fiction by kelsey keaton

Extreme Morphologies

Peter couldn’t understand where the flies were coming from. They clustered on the slick cream of the walls, on table tops, on mirrors—swollen and lethargic. He stood in the darkness of the doorway, keys in hand.

Each night this standoff went on longer and longer, but he would give in at last.

He flipped the switch and the lights flared on. The flies rose, weaving drunkenly through the air. Their buzz reverberated in his skull. He told himself he hated them, that they were driving him crazy.

Before leaving for work each day, he checked all the doors and windows and vents, examined all their seams. There seemed no possible way they could be getting in and yet there were always more.

The first few nights he lay awake wondering if something had died in the walls. He remembered the dead raccoon he’d found as a child. Roadkill. He thought of the fur stiff with dark blood, the white maggots bulging through red muscle.

Yet he didn’t reach out to maintenance. He didn’t check with his neighbors. He simply returned each evening to the apartment building which glowed a sour yellow in the twilight, and killed flies.

Besides, the only neighbor he knew well enough to talk to was Mrs. Yokohama. The day he and Laura had moved in, she’d shown up at their door with freshly baked banana bread and hand-written directions to the nearest Publix.

Laura had been charmed by her, gushed about their adorable neighbors to her friends—for Mr. Yokohama was kind too, if less verbose. He seemed to run errands for the other residents. Early on Peter had noticed him knocking on various doors with white prescription bags or cat litter, even pineapples. He’d even helped Peter carry all the flattened cardboard boxes to the dumpster, smiling behind his glasses but not saying a word.

Mrs. Yokohama was the one who had a lot to say, to Laura in particular. Several times Peter saw the two of them chatting by the mailboxes or the gate, Laura lingered, smiling and laughing, her sea turtle keychain dangling from her fingers. Unlike him, she was at ease with strangers, yet he’d wondered at it, figured they could have little in common. Now he cringed as he imagined what Laura could have said. Especially later.

When he crossed paths with the older woman these days she gave him a polite sort of nod, a tightness between her brows.

She hadn’t once asked about Laura. She probably knew Laura had taken all her books and trinkets with her, packed them up in new boxes, leaving the already sparse shelves completely bare.

These shelves were now gathering dust, drawing particles toward their smooth white surface. This was most evident in the mornings as sun sliced through the blinds. Peter knew he should dust the shelves, or at least buy new objects to place there. But he did neither. He stared at the negative space as he drank his black coffee and fresh orange juice.

That was one thing he did like about Florida, all the fresh fruit. He liked the strange alchemical feeling that came over him as the acid in the coffee and the acid in the citrus combined in his empty stomach. He liked the idea of disintegrating from the inside out.

After several weeks he became quite expert at dispatching the flies with an old flip-flop. The fly slaughter simply joined the list of daily tasks, and like doing the dishes, there was a certain meditative quality to it.

What he did not admit to himself was the bloodlust he felt as he killed the last fly. Her face would come to his mind, the unbearable set her jaw: immovable once she’d made a decision. He was always bending and she was always stone. He’d execute the fly and stand, shoe in hand, as a pleasurable chemical cycling through his veins.

Afterward he would eat dinner. He wasn’t much of a cook so usually just takeout or spaghetti. Then he’d take a beer outside.

He sat in one of the two plastic chairs stationed outside of his front door and looked at the moon – if there was a moon to see. Usually he looked at the blue-green glow of the pool, enclosed by the horseshoe of the apartment building.

Sitting like this Peter sometimes saw the other residents. He watched tipsy couples stumble past, their sharp laughs mingling with the keening of the bats. Hunched figures in scrubs drifted past, and an elderly man in neon pink shorts who reappeared night after night, walking his small white dog. They all slipped assuredly into their air-conditioned habitats. Their windows glowed tangerine. Even the bats that darted above gave off a sense of belonging. Bats belonged to each other, to the sky. It was only Peter who sat alone, waiting for something to happen.

*

It was sometime after the flies arrived, that Peter noticed the woman. She walked past him as he sat in his plastic chair, gold hoops glinting through her sheet of black hair, carrying paper bags of groceries on her hips.

He noticed her another night, then a third. Again and again, she slid past him. Nothing unusual about her on the surface. Yet his body learned to look for her, began to track her movements. His muscles tensed as her scent drifted over the stifling air, musk and jasmine vine. Night blooming.

There were always bottles of wine huddled by her door, flowers tucked through the grate of her window. He couldn’t decide if they were discards from long languid parties or offerings. He kept his eyes peeled for admirers, for lovers, but none materialized. Once or twice he did see Mrs. Yokohama press a squarish bundle into the woman’s arms. The younger woman laughed, tried to protest, but she accepted the gift in the end.

*

Then one night the woman with the gold earrings altered her orbit. She paused, turned, and met his stare.

Instinctively Peter leaned back toward the wall and its shadow. There was no accusation in her eyes but she held her small brown body upright and still, as if gathering herself inward, ready to spring. Instead, she drifted toward him in her long sheer dress, an ethereal jellyfish.

“You,” she said. He blinked.

“Peter,” he replied automatically. The words plucked from his lips. She smiled, a serpent sort of smile. Though maybe that was just the dark lipstick she wore, the color of a blackberry stain.

“I’m Luz.”

He was aware that he was handing her a Corona, already opened. The bottle opener in his other hand.

“But you’re always out here by yourself,” she was saying, taking the still-cold bottle and leaning back against a column. “It can’t be the view.”

Her voice was liquid, easy.

“At least it’s not snow,” he said, because it was something to say. “You’re not from around here then?”

Said with a small smile. “The midwest,” he admitted.

“So, the weather brought you.”

She had moved between him and the glow from the pool. “No, my ex.”

“Ah. Well, you should be careful then. This isn’t the safest place for a broken heart.”

“Aren’t there broken hearts everywhere?” he said, feeling drunk on the scent of jasmine.

She crossed her arms and grinned.

“True, but things decay faster here. It’s the humidity, and the salt.”

Peter noticed her column was dusted with lichens.

“You just moved to the building?” he asked, at once overcome with a perverse need to apologize for the crackled tiles underfoot, the flimsy plastic chairs, the yellow custard walls.

“Me? Oh, I’ve been here for ages.” She fingered a palm frond. “But I did go away for a while. I get away when I can. I always get called back, eventually.”

“By your family?”

“Well, by my responsibilities.”

“Her family didn’t like me,” Peter said, “I mean they said they did. Probably told me that they loved me more times than my own family has my entire life.”

The bitterness leached out, mingled with his sweat.

“I mean her parents were the reason we moved down here. And they were welcoming, sure. But they were always looking at me, wanting something more from me—to dance, to make impromptu speeches. I mean how is it possible to feel that much all the time? Isn’t it just a performance?”

Catching himself at last, he clamped his mouth shut, but his words buzzed violently in the air.

“Different love languages,” Luz said, almost to herself, then shaking her head, “No, it’s a trap either way isn’t it?”

She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were trained on a line of ants moving across the tiles.

“You know, ants communicate mostly with smells. Less problematic that way. A body reacts to a smell, it can’t help it. Attraction, repulsion, fear. . .”

She paused, fingered her gold bracelets.

“So when an ant dies, its body produces a chemical that tells the other ants: hey there, I’m dead. And so before anything starts decomposing, they move the body to the waste pile.”

She gave a little flick of her hand, then she shrugged.

“But scientists did studies where they coated live ants with this death chemical. And every time, despite her kicks and struggles, the sister ants will carry off the poor thing and dump her with the corpses.”

“Which ant am I supposed to be in this scenario?” Peter asked, not sure if he should laugh.

She angled her chin toward him.

“Maybe neither. But you do seem like a fish in the wrong pond.” “Fish out of water,” he corrected automatically.

She swayed, laughed.

“Yes, that. In Spanish, it’s the opposite. Tu estas en tu salsa. You know, when someone is in their element, not out of it.”

She looked down at her hands.

“I need a cigarette,” she said. “This is why people take up smoking, you know? Makes it easier to talk to strangers. Stupid me for quitting.”

Peter had been sitting out in the humid night for some time.

Sweat clung to every one of his pores. Now the droplets grew cold and dripped. He wanted to offer her another beer, he wanted her to stay, but a sourness knotted his gums together.

The moment stretched.

“If you don’t like it here, you should go,” Luz said at last, her dark lips forming Laura’s oft-repeated words. He felt his spine stiffen, turn itself to iron. He tried to laugh, to keep his voice light.

“Who said I didn’t like it here?”

There was a darkness to her expression, a Cheshire moon smile, the rest of her disappearing.

“Guess I’ll be seeing you around then,” she said, as if they’d been having a different sort of conversation.

“Looking forward to it,” Peter called to her retreating back.

He sat for a while longer in her lingering scent, his blood swelling and then settling.

*

Peter sat in his cubicle at work, the blue light blaring down from the fluorescent bulbs. He flipped his phone over, and fought the temptation to listen to the voicemail again.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He stared at the shiny circle of oil at the center of the letters. He simply could not work.

When some co-workers invited him for happy hour drinks he agreed. Not because he was in the mood, but because he needed proof that he was a normal person, that he could do normal person things.

At the bar, he sipped carefully, tried to make the drinks last as  long as possible. They grew warm.

He laughed when appropriate. He delayed the inevitable.

When, at last, he was confronted with the yellow glow of the apartment building, he felt the damp heat of dread. Getting out of his car he pictured the flies that must, at that moment, be filling his apartment.

As he walked through the compressed night air, his hackles rose in anticipation, his fingers itched for the textured surface of the flip-flip. He went through the gate, gently pushing it closed so it wouldn’t clang. The building was a slumbering creature, not to be disturbed.

He walked through the palms, the dried fronds rattling in the warm wind. He remembered being young and listening to the cattails chattering with each other in a similar way.

His feet took him to Luz’s door instead of his own. The light was on, but he didn’t knock. He stood and let his eyes absorb all the strange objects collected there.

Dark roses and other flowers, all wilting or half-dried. Assorted bottles. Half burned candles. Folded paper bags. Chains and beaded necklaces, woven through the window bars. There were small mounds of oranges. Roots with dark earth still clinging to them.

Luz opened the door. “Can I bum a cigarette?” “Peter, I told you I quit.”

He didn’t move. She looked him up and down, and sighed. “Alright then,” she said, flapping her hands to usher him a few

steps back. She rummaged through the objects on the ground and picked up a small paper bag, crisply folded. From it, she pulled out a pack of matches and two cigarettes. They were thin and forest green. She handed him one and he put it to his lips. He leaned toward her and she lit it. His head was flooded with the smell of tobacco seeped in seaweed.

They stood in silence for some time, leaning against the bare stretch of wall on the other side of the door. Smoke drifted around their faces in purple tendrils. As always Peter’s eyes were drawn to the glow of the pool. No one ever seemed to use that pool.

“I still don’t know what I did wrong,” Peter said. “She never explained, not really.”

“What makes you think you deserve to know?” Luz replied after a while.

“How else am I supposed to fix myself?”

His voice was thicker than usual and he was grateful for the darkness, for the shadow.

“You want there to be a map,” Luz said softly, crouching to ash her cigarette into a mug. The gold bangles on her wrist chimed. “They all want a map. Because a map puts the responsibility on someone else. How greedy.” She paused. “Pain attracts pain, Peter.”

As she stood there was a flare of emotion along her bare shoulders. He saw it flicker down her wrists, and out through her fingertips. She was looking straight at him, frowning a little, and there was a constant newness moving along the plains of her face, as if her cells were shimmering and faltering, remaking themselves right there before his eyes. Then she placed a very solid finger on his chest. Warmth radiated through him.

“I know a creature who eats hearts like yours,” she said. “And another who makes them into beautiful treasures and puts them on a shelf. Gold-encrusted eggs with tiny little worlds inside.”

She paused and he breathed in her wonderful smell.

"If you feel your life went wrong somewhere,” she said leaning in close. “Don’t wait for someone else to remake it for you.”

*

Peter undressed in the dark. The sweetness of jasmine still clung to his skin. He pulled himself into bed, but once there he couldn’t sleep. He brushed his fingers over his lips—they stung slightly, raw as if from venom.

And the flies buzzed.

He imagined getting up, hunting them down. But instead, he lay there.

The night pressed heavy on his body, like the thick mats of seaweed that formed on the beach, continually and forever.

In the morning there were seven flies clustered on the bathroom window.

He killed them one by one and flushed their corpses. But afterward he felt no satisfaction. His coffee sat inky in its white mug. He burned the roof of his mouth as he drank. He was out of orange juice. He was late for work. Anger bubbled inside of him, but it was low and unreachable.

*

That night, returning to the apartment building, Peter gave himself a fright. Closing the gate he saw a shape low to the ground, leaning into the pool. For a moment he was sure that a jaguar or cougar was crouched there, some predatory cat escaped from the zoo.

Then the shape turned its head toward him. It rustled.

Peter blinked several times, and as the figure slowly unfolded itself, it shifted into the shape of a small brown woman. Gold earrings glinted in her black hair.

“Luz” he said with a deep exhale, a wave of heat in his lungs. He walked toward her.

“Damn. Peter, can you believe it? I dropped my ring in the pool. It’s an heirloom too.”

She reached for his arm, pulled him near the edge, and pointed. Her small hand burned through his shirt sleeve. A molten feeling was trickling through his arteries, and he saw something, something glinting gold at the bottom of the turquoise water.

When Luz released his arm, his fingers went to the buttons of his shirt. He didn’t fumble. Quickly he undid his belt and stripped, piece by piece, until all that remained were his boxers and socks.

He could feel Luz looking at him but she was silent.

He sat down on the damp tiles and pulled off the socks. He glanced back at her then. The light from the pool glinted from deep within her eyes. It was the expression of a wave pulling back from the shore. Not understanding and no longer caring, he turned back to the gold at the bottom of the pool. The tang of chemicals flooded his nostrils as he took in a deep breath and dove.

He shut his eyes against the crashing water.

The cool water embraced him. He reached out for the bottom, scrambled for the ring. But when his fingers at last felt smooth metal, something wasn’t right.

The ring was much too large, it could have been a bracelet. He gripped it. Had she said ring?

“Just break the lease Peter” Laura’s voicemail had said. “I’ll help talk to the landlord if you need me to. It’s my fault you’re in this position. But if you’re staying for me, if you’re hoping that. . . Look. Go back home ok? I’m sorry for everything, I can’t say that enough, I know. But you’re making me worry.”

He tried to open his eyes, but there was only mossy darkness. He kicked and pushed up toward the surface of the water. He was on fire, but it wasn't his lungs calling for fresh air. It was his skin, sizzling and burning all over. He kicked harder, holding the ring out in front of him like an infinitely heavy life-saver, like some great, horrible joke.

His heart felt strange, the wrong rhythm, and it was taking far too long to reach the edge of the pool. He could see Luz’s face now, blurred by water but illuminated like the moon.

His head had barely broken the surface when he was suddenly lifted. It was as if two hooks had grabbed him under his arms. Peter was eye to eye with his female neighbor now, but she was giant, her luminous gold face filling up the whole field of his vision. Her eyes were deep pools, her teeth pearls. She plucked the ring from his webbed fingers and sighed.

“Oh, Peter. It’s a gift. Something much worse would have followed the flies before too long. You see that don’t you? I told you, there are all sorts of beings who hunt for human hearts. Beings that you really want nothing to do with, beings that I certainly can’t allow here. This place is my responsibility.”

She pressed her dark lips together, paused as if to let him reply.

His eyesight was disjointed, it wobbled. He wanted to tell the female creature who called herself Luz, that it was alright. She’d needn’t look so sorry for him. Her pity made his skin itch.

But he couldn’t speak.

When he tried, only a gurgle emerged. His mind was floating away from his grasp, like a leaf on a torrent of rain runoff. His tongue was slick and heavy in his mouth.

The female entity smiled.

“Well, let’s get you washed off, that’ll make you a little more comfortable. The chlorine can’t be good for your skin.”

And she carried what remained of Peter away into the night.

Kelsey Keaton (she/her) works at a natural history museum in Chicago. When she's having a bad day she likes to watch the dermestid beetles clean skeletons. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Ten Thousand Minds on Fire, Ginger Zine, and Pest Control Magazine. She can be found on instagram @milkofwildbeasts or at kelseykeaton.com