5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
www.dzancbooks.org
ANIMALS EAT EACH OTHER. Copyright © 2018, text by Elle Nash. All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Dzanc Books, 5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48103.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nash, Elle, author.
Title: Animals eat each other / Elle Nash.
Description: Ann Arbor, MI : Dzanc Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016039154 (print) | LCCN 2016039627 (ebook) | ISBN 9781938604430 (print) | ISBN 9781945814075 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3614.A727 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3614.A727 (ebook) |
DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039154
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
First US edition: April 2018
Interior design by Leslie Vedder
Cover designed by Matt Revert
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
There is a cost to being special.
Most people are not willing to pay that price.
—Wal-Mart Vice President, 2010
You can run as fast as you want,
but you can never outrun your cliché.
—Doppelherz, Marilyn Manson, 2003
PROLOGUE
MATT PLACED THE KNIFE on my face, pressing down against my lips. He wanted me to lick the edge of it, to push my tongue up against the serrated edge so he could watch the way the muscle in my mouth looked against the metal. With his other hand, he held my neck to the floor.
The one who tied me to the coffee table was his girlfriend, Frances. Her hand was on my thigh, small and smooth and birdlike, occasionally caressing back and forth across my leg as I lay on my back, pressed into the living room carpet. Frances was naked and sat with her legs under her, tourmaline hair falling to her lower back. We were drunk again, their baby asleep in his crib in the bedroom down the hall.
I squirmed my hips to get comfortable, inched my head left to keep my hair from pulling. Matt’s fingers, thick and callused, wrapped tighter around my neck. The pressure in my skull increased in slow heartbeats, the room fading into an inky black vignette. His eyes, the kind of blue you only see in nature documentaries about very cold places, stared into mine. I stared at the bridge of his nose to seem like I was staring into his eyes. At moments, I would catch his gaze and almost see a flash that I was a Real Living Thing, visceral and bleeding.
I wanted to be validated, the way everyone does. I ended up between a floor and a knife, between a man and the mother of his child. This was before I understood what it was like to be held close, to-the-ribs close. Close like I was the only one.
FROM DUST
THAT SUMMER I WORKED at RadioShack in a dull strip mall, three miles from my mother’s place in Lamplighter mobile home park. We moved to Lamplighter when I was eight, after my father died from sudden liver complications, leaving us with a garage-sized inheritance of 1970s knick-knacks, old photos, and debt. My mother was a caretaker for the elderly, and although she worked through most holidays, her income alone couldn’t pay the mortgage on the rambler they had bought when they first moved to Colorado Springs.
All summer, my mother had been prodding me to find a job. I’d just graduated high school and had no immediate plans for college, instead investing my time in a growing obsession with snorting Percocet. I was thirteen the first time I thumbed one of my mother’s pills, a Vicodin—only one because I feared she might notice it was missing. I remember carrying it back to my bedroom like a fragile tooth, and I placed it under my pillow with the same excitement that used to come from exchanging body parts for quarters. I brushed my teeth and washed my face in the hallway bathroom and when I came back, the pill was still there. I swallowed it with a glass of water, and at first felt very nauseous. Then a warmth spread from my belly into the rest of my limbs and I felt comforted in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It reminded me of a moment when I’d woken from a nightmare as a child and crawled into bed between both my parents, cradled by the largeness of their bodies and the smell of their sweat, both sweet and stale like old cigarettes.
Jenny and I stood behind the linoleum counter at the store, waiting on customers. Jenny was a girl I knew from middle school, who had worked at RadioShack since her sophomore year and got me a job, too. The summer had faded into cool evenings on the cusp of autumn, and wispy locks of Jenny’s pastel blue-tipped hair fell from her beanie. Poised between the gray squares of economy carpet and the stacked electronics, she was the brightest thing in the store.
That’s when Matt and Frances walked in. Jenny took them immediately to the only corner of the store where the camera couldn’t see them.
Matt was tall, his head shaved so close to the scalp I could see the lines in his cranium. Frances stood next to him, her fingers wrapped delicately between his own. With her other hand, she held the tips of her long hair to her mouth. She constantly checked the reaction on Matt’s face as Jenny spoke to them, as if any move she made or word she said was subject to his approval. Her almond-shaped eyes were exaggerated by her thin, drawn-in eyebrows. Matt pulled out a tube of Chapstick and unscrewed the top. He puckered his
