The Orange Eats Creeps Read Online Free PDF Page A

top of it like me.” Comically, the hand dryer shuts off and I’m able to slowly reach into the mirror’s frame, beyond the meshing point, and fix my own fractured smile from beyond the grave. Outside, in the radioactive perma-dawn of 7-Eleven, I fix a large 24 oz. cup of coffee, pouring from the fullest pitcher, leaving a half-inch at the top for the two things of hazelnut non-dairy creamer. I stir with two red straws before discarding them. Blue lid, a couple of napkins in my apron pocket for spills, one of which is already necessary to blot up beads of hot condensation that have gathered around the rim only to have fallen on the web between thumb and index finger. I’m a hungry wolf! I lunge at your eyeballs, infecting your insides by horrifying your bulging gaze, releasing chemicals in your brain that spark a sudden decay . I seek prey out of the endless night, fog shrouding my knives, my secrets. I will rummage around in your soul — don’t let me! Don’t let me too close, I will bite you, I will tear at you. I want to eat you! When anti-sleeping in a boxcar, Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies receive and send out neural stimuli with shared minds. I have found that this causes boners in the male mind, and uncontrollable weeping in the female mind. I’m sleeping now. With every crack of synapse a small felt thread grows and spreads across my body until I am covered with layers of a dusty web. This shroud obscures me, while it confines me to the self-annihilation scenario. Every thread wraps even tighter around me, until I’m suffocated by my ESP addiction, held fast by my insatiable urge to undo men through telekinetic mindpower!

    “The sun went down.”

    “Here, help me hoist open the paneled door of our telepathy crypt.”

    “Let’s go to Safeway, there’s one I saw at the last exit; I want some grapefruit juice.”

    I wander around to the alley of the supermarket to find a new box for all my stuff. Suddenly I find that I can’t walk any further, that something bad will happen to me if I round the corner. I lean my palm against the side of the building; I catch my breath which seems to have been taken from me. Some sharp pain pings at my kneecaps from the inside. A tingle washes over my brain and chills my entire body. I peer into the shadows carved out by the overlap of cinderblock wall and orange utility light. I see a shape. Am I supposed to be here, to find evidence? To bear witness? To blaze a trail? Where did I leave my soul that night? In a box behind a Safeway in Spokane. What does a sudden explosion in your pulse mean? What about a lurching of the synapse, is that someone trying to telepathically reach you? Her name was Kim; I had a thing for Kim, but in an indescribable way that was unlike anything else, ever. She seemed to under-perform everyone around her in just about everything, smarts, crafts, she couldn’t fight, she only cooked Hot Pockets… Why her then? There was just a lot of longing, and a lot of curiosity surrounding her I guess you could say. And I could never grasp it; she fell through my fingers. She was more dead than the rest of us, the deadest . Her hair fell in shafts of light through my fingers. In the reflection of her eyes I could see my heart, bursting. I grew up next to her body, came of age in a series of heartbeats when she said the syllables of my name. I found my hand caught in the fold between her ribcage and hip. There was nobody around, it was Sunday morning three years ago and our foster parents were at church. I had fallen asleep next to her the night before; we shared a bed those nights because it was the best way to do it, to sleep soundly beside a body that made little whining noises and turned like a plush engine, spilling gardenia into my face. I brushed across her hair on my pillow, took my hand across shoulder and fatty patch behind breasts, under crook of arm, under covers where her flesh was hot after slow burn of sleep, until my hand found the sad