A shadow smeared the girl’s window glass, dark breath seeping in at the seams to reconstitute itself in the stillness of the room, and hover bedside: a neurotic, caped demon wrenching himself away even as he slid closer, landing on the girl’s blind mouth. The demon took a sip and hissed his revulsion. His weight grew heavy on her. Her arms rose. She grazed her hand across his back, fingernails singeing on contact with his pale acid flesh … You treat me like I’m gone, but I never left. Couldn’t if I’d wanted to. I was content to dream, a ready-made sea for all who seek it. I lay in the dark, this thing on top of me as coalesced as a ball of rags. It was pummeling my chest with the tiny effort of a moth pounding unto its own small death. As sensations go, it’s oddly satisfying. I laughed. The flutter reached a minor panic. I lay sprinkled with coolness, building to a crushing sadness, lungs rattling behind big horrific breaths. The weight slid down, and down. I picked up one of his hands, an exquisite carving, pressing my lips to green veins bundled in the center of his wrist. I slid my tongue along his arm, his throat, making the flesh real. I held firmly in my hands and kissed all over what would become his face. I heard the rasp of human breath, felt blood filling my mouth.
Johnny’s carriage tumbled up the driveway, its lamp, a slip of untimely sun, casting a jagged path on the wall. If he was alone, it would be because he’d left his friends passed out in the theater. I’m bored, generally, but these new pastimes of his were hardly superior, sitting drunk watching spit arc into the footlights from behind you. I finessed my costume, smoothing, cinching. Johnny came in smelling of smoke, armpit grease, and rosemary. He found me in the dark, humming his greeting as he smushed his face into my neck, taking large bites and working his way down. He was running on the last of an intriguing public energy. It jarred me. But I can do better. I reassured myself that I too would go outside for a night’s entertainment. I would order a rum omelet in a tavern. I would inoculate myself with the knowledge that men don’t know much about a woman’s idea of fun. I squeezed his arm, then slid my hand down the back of his shirt to that fleshy area over his kidneys. Its softness made me think of Johnny as an infant, his mother making faces and pinching his little body as he lay in a cot. Johnny tried loosening the front of my dress. He sniffled, caught himself, and sniffled some more. God, I thought, he is actually weird. That earnest weeping … You sloppy little tool, I love you. You are falling, and there’s no clear end. We are two planets with fucked-up geometry. One day you’ll keep going, slip through my fingers and into my mouth.
It was the middle of the night, not like that mattered. Johnny was hungry so we went downstairs and I brought out what was left of dinner. Johnny sat at the table in his kimono jacket, looking past me with a blur to his eyes, no doubt cycling through the evening’s regrets. Small perceived slights gathered in heaps, ill-kept pets beseeching him with wet glances. His barriers were more and more permeable, and he liked to drag me across them. He liked that.
Johnny went into another room and returned with a ledger book. He flipped through it without looking at any page in particular, plucking out assorted slips of paper that were tucked inside before tossing the ledger itself up onto a high pantry shelf. He sat back down to scrutinize the loose sheets, marring them thoughtlessly before also casting those aside. He reacted strangely when he noticed me watching him. Truth be told, I was always watching him. And the way he looked back—well, I’ve been making a living parsing those kinds of looks since I was a child.
Whatever he was looking for, he wasn’t finding it. He hunched there distracted. Grasping for a pretense to go back, I thought. Johnny would never let himself go shimmying downtown at this hour simply because he wanted to. There needed to be a purpose, couched in something mundane and impersonal.
“Unsettled business?” I suggested.
He thought for a moment, tapping out a fragment of song with his fingertips. Then his hands relaxed and joined each other. He sagged in his seat, his stare enigmatic, goatlike. “As it happens,” he declared, “I am to be expected downtown,” like it was next on the schedule, after an evening of variety theater, gorging on peanuts, and getting blown in the dark.
“When—in the morning?”
“It’s not a morning-type errand. Urgent, you understand. Won’t take long.”
I lingered on it a second, nodding, my lips pursed. “In that case,” I ventured tastefully, “I ought to perhaps tag along?”
He smiled, a polite shift in the angle of his head. “Did you think I was simply informing you?”
“Of course not,” I said coolly, springing from my chair. I lingered in the open space of the kitchen with a dish in my hand, ready to make it look like I was only clearing the table. “Are you asking if I want to go too?”
“I am, yes.”
I skipped into a run. “It only seems that I should go,” I said, “to drive, one gets so tired. I mean who else is available at this hour? These long days, Johnny. How are you even still awake? I have a feeling something bad would happen if we ignored it and went back upstairs. You can sleep all of tomorrow”—I left everything scattered on the countertops—“I insist!”—and in one unbroken gesture I’d pulled on boots and a coat. “Don’t ever doubt me, Johnny.”
In the foyer I caught myself and ran upstairs to add layers of disguise. Johnny was intrigued and wanted one too. I saw to it. When I was done he looked like something that crawled out of a subterranean beer room in Catesville. “Yeah,” he said approvingly. “Bury me like this.” I curtsied at him in my sullied lace.
We left through the kitchen door, took the garden path, then through the gate to the road, lights of home casting finer and finer, sputtering to black. There was a moon slimpsing down around the hills, somewhere. The quietest roar came from the sky, almost purely imaginary. Johnny drove, squinting ahead with a confident mania. Our carriage light nipped at the darkness as treelike hands moved to pull the road out from under us.
Johnny pulled up to a livery stable on the outskirts of town. We saw the horses turned out into a pasture box, having roused the proprietor who’d been sleeping in a wagon bed with his dog. Then we walked on, tracing the cut of a barranca till we reached the main road, Laurel, and Anzar proper. All was quiet, the air mild, scented with herbs, a half-lit sky ushering us toward the smell of questionable amusement downtown. I forgave Johnny that he’d teased me into revealing so much of myself earlier, because of course he knew I wanted to go too. Instead of sleeping, I was heading in the direction of tantalizing unknowns; I promised myself I’d cut it off before it killed me. To the center of town I was bringing my intangible sick glamour—my wealth was energetic in nature. Johnny walked with money, tactile and true. The two of us put together exploited a collision of magics, an abundance we moved within as a gorgeous bubble.
We crossed into town without speaking, drawn toward the spectacle of a group of loose tramps in the near distance. Johnny meandered, slowing as he picked up on a mood redolent of Liberation on the downtown plaza. We waded into the introductory sights, approaching the first human napping on a blanket. Others lolled nearby, some with torches, a few capering before the windows of the plaza’s outlying buildings. There were strategic boulders and a system of plank walks crisscrossing the sodden green. Carton shacks and tent shanties were grouped on the knolls. Below, a band shell draped with an old sail shredded into a parody of lace suggested riotous performance could occur on a moment’s notice. Fun-loving tramps circulated around like it was the middle of the day, roaring in groups, chugging whole bottles on rocking chairs sunk into the mud. Guys were jogging back and forth with bundles, armfuls of unidentifiable objects, things with legs, a goat or maybe a small human, a woman, singing right into her ear. I heard Johnny chuckling to himself. He’d set down to a crouch, taking in the scene. I stood by in my cloak hood, my face stiff with powder.
A crowd had gathered in front of a man lecturing in the back of a cart. Some sort of rally was in progress, the man’s pro-vagabond screed taking on the strains of a bear against a rock face. Around him an audience of men perched on the park’s extant boulders, trinkets strewn thoughtlessly by God’s baby. A few bellowed fragments of their own speeches. Even within this racket I could tease out the familiar appeal, the rhetoric wielded by generations of tramp-philosophers and slick bull artists, hiding behind their devotion and research into the lives of the ancient mystics. Pure bugology, the way these speeches glided straight to the con, all before roving eyes of the audience scanning for the tail end of money. The worldview expressed was at its core anti-person, a demand for the primacy of the animal.
Some invisible force washed over Johnny—he rose and sauntered right into the plaza. I followed him … Before it killed me, my own phrase gluey alongside, metered out in footsteps. A man wearing a vest made of iridescent rooster feathers stood holding a banner proclaiming ANTS ARE CAVEMEN. Elsewhere a young man with a peeved ostrichlike face was seated behind a small folding table. Nothing was on the table except a row of peanuts lined up along the far edge, and he was watching us as he sucked deeply from his spiced cigarette. I saw an altar arranged against the trunk of a nearby sycamore, a paste of pigeon down and droppings spread over its base. Small devotional cards in varied hands were tied with ribbons all around the altar frame and a photograph of an old man holding a baby was tacked to the top. A group of ten or so, men outnumbering women, stooped around a duo practicing their cellos; the watchers standing under a tatter of branches, only intermittently focused. In the low light their faces appeared to float at the trunk-level, as they wore dark wool wraps, despite the warm night. A man told a woman who was sipping from a mug of green soup to cover her hair. She stood up and walked away without a glance; several watched as she trampled tiny moss blooms on the path boards. All through this flagging and drooping underworld enchantment were men cranking their backs, leaning over rails to leer at women, what few women were out at this hour. To be out here with her, at this hour—a rustling from behind, a man flashing homemade dentures. His companion, swaying on his curved spine, kneaded a mat of tobacco chaw in his fingers. Johnny strolled on and I followed him as close as I could. We passed a thin enormous man holding a pet ferret in a special sling. As we got closer I saw it wasn’t a ferret but rather a confusion of beard and his bandaged arm. Johnny wasn’t looking, he walked with his head turned, taken by something else, only getting closer to this guy while I tried to steer him the other way. When we were inches from the ferret man he widened his stance and caught us with his breath. “Like I said,” the ferret man rasped, “you shouldn’t be out here.” I gave Johnny a contemptuous look but he said nothing and we quickly passed, tracing the edge of the park on boards creaking underfoot, back to the road. I felt better on the road, a quarter mile or more of open air till we reached the sloughfront and a tavern there. Johnny said it’d be open, he said we’d be allowed to sit. I felt the breeze close as he walked with me, thinking who cares if you almost want to touch him, weaving my arm around his arm as we passed out of earshot of downtown. I was delighted at the prospect of dipping in for refreshments, sitting opposite each other on soft damask banquettes streaked with tea, crumbs collected in the button tufts. There’ll be a canopy of palms overhead, shading all doubt, buffeting against your standards of scorn, Johnny, your sense of propriety it’s outrageous, your paranoia. As if there’ll be waiters huddled together in intense debate in the corners. We shouldn’t be out here? Some nut said that. Some bum, insane fellow. They want, they’ll find scads of offenders, chances to fret at every turn. They don’t set the reality we choose to inhabit.
We were standing on the street; I was looking forward to going inside some place and sitting down. I’d been keeping my eyes trained on the singed edges of downtown’s teetering novelty act, of men engaged in a warped circus experiment seconds from catastrophe. I was beginning to feel fatigued.
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Excerpted from Acid Green Velvet by Grace Krilanovich. Reprinted by permission of Two Dollar Radio. Copyright © 2026 by Grace Krilanovich. All rights reserved.
Acid Green Velvet can be ordered here.
