Free The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich Page A

safety. The safety of mites? Did I just care about that? Kim folded the cat’s ears back like felt-covered leaves. She was surprised how perfectly they seemed to fold into little compact darts. They look better this way, she said. She remembered folding her dog’s ears down and back so the skin side was showing. She used to say that it was his hairdo… “Wait a minute,” Kim said, sitting in her darkened bedroom with Rick in the afternoon, “Just cuz you bought me a video doesn’t mean I have to put out. Anyway, we’re friends.” She had just finished saying this when he snuck back up into her face and for a second she felt sure it was going to happen: First Contact. She bristled as he moved in for the kiss. Sharply she pulled away. “Fuck man, your breath smells like a taxidermist’s workbench — ”His face reminded her of many she had seen who came to Oregon to die. There was pathos in Rick. He was dark and squirrelly. Shy and eager to please, untrained and raw. Needful… Kim couldn’t get him to stop shifting around like a dog smoothing out a place to sleep. Problem was, sleep proved elusive those days. They would have to lessen their death-grip on speed/consciousness/life for that one…

     
     
    One summer I caught an evil little pet. I caged it but it ditched me. No problem. After it left me I made it do my bidding from afar. Now I have remote control over its doings, ties I hitched over endless indelible months of putrid wandering. Walking lost, my body boiling like water until all the thoughts in my head just evaporate. The swath of vapor in the sky infects your lungs and forces me into bubbles in your brain with every predictable breath. That summer I was a teenage carnivore. On hot nights I dug up little things here and there that I found buried in holes. Creeping around under steel overpasses downtown I lived with my eyes to the ground, struck by how many gutter punks, panhandlers, dumpster divers, gakkers, vagrants, and romantic tramps would never even fuckin get it: the fact that we have to dig for stuff we don’t understand cuz we live in a past we don’t understand . I found a videotape in among some other stuff. It was of some kids partying in an apartment. They were all high on speed, tattooing each other while the girl held her cat to her chest, drunk, lying down on her living room floor. She looked absently at what was going on around her, a bit bewildered perhaps but casually luxuriating in her drunken nonchalance. She flipped through religious pamphlets in the dark. I identified with that girl on the tape, her predicament leapt right out at me from her crooked mouth. She looked at me but her bangs hid it all.

     
     
    Passing by the Anarcho-squats between Salem and Eugene I couldn’t help but absorb the longing of all the people lodged in every conceivable corner, suctioned into seams in the rafters. Their overwhelming sense of self-satisfaction warming the whole cavernous space like a great growling pot-bellied stove. They read to each other by the light of a bare bulb burning on the side of an adjacent building. The room glowed brown with the dim orange light. Their bodies were wrapped and bound like cheeses and, as it happened, their skins looked and felt like a salt-basted exquisite cheese because they never left the brown light. They had money — why didn’t they use it?… Thoughts of escape were suspiciously absent. They enmeshed themselves snakelike with others in proximity and groped long and poignantly, their minds jogging through the detailed process of making bombs out of ordinary household materials. Longing to be true fugitives, for true disaster to strike; they wanted to scrape crumbs off the floors of cops and judges and county supervisors’ homes, to gurgle their tap water after the inhabitants have torn themselves strangled and conflicted from this world. With great effort they pre-wrote suicide notes for each of the prominent robots they had scheduled to die. Cops