Free The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich

arranged, painstakingly in neat piles: three rolls of masking tape, two lighters, various ripped-in-half cigarettes, empty cigarette packages both foreign and domestic, multiple piles of two quarters, a banana, two jackets, newspapers, and some leaves. Evangele mind you, was up at the counter spinning around in his chair to the tune of “Oh Sherrie,” which he had playing on his boom box. If only the other guests knew he had infiltrated their little private club… his eyes raced to all of the sets of keys sitting on their tables next to plates of breakfast. His eyes stared at the keys for so long he saw them in his hands. All these people sitting there eating and talking didn’t even realize: he would be sitting comfortably in their Jacuzzi tubs with two redheads by dawn — of that he could be sure. He scribbled some lyrics on a receipt paper and passed it to a woman seated next to him. She slapped his face and stared hotly out the window… Shop dust has formed a protective coating on an old bucket of coffee on the floor of a 7-Eleven. The coffee is getting thicker and thicker, leathery and rare. Seth didn’t see me watching him like a lech as he climbed down a handful of stairs to the parking lot, his legs buckling out of starvation as he lowered his way down. I looked upon this fragile display lustily, and with perverted curiosity. I was drunk enough to fuck some way no two people had ever fucked before. Problem was, we couldn’t even stay awake, being out of our minds in the reek of DM syrup fumes, falling all over each other. I decided to take a nap in the bathtub. Sitting in the middle of all this steam I noticed pieces of flesh sloughing off in great grey sheets, plunging into sticky bathwater, each dissolving into a layer of ash on the surface of the anonymous liquid. Spelling ominous secrets.

    Shortly before running away Kim brought home two puppies she bought out in front of the grocery store. They went nuts at our house and ate our stepdad’s slippers and peed on our paperwork from the county office. He sent them to a shelter where one was put to sleep and the other went to live with a woman in Eugene. The dead one was dying anyway, and had a series of shots to finish him up. Our stepdad was the head of our house mom like Jesus was the head of the church, “This is not a matter of dominance; it is a matter of love.” Kim danced in circles on the kitchen floor; she said, “I’ll play this song till I can’t take any more.” As for her friends Rick, Ronnie, Peetie — that whole other gang of slutty teenage hobo junkies — all those guys came from bad homes. They’d had enough and they ran away. They pissed off cops with their screw you attitude and fucked up bodies, got beat up too many times for being fuckup transient whores. They got holes in their throats from spewing bile in the general direction of city limits. Peetie had a patchy flat top and a tattoo that said JÅCKE OFF + DIE in block letters and wore the same brown t-shirt every day with the sleeves rolled all the way up. He used to look normal, his cheeks were filled out in well-fed youth, his teeth used to be straight, but several months on the road and all the drugs and stuff had made him totally skinny, leathery skinny. More like a cart horse that got whipped all day. At our foster house jars of half-formed houseplants sat along every horizontal surface. Some were just collections of sprigs of green threads — weeds really — in cups of water. How do they do that, grow a little plant in a cup of water? Orange roots twisted around in the murky glass. I thought I saw one twitch and send up a line of bubbles, but no… Other plants looking like paper mâché wings dipped in slime rested on pieces of cardboard on the floor. Those ones were actually rooted in dirt. Flat green flaps of shell on a stick. I’ll water it in a little bit and it will gurgle at me for more till all the mites living in its soil have scrambled up its stalk for