Annika Ancheta, fiction, 2024
"There's a sort of comfort that comes with talking about your own filth. I decided to write about mine—a filth that accumulated over the loneliest period of all our lives."
INT. ??? - ???
Scarlet. Bleeding into the ground. A puddle of filth gathering at hangnailed toes. The floor is splotchy with dirt and dust, a pair of long thin ankles connected to elongated feet dipping into a dark puddle on the floor. A hand with untrimmed nails picks at the paling pallor of their ankles. Nipping at the skin.
Moving up. Towards the face. A dark mane of short wild hair flares around them like a hive. Their eyes are dark, empty; sinks into their face. Their gaunt cheekbones seem to slice the air with every shiver.
Lashes long and heavy. So wide yet so slim. Their mouth is stained with blood, dripping down, down…
There has not been a moment where they were not full. A moment unsatiated. A moment where they were anything but perfectly, completely, utterly alone. Isolated.
But that’s the issue, isn’t it? The issue with the blood, how it's nearly black against their chin, how it seems to sink and dry, and the stench is all-consuming that if you were there, if you were there in that room with them, you would have sunk to the floor, sinuses filled with the smell.
That’s the problem with all this food.
It’s all gone stale.
BLOOD CLOT
I.
INT. ??? - ???
They had found you out there. In the cold, shivering night. No blanket to keep your body warm, though devoid of shivers, your form curled up atop a lone bench just across from it. The house—a massive complex located at the apex of the hill crest, with the closest man-made structure being the cell tower just further above—roots itself into the soil on the other side of the road, a considerable number of floors and a small little flamingo out on the front lawn. There’s a party going on. Music booming through the walls until the windows are shaking, the sound of cups and hollers and laughter over pointless things. One of them saw you. Gazed out the window and noticed you, face snuggled into your arms and your eyes closed.
After some time of deliberation, a couple of them went out. Scooped you up, jostled you enough to make you stir but not enough to jolt you out of slumber. Consciousness dabbles into your senses as they bring you inside from the nightly chill.
You don’t know what they intended to do with you. Could have been good. Most likely bad.
But when they placed you down on the couch to gather around you, your cadaver cold eyes fleeting open like bat wings and your lips parted to lick at your teeth, you didn’t give yourself the chance to find out.
You made eye contact with the first man you saw and took a bite.
INT. A HOUSE, YOU THINK - DUSK
The house is like a cake. A reverse, maybe. You start from the bottom and make your way towards the topmost point. They’re like mice—all of them are, but these ones in particular. They’ve trapped themselves within a prison of their own making, with clumsy locks on the doors and windows. All they have left to rely on are the rooms above ground floor, scrambling up the steps with heaving sobs and endless wheezes. They claw at the banisters of the topmost balconies, clumsily hiding behind closets as they watch you from above, because they have nothing else to look forward to but each step of your heels, digging into the stained fluffiness of the stairs.
Perfect. It’s perfect. You had to have known this would happen, with the weeks you spent out in the bitter night, craving for a food beyond the rats you’d scrounge up beneath the L.A. sewers, for a chance to devour without the need to prepare. They brought you in while you were sleeping. It’s too perfect.
One by one, their bodies fall to the ground. Rivers and rivulets of deep scarlet wind their way down the steps of each floor, marking the ground with the stains of each death. You make quick work, pushing them further and further up and for once you feel like what you’ve always meant to be, something that doesn’t just trick but takes, takes, takes. You smash their heads against bathroom tiles until their skulls break, crack their necks and test out slivers of their nectar before
moving to the next one. The residue of bodies you leave behind is like a charcuterie board splayed out for all to see, peppering across floorboards and tiles for whatever witnesses there will be to find.
You glance around the room—the highest room in the hierarchy of a home, bodies splattered along the walls with their grits and gore. Faces wrought with permanent petrification, tongues gouged out and eyes thrown up towards the ceiling. The ceiling is covered in viscera, dangling from rotating wooden fans and embracing the window panes nearby, the black mixing seamlessly with the crimson. You feel your belly grumble tenderly, sated for the time being.
You spend some time getting ready to go out again. Using the warm water in their shower, finding some loose clothes in their wardrobes. You grab a couple ziploc bags for the trip back out, leaking a couple more droplets of blood into them as DIY to-go packets. You’re ready and warm and giggly and so you trudge down the steps, preparing to make your way back into the night.
When you open the door and attempt to walk out, you hit an invisible wall. You suffocate at the sensation, plastic wrap pressed against your nostrils as you attempt to barge through the doorway. You make a couple more attempts, pounding and clawing at the entryway before you finally realize.
They never invited you inside, did they?
II.
INT. A HOUSE, YOU KNOW - MIDNIGHT
The panic doesn’t set in for a while. It’s not often for a trauma response to resort to numbness but you find that you’re currently untethered, even in this moment. Your main issue—one that you realized after an hour of staring blanklYout the doorway, into the street of which no cars passed by, of which vintage street lamps flickered above the bench they brought you inside from—would be sunlight. Daylight wouldn’t be until a couple of hours so you have time. The house is tall and impressive, and the garage to its side provided some useful things. A 2016 Nissan Rogue, a corkboard of carpentry and mechanic’s tools, and a roll of duct tape in one of the side cupboards. You spent the next thirty minutes making sure every window was blocked over, every blind and curtain drawn before the first snippets of sunlight filtered into your new home.
When you were finished, you stood in the center of the living room. The sheepskin rug curls against her ankles as you watch the black strips of tape illuminate with the sun’s burning visage, a soft shudder traveling beneath your skin at the mere sensation of light. You’re in an oversized white tee within a sea of bodies, waterfalls of ichor drained from your first blood on the couch, his ochre-colored eyes pleading towards the lamp at the far north of his head. Bodies, littered about, a decades’ worth of food, food you’ve been craving for the longest time of the longest hour.
In these days and ages, to be who you are is to fake that you’re not. To survive is to pretend, to pretend is to be humanlike. To fix your posture and suck in your teeth. To hold in frustrations, even as mortals whom you try to lead into empty avenues keep trying to lead you. For so long you had to be the perfect human specimen because humans were the only thing you could feed on—no longer the stacks of candy smuggled in pockets or the low-hanging fruits from neighborhood gardens. A constant charade. But here, as gradual as it is, the façade shatters. You don’t have to keep yourself upright, keep yourself pretty and beautiful as a lure.
You can just… eat.
INT. THE HOUSE - LATER
For the next couple of weeks, in spite of yourself, you become accustomed to the gore and viscera lingering at your feet, decapitated heads you couldn’t bother setting right ones you’ve had a fill of their chaliced necks. During the day you take the time to rest, belly full with blood. In the night, when you wake with the beginnings of starvation nipping at your gut, that is when you begin to eat. And you are fed. W ell fed, perfectly fed. No need for batting lashes or plushing out lips, no need for fake plans to get the chance to taste the alcohol in another person’s veins. No seductions, no teasings, no nothing. For once, you feel like an animal and you love it.
You decide, despite the decorum obviously catering to previous inhabitants, to make this place your home. With careful hands you toss away wooden utensils and garlic cloves, checking the fridge for any expiring preserves. You can’t throw it away so you elect to keep them closed among the split banana peels and soggy socks that you don’t want to think about. You lounge yourself on long chairs and pop open cans of root beer, pretending to chug them while counting the amount of popcorn on the popcorn ceiling above you. With a stable supply, you’re in heaven on earth. Thirty bodies total, due to last for a good while. On the rare occasion that someone calls or visits—a family member who hasn’t heard from a loved one in the last week, a mechanic who had been booked earlier that month to fix a drainage issue—you tell the shortest, easiest lies you’ve ever uttered in your life. Like a perfect stratagem, the visits limit until they stop coming altogether. You don’t worry yourself with beckoning them in. There’s plenty of everything to keep you fed.
You excitedly count down the days since you’ve spoken to another being, aside from the Playboy girls winking at you from magazines stuffed clumsily beneath bedsheets. You take endless paces around the living room, pretending that you’ve booked this summer home all your life. You don’t bother anymore with testing the tensity of the barrier between you and the front door because there’s no point in leaving something as good as this, and you go to bed each morning in a different bedroom, wrapped in silky soft sheets slickened with AXE body spray and bodily fluids. You feel a sensation of joy whenever you make the decision to not get up.
You deserve this, you think. You fit right here. So many nights crawling in the night, like the many, many before you, searching for fresh blood in starving streets, begging to be fed. Forced to speak when you want nothing more than to feast.
You’re in paradise. Somehow, in this prison, you’ve found your paradise.
INT. THE HOUSE - EVEN LATER
Around a month into your stay, you become bored so you end up watching the TV. Which is new—you haven’t had to pay for cable in a good several years or so, too busy satiating other cravings with other sorts of entertainment in the form of watching electricity bounce between a plug and an ethernet cable or watching the cockroaches scurry along pebbled roads while you sink your teeth into a nighttime hooker. There’s a couple of channels on, some playing old-timey
comedies with laugh tracks of people you think you could recognize if you paid actual attention, or music videos from artists that you don’t think are around anymore but you remember at the same age you’ve been in for eternity.
Your favorite is the cooking channel. You love the sound of the grill churning, the metallic scratch of a whisk rubbing into a steel pot. Sometimes you wonder if it would be good to learn from them, but you don’t need to eat and you’ve never cooked a day in your life nor do you plan to, and there aren’t any ingredients or cooking supplies in the kitchen besides knives and baking soda after you rid their stock of Chinese takeout from the fridge and popsicles from the freezer. You make do with what you have.
One day they cut up slices of mango for a cake recipe. They douse a long onyx slab of table in flour, rolling dough across it for the cake batter and saving it for later. Then they take a mango fruit—green and red, plump in their hand. A knife slips through its dermis, slicing it in half. You watch and copy their movements, but you have no fruits in the house because it’s already been several theoretical grocery shifts since the ones before expired—so you scoop up one of the bodies found slumped down the stairs and splay it across your lap, pretending your nails are the knives, slicing through the thick pale skin like mango. You watch them as they cubify its innards, cutting the pulsating gush into neat little squares, and you try to do the same but your pinkie keeps getting caught on an artery or a bone, and it doesn’t smell like mango even though it’s just as wet. You watch with pornographic intent as they bring the mangoes to their lips, a languid moaning rippling through their throat. You watch while you copy and you try to take a bite of the body, not like a vampire but like the primate you were before, gulping and chewing but it doesn't work.
It’s just as bloody though. That has to count for something.
Each day you mark, you move from one room to the next. Mondays you spend your time on the ground floor, sipping on one of the cadavers paralyzed against a closet door. Tuesdays you take your time in the garage, locking yourself within the driver’s seat of the Rogue, pressing your feet on the gas pedal and wondering if you opened the door and put the car in reverse and drove on out of here if the impact of the invisible barrier that keeps you within these wills would kill you for trying so. Wednesdays you’ve decided are bathroom days, sitting in the tub full of water until the suds rot into the white acrylic, making random concoctions composed of blood and sinew, wrapping intestines up like those shower sponges you had seen advertised on billboards and Sephoras when you remember what colors they were, using brains to wash down your chest and the hair growing on your legs. Thursdays you try to forget you’re stuck here, try not to think how predictable each room has become, how you can hear the cooing of birds outside those windows but haven’t seen them since the beginning of your stay.
On Fridays you try to eat corpses like mangoes. You look at photographs plastered on the wall, matching each face to those smushed against the carpet, with baby photos and family photos and types of photos you forgot that people liked to take like birthday parties or graduation. Thirty bodies. Thirty friends. You wonder what their intention was when they brought you in that night, if in the rarest of chances they were good that they would have liked to be friends.
The weekends you have dedicated to rot.
INT. THE HOUSE - EVEN FUCKING LATER
At some point, you stopped trying to wipe your hands of the grime. It’s not like it’ll get any better, with how much of the murk clings to your fingers. You can see the way the dark splotches curl beneath the edges of your fingernails, how they douse the pink in a deep ugly brown that makes you feel ill at the sight. You don’t even bother to realign your food when you finish your nightly meals; discarded about the house like ragdolls, wrists chewed through and hanging off limbs, legs strewn about because you needed some form of change, some form of difference even if it were just the ways you positioned them, the ways you laid them about and ate.
At some point, the money dries up. You had forgotten the concept of money since you never really needed it, did you? At some point when you turn on the shower to clean the red down your chest the water spray has turned cold. A couple months later the water stops coming at all. Sinks don’t work. The toilet doesn’t flush. You can’t go outside to take out the trash. So for the next couple of weeks, you begin to leave trash around. You stop bothering to wash, to change clothes. You close your eyes when you defecate because you know the toilet still holds the shit you dumped in it the day before.
It stinks. It fucking stinks.
You’ve never noticed the smell before, have you? Before you had become used to it—accumulated to it with ease. Not anymore. The stench is putrid, wafting through the rooms like a specter. You don’t remember blood smelling this bad. You don’t remember you smelling this bad—was it always like this? When you were searching for fresh prey during the late hours at nearby Sears at the mall, or navigating through the crossroads of rooftops down the cul-de-sac on 21st, did you smell like this? Did people scrunch their nose as you came to them, hoping for a fresh bite? Did they stop themselves from doing so just to be nice? How long? How long did it take before you realized, what rank stench you left in your wake, how much perfume it would take to draft it out?
When you turn on the air conditioner during a heat wave, the smell gets worse. Garbage, striking your nose. It’s the first time you cry in a long time. How long did you stink?
III.
INT. ??? - ???
As a child, you learned that dust is made from skin cells. They flake off your body with each movement, each particle of you decaying with a sincere deathly slowness. You wonder if you still lost dead skin, after you turned—if you do, you wonder how that biological paradox makes sense for you; if you don’t, you wonder how you haven’t accumulated over time, layers upon layers of skin wrapping around your inner dermis until you’re weighed down by your own throbbing flesh.
Dust has begun to gather. You wonder if you should clean it up. Grab a dustpan you saw from the closet on the lower floor and put it to good use. You’re often stepping on bits of crumbs and fleshy bits, sticking to the bottom of your soles like caramel. You’re finding clumps of tangled hair beneath your pillow as you drool on a bed too big, sheets bunched and thrown and never made. You masturbate daily with the blood still on your fingers, eyes rolling up to pictures of Tom Brady and Laker games above the headboard. You’re stumbling from room to room, belly pudging from overfeeding, throat swelled with constant blood pulps and blood clots that you can’t bother to shake from your jaw. Nails and toes unclipped, bits of dirt and brown blood drying just beneath. And you know you can’t clean up. You can’t bother with paper towels and toilet paper and dish rags, can’t bother to even pick at the reddened clumps jammed between your canine teeth.
You just can’t care.
INT. HERE - NOW
It becomes apparent to you that you are trapped. You are wasting away in a tupperware container of endless food that has met its expiration, with red paste guzzling into a brown that sinks into the floorboards and clogs the air with the scent. You’ve begun to commune with yourself because you no longer have the night to comfort you, the ability to drone on and complain diminishing with how often the hours stretch long.
You think back to your kin before and after you, those creatures of the night that prowl about. How long they must have spent within catacombs and alleyways, feasting on the souls that would make their way into their abodes, an eternity of endless supply with winding mazes and corridors that they even forget they left waste at all. How it must feel, you wonder, to not be trapped in your own filth, to waste away in the aftermath of your desserts. To not have to see the bodies that you have begun to grieve for, as they nevertheless remain in a form of retribution, and to wish you’d have kept one alive not because you liked them but because you would not feel alone. You wonder how nice it must be to have others, to not be trapped, an infinity of toxins suffocating you as you wake each night from impromptu naps, hoping that there will one day be a car that comes to this little abode and a person who will come, who will free you from this torture, whether it be an invitation to step outside or a stake through the heart.
You sit within your seat of endless bone and meat, crimson viscera tickling at your thighs, hoping that this house crumbles just as the sun rises and sends you back to where the vampires of old wandered those open streets, like the vampire who turned you, and the vampire who turned them. You wonder, wonder, wonder. W onder what if you were destined to be like this, or wonder if this is really the thing you’ve always wanted, and if you were too stupid or naïve to imagine anything more.
One day—you’ve lost count, you can check again, you can check how long you’ve been here but you don’t even have the strength to—you go up to that damn doorway, staring out the black tape you smothered clumsily across the ornate-drawn glass. It would be so easy to peel it away, to let the rays of that dreadful sun inside, to be petrified by its rays and succumb to the sensations of heat that would incinerate you where you stand. You could end this now. Your last vision being that bench on the other side of the road where they found you, where your hell had begun.
But you don’t. You can’t. It’s too good, too swift a demise for one such as you. You’ve done something to deserve this. It would be a mercy but you’re someone who deserves none. Why should you be granted the release of death when you don’t deserve it in the first place?
You go sit back down with your food, junk and leftovers scattered about.
You belong here, you think.
You just fit right in.
INT. HERE - FOREVER
You sit in the living room with the corpse of your first blood, his skin bleached and gray, eyes sunken and atrophied. Flies buzz around the both of you, attracted to both your scents. You wrap your mouth around his neck and try to suck him like a mango.