Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

And when Trisha had gone in to check something on the stove, the old woman noticed the web sparkling in the sun, beads of dew like honeysuckle nectar on every strand, and the huge yellow and black garden spider hanging headdown in the center. Wrapping something in silk, spinning the little insect body around and around, hiding it away and only bumps and ridges so she knew it was a grasshopper in there; when she’d turned around again, Lila was watching her, watching her watch the spider, and there’d been blood in the shape of a cross on her forehead.

And Lila had smiled and held one finger to her little-girl lips.

The old woman licked her dry lips and thought about buzzing for the nurse to bring her a paper cup of ice water.

“I don’t want you keeping that old shotgun in the house anymore,” her niece had said, and she hadn’t argued, because she knew she wouldn’t be going back to Cullom Street, because the eyes that had watched her from the kudzu had only laughed at the gun, anyway, laughed at her, bony old woman. Laughed harder when she’d tried to aim at the winterbare tangle of vines, her shaking hands and their eyes she could only see because they were blacker than the dark, because they were places where there was nothing else.

The old woman closed her eyes, listened to her tired heart, and waited for the sun to rise.

Niki and Spyder went home by themselves, Niki driving and Spyder talking for a while and then dozing off. Spyder had put on a Doors tape, had seemed in better spirits than on the trip up, as if the mess back at Dante’s had cheered her up. It had left Niki confused, embarrassed and feeling useless again, eager to get out of the way before things got any worse. Claude had gone home with some friends he’d met at the club, said he’d get a ride back to Birmingham later, and Niki hadn’t seen Daria again after they’d left the stage, had only talked to Theo. Theo like a human teakettle, so pissed she gritted her teeth and spoke through clenched jaws. Niki knew that Keith had taken off, and Theo said it was all his fault, because he was a junky, that Daria had finally kicked him out of the band and it was about goddamn time.

Niki blinked, nodded, too sleepy, reminding herself to get off at the next exit for coffee, lousy convenience-store coffee, but maybe it would keep her awake until they got home. Jim Morrison singing “Riders on the Storm,” and that song always gave her the creeps so she reached over and popped the tape out of the deck. Looked back at the road, the broken yellow-line tease, and she rubbed her eyes. Spyder stirred in her sleep, dream mumbled, and Niki thought about waking her up, making her talk.

Let her sleep. God, she hardly ever just falls asleep without the pills, and Niki’s eyelids fluttered, snapped open and fluttered halfmast again.

And something was in the road, then, something big and dark that seemed to be moving slowly ahead of them, just inches ahead of the Celica’s headlights; something too big to be real, but she snapped awake, full awake in a second and swearing, cut the steering wheel sharp to miss it, and the tires crunched breakdown lane gravel as the car rushed past and over the spot where the thing would have been, if it had been anything but her exhausted eyes, anything but her weary, sleep-hungry mind.

Spyder opened her eyes and squinted at the road in front of them.

“What happened?” and Niki shook her head, “Nothing,” she said. “I was half asleep and thought I saw an animal in the road…”

“What kind of animal?” Spyder asked and pushed the Doors tape back in.

“It was just my imagination,” Niki said, but she was sweating and there were chillbumps under her clothes; suddenly even Jim Morrison’s ghostly rumble seemed better than being awake alone with the cold Alabama night all around her.

“Stay awake for me,” she said. “Talk to me, okay?” and Spyder nodded, sure, reached over and gently kneaded the knotted muscles at the base of Niki’s neck with her strong fingers.

“It might have been a deer,” she said, and Niki said, “Yeah, maybe so,” and kept her eyes open for exit signs.

W ham, wham, wham, and Niki woke up from a soft dream of the French Quarter and a girl telling her fortune with an oversized, dog-eared pack of tarot cards, pretty girl in goth whiteface and eyeliner. And this card, she’d said, this card, well, you know this card. Woke up, groggy, and she rubbed her eyes, realized she was cold and the bedspread was gone, and Spyder was gone, nothing left but the sheets.

Wham. Wham.

The rusty old alarm clock on the floor said a quarter past three, and she closed her eyes again. Sunday afternoon; it had been sometime after dawn when she’d finally dozed off, after the long drive back from Atlanta and then sex, good sex even though she’d really been too sleepy.

Wham.

“Spyder?” she called, but no one answered her. “Is that you, Spyder? Christ, what the hell are you doing in there? Hanging pictures?”

She wanted to go back to sleep, wanted the girl in black lace and fishnets on her slender arms to finish the reading, turn over all her cards, wanted to feel the warm Gulf breeze instead of the clinging cold of the bedroom. Wanted the bedspread back and Spyder with it, Spyder warm around her, warm as any tropical evening.

“Spyder?”

Wham. Wham.

“Shit,” and Niki ran her fingers through her hair, shaggy mop she’d been thinking of cutting off short again, kept meaning to ask Spyder if she cared or not. She kicked the sheets away and slipped out of bed, bare feet on the cold floorboards and she looked around for her socks, none to be seen so she just tiptoed, instead. Out of the bedroom and it was even colder in the foyer, tiptoed across to the living room but still no Spyder. The television was on, the sound turned down all the way, silent MTV nonsense, gangsta rap pantomime; she had to pee.

And there was the missing bedspread, a huge white crocheted thing stretched trampoline tight and hanging in the air in the next room, the old dining room full of Spyder’s books; she stopped and rubbed at her eyes again. She could see where two corners had been nailed directly to the wall, big nails driven into the peeling wallpaper and a third corner stretched over to a crooked shelf and held in place with stacks of World Book encyclopedias. The fourth was out of sight, around the corner, wham, wham, and she knew if she stepped out into the middle of the living room she’d see Spyder in there, hammering it to the other wall. But she didn’t, too curious; Niki knew that whatever Spyder was doing, she’d probably stop the second Niki asked.

“Oh,” Spyder would say, “nothing,” so Niki kept her mouth shut and watched.

An instant later and Spyder stepped into view, wearing nothing but the Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt she’d put on after they’d made love, the shirt she slept in a lot but never washed so it always smelled like sweat and patchouli. Spyder was holding a bowling ball, a black bowling ball with red swirls in it, so it sort of looked like she was holding a strange little gas planet, ebony and crimson Neptune; she held it out over the center of the bedspread, set it carefully in the middle. The whole thing sagged with the weight of the bowling ball, sagged in the center until it was only about a foot off the floor, but it didn’t pull loose from the walls; Spyder ducked underneath, then came out the other side and she stacked more encyclopedias to hold up the corner that wasn’t nailed. She didn’t notice Niki, standing alone in the TV glare.

Spyder disappeared, toolbox sounds, and when Niki could see her again, she had a fat black marker in her left hand, a yardstick in her right; she leaned over the bedspread, measured distance, colored careful dots, measured, black on the white cotton here and there, beginning near the edge and working her way in, toward the sucking weight of the bowling ball. Thirty, forty, forty-three dots, and she set the yardstick and the marker on the floor, then, gone again and this time she came back with a blue plastic butter tub of ball bearings, different sizes, like steel marbles. She dug around, selected one, as if only that one would do, and placed it on the first black mark she’d drawn. The ball bearing made its own small depression in the bedspread before it started to roll downhill; Niki heard the distinct clack of steel against epoxy as it hit the bowling ball, loud sound in the still, quiet house.