this forest in exile, having fallen from the sky, picking up where it left off, taking root and growing in an alien grove on the beach. He carried me to his shed-against-nature built of wood that shouldn’t be there, filled with fibers woven from scraps of alien hides. Skinned animals not from this earth or this time. The shed was full of flies. They beat themselves against the walls, forgetting, or punishing themselves for the trees and the shed that came out of the sky. The shed was hot and muggy and all the unkempt spores fell out of the trees and clogged the powdered thicket of light inside with nowhere else to go.

I choked on the spores in my sleep and he arranged patches of weather-beaten calico around me. His dingy breath was all over me, trapped in the bits of cloth wrapping me up tight. I felt as if he had eaten me — he surrounded me so completely — as he rose and fell with my breath so close in this calico cave. There’s doom in my heart and love in my eyes, he said, tickling the spores clouding the baked air. They rattled on the floor as if electrocuted.

A gurgling popped and sputtered in the corner. He assured me that it was just the sound of the baby trees slowly and meticulously prying their way up through the floorboards. “Surely you’d let your babies in,” I said still sleeping. Surely you wouldn’t pummel your sapling friends through the floorboards of this shed-against-nature… There was not a lot to be trusted on this parcel of unnatural land. All the laws were screwy and if you looked away for a moment you’d turn back to find things were even screwier.