The Orange Eats Creeps (6)

I get the sinking feeling that I'm gonna be here forever. I traced into the sky: f-o-r-e-v-e-r... In this world, there's no edge, no junctions or seams, just endless rounded corners -- the sanded contours of hell--

Summer ticks away What have you been up to lately?

[Grace Krilanovich, 144]

The Orange Eats Creeps (2-5)

There is a myth up on The Highway That Eats People that there's one way in and one way out. There are actually many ways in and many ways out--the trick is to pick the road that leads out and not ever deeper. Which path leads to the gauzy powder image of the woman--the one with white crepe shadows wrapped around her body and a skull where her face should be? She fills her nights flying low over the woods, the murderers' cabins, and under the bridge where the bodies were kept (not "found"), flying around and down the spiral path that corkscrewed down down to the center of the woods, until she came to rest and lay in the middle of the highway, splayed across the road like a fallen bough-- There she ceased to exist except as two enormous black holes for eyes.

[Grace Krilanovich, 97]


When a sleeping cat's paws twitch it's dreaming of running away from you. You know, these are weird times, marked by a nonspecific dread that rests in nights of brown fog at the center of my bones. Everything in this life is determined, a machine fueled by the tones emitted by digging a fresh grave. Horrific events are set in motion in this occupied territory, activated by movement, but I can't stop moving...

[Grace Krilanovich, 105]


That autumn it went like this: We? No: I.
I walk alone and I am the last one.

[Grace Krilanovich, 110]


I thought of forgotten rooms, of walls collapsing in old apartment buildings, accordion-like, disappearing into a crevice in the dark. One day my house mom went into one of these collapsed rooms and found grey grass sinews itching their way through cracks in the floor, filling the room with tufts of itchy vegetation. They grew and spread into the elaborate lace-like fans and dusty cobweb looms before wilting into flakes at first sign of morning. All of these memories made up some survey of the make-believe life I led as only a kind of version of living. I made myself remember: crime scenes are kind of ruin too.

[Grace Krilanovich, 115]

The Orange Eats Creeps (1)

(Hibernation) It was an option so few were willing to ever conceive. No food no walking no thoughts of escape. None of it necessary. They were a few of the undead who had decided to stop moving and just sleep it out -- not to die for real, but try to live in the lands resting on the other side of their quiet minds. They'd forged their own key out of a visionary narcissism and magically it fit the lock; their lungs sopped up the air that languished and strained at tight dozing skin. So many other solutions had been attempted and yet they had failed. No one ever got it right. The dream was over, so they retreated from the highways and streets of their regions, rooted around in the scrap heap for shavings and supplies and fell into a deep winter sleep that has lasted these many, many months.

[Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps, 93]