Grace Krilanovich - The Orange Eats Creeps

I picked up the new People to go through at a 7-Eleven checkout, taking care to flip past the first seven or eight pages — enough to bypass the introductory ads, but not so much as to miss candid photos of famous people and end up in human-interest territory. When some lady glared at me I stuffed the magazine down into the rack and got a hot dog, pressing onions in a mound on top of it. Seth, Josh, Murph, and Knowles were trying to talk the clerk into letting them drink from a big white bucket of old, cold coffee that was sitting on the floor; cause they’re cheap assholes. At some point word was given and it became okay for them to take Styrofoam cups and fill them up, and they were taking like four each and reheating them in the tainted microwave. Ready for coffee with eau de nitrate à burrito steamed inside? A few of us broke away from the dozen or so area kids who were already walking the tracks, for no other reason than to fuck with some locals. I had a canvas bag with my laundry in it, so we went to this laundromat that smelled like bleach. That, the heat, and the sheer volume made it seem like the place was gonna positively explode. A fine layer of detergent dust on every surface grated horrifically when I scratched at the enamel lid of a washing machine. I was loading it up with rags when Knowles came up to me and said the guy was there with our shit. “Go see Seth then, I don’t know…” I said to him. I assumed he and the guy went into the bathroom together cuz I didn’t see him for a while, and figured it would take forever to break into that emphatically locked bathroom in the first place. Well Knowles came out glowing like a fuckin toy robot — hitting on every chick in the place with this gross smile. I sat on a white curb in the parking lot, squinting into the mirror of a rouge compact as I trimmed my bangs with a tiny pair of corroded sewing scissors. Amphetamine is it for us, Knowles cautioned as he sat down. He explained that, “while amped walking around downtown, lost and aroused,” he would kick at his shins whenever he started to think about sex, and while he was in a good riding place underneath those new modern freight cars he would hold his hand as close to the ground as possible without mashing it up on the track. Around the corner at the Greyhound station I met a man wearing a green windbreaker. We ducked into the nearest restroom. My lips grazed his cheek; his cold skin tasted like wind.

Never get old! As a vampire you’re undead, as a sexy girl you’re dying all the time. With this preserved teen body, something’s just a little off — is it the foggy eyes? Drained, heavy limbs, the fecund core? Liquid bones? Cinders, wind, and frost have irritated and roughed up teen skin. Sickly and suffering from chronic under-nourishment, I appear to subsist almost entirely upon my fingernails, which I gnaw habitually. In my mind, when I am neither out cold or awake, but in a fit of trippy awfulness after the Robitussin has worn off, I, like my brothers in the freight car, have to crash for a few during the afternoon — sleeping to some extent of the word, but it’s more like anti-dreaming — guided on a horrific tour of the service entrances of my mind.

What I did!

I could see it all, but from too far away to do anything about it. There was probably a hillside over a creekbed close to where we romped. When it was windy the sound of leaves on rocks obscured the sound of a falling body. There was a bundle, a body wrapped. When this bundle is undone it will be discovered to be the remains of a twenty-year-old, her tight throat torn asunder by fine white bites. Further down, her right breast is cut, where during that part of the ceremony an incision is made to heighten a point in the story. If the path suggested by her ribcage is taken, it will lead to an abrupt gouge at the base of the tailbone, an enlargement chiseled out of the rectum, where some ass play had been as part of a seduction script which, it will later be known, has been caught on VHS tape by the assailant. This tape will be selected out of a bag of other tapes and viewed, where her secret death had formed a magnetic coating on the tape which will, in turn, remain as a cathartic residue for all to see (no one should be expected to endure both a secret birth and a secret death). There is also a part of the ceremony where a man holds a woman’s legs up and together while he amasses great erotic potential at the site where these limbs had been convinced apart, where he too will surmount an outrageous smoldering climax, alternately squinting and unsquinting his eyes as if he can’t believe it. She will then kiss him full on the mouth, dropping breathless lips onto his, drawing back saliva to a place strange and wonderful in her brain and with it his thoughts, his being, a fluid transfer which has no more materiality than a kiss. It is this way she can know him, have him truly within her, to know his thoughts, to dream his dreams for him; to, in an abstract capacity, inhabit his being in this way — to not penetrate his core, but take it into her so it becomes her core. All her life she had been amassing cores inside her body, to insert one more would not be a difficult task, and it would hardly be the last. I know this because I was there. It is through these transferals that I came to know the girl on the tape. I kissed the screen and so gained access to her mind and lived inside it for a year like a vapor.

KIM WASHED HER HAIR IN THE CREEK, AT A SPOT in the middle of the forest below an abandoned limekiln. She waded through the shallow trough into a thick rush of cool water and knelt on a shiny black stone. Taking a cracked coffee mug she sloughed ice water over her hair. Pulling a bead of dishsoap into her palm, Kim worked the gel into an acrid lather. She passed cup after cup of creek water over her bowed head. She yawned because she was tired and water gathered in a rush of streams around her gaping mouth. The dog guarding a yard close to where I slept was able to absorb the energy of surrounding ghosts. He barked like it all was unbearable and I know, I know, dog. I choked on the dusty air and lapsed into a franticly disturbed sleep.

I dreamed that I awoke abruptly and found myself in a weather-beaten shed on the beach, which looked to have been built by hand — in what century I couldn’t be sure. Seth appeared in the doorway. He carried a small object carefully in his hands. “You were sleeping. I found you and brought you here. I thought that by waking you would see the world through different eyes… I’m sorry to wake you but I wanted you to see what happened, what I did for you… I wanted you to see what we made.” He held up a tiny pink mask. “All this time while you were sleeping. No one else was around. I wouldn’t let anybody near. And one day it appeared, it just happened. It came from you — from your body. Don’t you see? It’s our image, combined.” I looked at it and saw my features projected down into coordinates in the delicate pink wax. Where he found it I didn’t want to know. I pushed it away. “Don’t you understand? We made this. This is ours.” I coughed and buried my face in my shoulder. He looked positively extinguished. The truth was, I didn’t recognize the damn thing. If I was asleep this whole time and it just came about, well, I couldn’t be sure it was even mine. I chewed nothing inside my mouth, “I’m going away.”

Josh and Knowles found girlfriends in town, these sixteen-year-old rockabilly chicks with smelly old letterman jackets, pegged jeans, and creepers who shared a bed in their apartment with a young cat, made miniature by a steady diet of second-hand smoke. The boys brought them back to the camp and petted them and kept telling the girls how much they were “tortured by their own savagery.” Murph came back with a grocery bag of old bagels he got behind a coffee house.