The Orange Eats Creeps Read Online Free PDF Page B

own lives in this garish potpourri den. We beat on each other in bed with a big wooden fork and spoon ripped from the kitchen wall. Monday night we had found a way to help ourselves to the Bourbon.

    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