Spider Dreams: Chapter 14 "Frailty"

ghostfish (60)in #story • 6 years ago (edited)

Two spiders meet each other, one with a large yellow marked abdomen, the other with thin long legs. They crawl across a wall of webbing weaved down a concrete tunnel. Thick silk coats the air hanging like transparent netting. Bugs and moths fly helpless, addicted to the glow. They stick to the ceiling.

“We found the real mother lode here,” one arachnid said to the other.

“Yes, we feast. We feast every night.” The other said. “We feast and procreate, multiply, and dominate. With this food supply and the almighty glow, our children will flourish. I am never leaving these walls.”

“Their insides, bitter juices. With crispy wings.”

The two arachnids continued along their way after cocooning a still moving moth.

Thousands of fat bodied abdomens with eight hairy legs hang through the tunnel. Webs coat cotton blanket concrete making the unnatural, natural.

At home has become a desperate compressed hunger for compensation and dependency. It does not come neatly wrapped in shiny simple pleasures.

She stands in a towel. Skin steaming warm from the waters. Wet hair drapes down along her collarbone. I am aroused. She has howling werewolf eyes.

I turn my gaze out the window. A storm is blowing: dark fluids, bubbles, floating, a heat belt, a loud continuous heart beat, thumping, thumping, and there is a second: quieter, more harmonious. The female has always been the sacred and superior creature by nature in all the submissive giving ways. How the male thrusts his seed across the land attempting to dominate, fighting each other for the fruit at the end of the tunnel. The simple mission of creation: to seek and destroy?

She sits there at the end of the bed looking quaint, delicate, about to break. A tear leaks a salty streak down her left cheek and splashes loud against the hardwood floor.

“You don’t love me any more. Do you?” She asks.

That’s when I see it. A black furry whisker-chinned insect with two long black antennas feeling their way forward in a blind world. It creeps up from her back over the smooth nakedness of her shoulder. I blink. Am I seeing this? I stumble back off my chair. Its feelers reaching towards me. It has sensed me.

“Why do you want to kill me?” It asked. The words were more in my head than audible.

“I don’t.”

“You don’t what? Love me anymore?”

“That’s not want I meant.”

“Yes it is, you want to kill me.” The whiskers on its chin wiggled as it spoke and it pointed a leg at me. “You want to squish me.”

Her tears fell. The floor, now a puddle.

“I had to leave.”

“Don’t go. We need you. I Need you.”

Her large eyes melted sadness into my heart as I stood to face the door.

“I’ll be back later,” I said letting the solid white door close shut gently. Her sobs and tears leaking through the walls.

“You are killing me.” I heard a voice scream down the hall as I approached the front doors.

Daylight.

I went to the river. Somehow the constant thick motion of water soothes me watching the surface of a large body eddy and carry leaves along their path away. Washing away the dead.

The memory of being buried beneath a large pile of leaves. Dry autumn day. A crisp taste of leaf in my mouth and nose. I lay motionless hiding. She was covering me in more and more leaves. I began to laugh and she found me, tickling me. Sunlight cut through barren branches high above. Her beautiful smile. Leaves crunched and she lifted me to the sky. I laugh and giggle.

I sat at the park bench pondering the impermanence of life, the constant changing shoreline. Less than fifty feet away a ceremonial marker remained from two weeks ago dressed in burned out melted candles and dead flowers. A young twenty something male went missing. A week later his body washed up here. It hasn’t been determined if the cause of dead was suicide or accredited to the “Smiley Face Killer.”

I begin to walk, stirring the flock of ducks. They escape into the sky.