Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

Niki laughed beneath the bulgy shirt and switched to Spyder’s right nipple.

“Niki,” Spyder said, “you’re not gonna leave, when you get tired of the sex, or…” and then she didn’t say anything more, wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Niki’s tongue had stopped, and she pulled her head out, didn’t take her hand away from Spyder’s crotch, though. Her hair stuck out all over, static and bedhair, her dark, deep eyes, not hurt or pissed, wide and a little sleepy and no deceit in there that Spyder could see.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” she said and pretended to frown.

And Spyder looked back up at the sun on the wall, an inch or two lower, maybe, like the hand of a clock, sand in glass, nothing left behind as it passed. Except a cooling place if she put her fingers to the wall above it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re not thinking about going anywhere. Everyone always acts like it’s gonna be forever, but nobody ever thinks about forever. We were gonna be together forever, Niki. I mean, me and Robin and Byron and Walter, like a family. Like a tribe…”

“I’m okay, Spyder,” Niki said, and the way she said it, Spyder could almost believe she knew what she was talking about. “We’re gonna be okay, too.”

“I want to tell you some things,” and now Niki’s hand did move away, left Spyder empty and damp between the legs, but she kept talking. “Not yet, but maybe tomorrow. Maybe soon. They’re not good things, but maybe if we both know them…” and then she was too afraid to say any more, and so she just stared at the sun on the wall, slipping down, like the world was slipping down. Falling, like the world was falling.

“Anytime,” Niki said. “Anytime you’re ready, I’ll listen. And I’ll still be here when you’re done.”

“We shouldn’t make promises,” Spyder said. “It’s bad luck, I think.”

The second time Spyder woke up, the sun was down, twilight tuned down almost to night, and she could smell Red Diamond coffee and something cooking. She reached for Niki, but found she was alone in the bed, and the spot on the sheets where Niki had lain curled next to her was cold. Like nothing could be left behind but body heat and the vaguest impression of arms and legs and heads in pillows. Spyder crawled out of bed and pulled on a pair of old Levi’s, one of the buttonholes on the fly busted so her plaid boxers showed underneath.

She found Niki sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, some of Spyder’s tools scattered around her. “Hey, sleeping beauty,” Niki said, and Spyder poked her in the ribs with a big toe. Niki slapped her foot and went back to what she was doing, stripping black rubber insulation from copper telephone wire with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, straightening the strands of wire again.

“I’m pretty sure I can fix this,” she said.

Spyder didn’t comment, went to the stove and lifted the lid on one of the pots.

“I found a bag of pinto beans in the cabinet, and a can of turnip greens,” Niki said, then began twisting the severed ends of the phone line back together. “Too bad we don’t have stuff to make corn bread.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” and Spyder tasted the pintos, added black pepper to the pot; Niki had already begun covering the spliced wire with electrical tape.

“I think so,” she said. “I mean, it may not be the clearest connection in the world, but I think it’ll at least work again.”

“I wasn’t talking about the phone,” Spyder said. “You have to put salt in these, you know?”

Niki stopped and looked at her.

“And some onion wouldn’t have hurt, either. I thought people from New Orleans knew how to cook beans?”

“Yeah, Spyder. Whenever I wasn’t too busy listening to the blues or chasing alligators down the street, I was cooking beans.”

Spyder opened the refrigerator, began digging around behind six-packs of Buffalo Rock and Diet Coke cans, foil-covered leftovers, for the onion she remembered having seen a day or so before, found a little cardboard carton of mealie worms instead; she took it out and set it on the table. “I thought I threw these out,” and she shook the carton, shsssk-shsssk rattle of sawdust and grubs. “I bet they’re all dead by now, anyway,” and she put them back in the fridge.

“Christ, Spyder. Please don’t put dead worms in the refrigerator.”

“I’ll throw them away later,” trying not to think about what the unused, uneaten mealies really meant, what they’d followed from and signified; she found the onion, white onion almost as big as her fist, hiding behind an old carton of buttermilk.

Niki stood up and dusted off her butt, lifted the receiver and held it against her ear. “Wow,” she said, proud voice. “I did it. I fixed the phone.” Spyder shut the fridge and clapped for her, smiled when Niki curtsied.

The receiver back in its cradle and immediately the black telephone rang. “Jesus,” Niki said. “That’s some good fucking timing, huh?” She started to answer it, but “No,” Spyder said. “No, Niki, don’t.”

“Why? I just fixed it. That’s probably someone that’s been trying to call us for days.”

“I don’t care. Just let it ring.”

Niki stared at the phone, strident box of noise on the wall; Spyder carried her onion over to the sink, ran cold water over the papery skin before she began to peel it. After the eleventh ring, the phone was silent.

“Are you gonna answer it next time?” Niki asked, sounding confused, disappointed, and Spyder shrugged, tossed the empty onion skin at the garbage. “Probably,” she said, opened a drawer next to the sink and rummaged through the jumble of utensils and silverware inside until she found the knife she was looking for.

She sliced the onion on the counter, not bothering to get down the cutting board, not caring if she scratched the wood. So many scratches there already. Most of them there since she’d been a child, and she’d never understood why her mother had always been so careful not to add any more.

“I was just trying to help,” Niki said behind her. “You should’ve said something, if you didn’t want me to fix the phone.”

And then it rang again, third slice through the onion, and Spyder almost cut her hand.

“Do you want me to answer it?” Niki asked.

Spyder finished slicing the onion, three more slices, three more rings, rinsed the knife under the tap. She carried a double handful of onion to the stove and added it to the boiling pot of beans. And then she answered the phone, because she knew it was useless not to, just like she’d known precisely when the bedspread was going to tear, which ball bearing she’d be left holding, just like that.

“You don’t have to,” Niki said, but Spyder only stared at her, put the receiver to her own ear, spoke slowly into the mouthpiece. “Hello?” and nothing at first from the other end except traffic sounds, pay phone sounds that made her think of Byron, and she almost hung up.

“Spyder?” Niki whispered, and right after, in her ear, the familiar boy voice, “Spyder? Is that you?”

She pretended not to recognize him, watched the pots on the stovetop, the steam rising from the pintos. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“I know you probably don’t want to hear from me,” he said, Walter’s nervous voice and he was at least half-wrong. Part of her wanted to hear him very badly, wanted to cry and smile and tell him how much she missed him, how she missed them all. Wanted to tell him none of it mattered anymore, not enough to justify the loneliness.

“So why are you calling me,” she said, and there was nothing through the line for a moment except the sound of him breathing, the backdrop of street noise.

“I left, Spyder. I got almost all the way to Chicago and came back,” he said. “I’ve been riding goddamned buses for days, and I have to know what’s happening, Spyder. I think it’s not gonna stop it from happening, or even stop me from going crazy, but I have to know, anyway. I have to know if all that shit Robin and Byron made up still means anything.”