There is a spider living underneath the staircase of my old and crooked house. She is nameless, voiceless. Distorted from Arachne’s feminine shape, possessing an octet of twisted and spindly limbs, cleaved from either side of her torso, to move her from room to room.  The spider sees with one thousand hungry eyes like little black pearls, all in a row on either side of her face. Her hair is long and black, mouth wide, jaws gaping, smeared red with the dirt and blood.

She is mine, and mine alone.

 
The spider appeared one day, quite like spiders do, in the dry days between summer and fall. I was alone then, as I often was, resigned to my work and research. I had retired to my texts and journals, sequestered from all other form of distraction or company, until I found her. Shuffling first under the floorboards and crawlspaces to find her way in, then into the corners, and hiding from my line of sight. Until I crouched to her, held out a hand and told her, “Stay.”

And so she did.

 
We pass our days in silence. I read at my desk or in my armchair in the downstairs study, and take my tea and meals in the kitchen alone. The walls and floors creak and moan around me, tired and quiet save the sounds of my own breathing. Beneath the stairs my spider sleeps, and I whittle away the time until she wakes and comes to me, hiding under shadows and table legs until the lights are out.

 
The spider must hunt at night, to feed the young growing in her belly. This is our arrangement. I leave her be, to creep out from under the staircase on the slow shiver-crawl of limbs, long and bent. She catches the flies wringing their grubby hands in the corners of my kitchen and on my windowsills, and she swallows the rats that hide in my cupboards. She snatches them up in her long and dirty fingers, bloodied and tangled in the drag of her hair across my floor when she is hunting. The spider takes care of me, in her own quiet way. I need no one else.

 
My spider watches me. Finishing up the dishes, washing in the bathtub after dinner or in bed when I am getting ready to sleep, when she thinks I am not of mind. She makes her way up the stairs, just after the front porch lights come on across the block, hair trailing the steps in the shuffle-sigh against wood and carpet. I say nothing of it. It is in her inquiring nature, craning her neck at the opened doorway to observe me, study me. From my bed I see only eyes and teeth in the dark, and call her to me. I do not fear the spider.

There is only love in her gaze, written in the bent geometry of her body as she sits at the foot of my bed to watch me sleep. Around us the old house only sighs.

 
There are eggs inside her; I can no longer ignore them. Her belly is now full, heavily pregnant with young, the swell of her abdomen soft and gently round. I feel them beneath my palms when I touch her, first covetous, then protecting. They are countless, tiny and imperfect like the hollow gleam in her hundreds of eyes, compacted, compounded. Her young are fatherless; the bastard remains of a life prior to the one now spent under stairs and sofas, in need of a nest to keep them safe.

She will make a beautiful mother.

 
Tonight, as I lay down to sleep, my spider creeps out from her hiding. Her fingers and toes and nails scratch up the stairs and down the hallway to my bedroom. I know she must lay her eggs soon, and the spider is hesitant in a way I have never seen. It fills me with a strange excitement as I watch her from my bed, the way her eyes gleam wetly in the stripes of neighbor’s porch-light coming from the window. Without haste, my spider crawls up my blankets with scratching digits and into my bed. She drapes me in the fall of her hair and her breath like rat’s blood on my face, all limbs and eyes and distorted grace, and watches me. Perched above my head, silent and still, if only for a moment.

 
I bite my lip, dizzy with anticipation when she cranes her neck to face me full-on, fingers holding me into the sheets, embracing me. I take a breath when she drags nailed fingers across my neck, down my chest above my sternum and where my heart beats like a broken bat wing.  She opens my flesh like tearing rice paper until she finds my bones, and if I scream I do not hear it, paralyzed with the pain racing through me like a wild, angry fire.

My eyes are filled with a thousand pearls and my mouth the taste of hair and dirt and iron, and my bones give like twigs when she opens my ribcage to peer inside.

 
The spider deposits her clutch inside of me. She coughs with a retch of blood and insect legs until she brings it up, small and quivering and perfect, to nestle within my sinew and between the bones. Blinking through the fever of pain I can see them all, like beautiful little facsimiles inside of wet marble casings, exactly like their mother. For it I smile in the dark, and cough through the spit and the blood, feeling the weight of the clutch somewhere inside me where I cannot see. I begin to shiver, cold, blood slipping down the sheets beneath me and to the floor. Above me my spider watches, cranes her head, and simply strokes my face with a single wispy finger.

 
I will father her young like this, because my spider is mine and I am hers.

–

©2010 Magen Toole

Magen Toole is an arts student, odd-jobber and fiction writer from Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror, The Battered Suitcase and others. She can be found online at http://magentoole.wordpress.com/

When I was ten-years-old, I dreamt I was a wolf. In my eyes I ran the miles of thicket behind my mother’s house, down the uneven porch steps, through the back gate and into the brush, for years and years. I traveled, down forest paths by dying firefly light and the winding of river beds, along the jagged western cliffs with weathered faces and open mouths. I went to where I could not be found, to crawl inside the bony ribcages of trees and hide under their weeping boughs, until crying so loudly they blocked out the sun above me with their arms. I cried with them.

The moon was my halo, my eyes sharp and teeth like white daggers in its full blush. It held my secrets and my face. I was no longer a child and I would never be a woman, even when my breasts swelled in the following summer and I first felt the flush of adolescence between my thighs. Boys would never look at me like a cheap distraction, with their knobby bodies and hungry hands. My father would never look at me.

As the wolf, sheep and white rabbits lay down with me. They bowed their heads before me as my supper and I knew no fear. The sparrows picked clean the seeds and insects from my fur. Their beaks pulled out the stitches that held my human skin together, sewn in pieces of my mother’s smile, my grandmother’s eyes, and the bruises on my elbows and knees. These things were forgotten, shed like a winter’s coat with the purple outline of my father’s rough palm across my cheek. The forest held me as I slept and made me forget them. As my father had forgotten me, my face and my eyes, when he closed the door to my mother’s house and never returned. 

When I see my father again I’m twenty-four-years-old. I wear heels and a short yellow sundress that looks like summer, and find my father in a phone book, like a ghost or a memory that shouldn’t be. Ghosts shouldn’t have names in phone books, but I follow the trail he leaves behind him to a bar on the edge of town. My father stinks of cigarettes and cheap whiskey and old sweat. He stinks like this bar stinks, looking at me under the flicker of blue neon signage, and smiles, greasy, all teeth. He doesn’t know me anymore.

“You’re a pretty girl,” my father says. His eyes squint when he looks at my hips instead of my face, and he licks the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue. It’s a nervous habit. “I can show you a good time, you know.”

When he touches my arm and asks me to come home with him, I only smile. He doesn’t recognize my mother’s mouth on me. I’m glad.

Home is a trailer down a bumpy road in a dusty red pick-up truck. It is the same truck I was laying in the first time my father was inside of me, in the thicket down the road from my mother’s house. Time doesn’t change him. His trailer is small, tired and beige, filled with cheap wooden furniture and old photographs on bookshelves. There are no pictures of me.

My father takes off his jacket and takes me to the bedroom. He puts his hands on my waist and squeezes the bones under my dress, licking his lips again. He isn’t nervous.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” I ask when he tries to put his hand beneath my skirt. I feel sick, my limbs heavy, thin and useless. I hate him for it.

My father is almost laughing. “Does it matter, baby?” he asks. “I know a lot of girls.”

From across the room I see the swollen white moon in slits of light through the bedroom curtains. I can smell and taste his blood through his skin. He tries to kiss me, which he never did before, and stops when he sees me beginning to change.

My fingers extend, followed by my toes, the bones in my arms and legs lengthening under my skin, which gives in the rip-tatter-pop of fresh stitches. The shaggy gray pelt grows into place as my mouth stretches into a muzzle, my teeth growing and vision sharpening. I drop to all fours, my skeleton contorting to fit the shape of the wolf’s body, ligaments tearing, snapping, realigning, and making me more than what I was. I’m no longer my father’s daughter. I’m something else entirely.

He runs and I give chase, out the front door, down the ramshackle wooden steps and dirt driveway. The clearing around the trailer gives way to a sparse patch of forest, the earth soft and cool beneath my feet. Into the thicket I find him, following the scent of his blood and sweat and fear, sticky-sweet and hot in my snout and on my tongue. He’s pathetic, now as he has ever been, towering above my head and in my dreams in his sickness.

I move between the trees. The moon is my cover, to hide my face and keep my secrets in silhouette on the forest floor. Its light cuts through the brush and swallows us whole. He doesn’t see me coming. When I find him, crouched, panting like a frightened rabbit against a tree trunk, I open my jaw. I snare his throat between my teeth, hearing the sick twist-crunch of bone and sinew as I tear it out. He doesn’t scream. There is no time, only his blood in my mouth and on my fur and the moon above my head.

What my father takes from me dies with him, and for it I’m free.

–

©2009 Magen Toole

 
Magen Toole is a student and odd-jobber from Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror and The Battered Suitcase. She can be found online at http://magentoole.wordpress.com/