Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [114]
Silk like spun razors, like steel and slicing thread.
Niki gasped, fish gasp, useless attempt to breathe, and released Spyder’s left hand, tangled her fingers in dreads and sidestepped before she smacked Spyder’s forehead into the wall. And then they were both falling, sinking to their knees, Niki’s arms wrapped tightly around Spyder, Spyder sobbing loud and jagged and blood on her face again. What Niki might have seen hanging in the air a second before was gone, had never been there, nothing now but the weak light above the sink and the sounds of the water still gurgling from the tap and Spyder sobbing like a broken child.
Niki struggled to fill her lungs again.
“You’re not fucking chasing me away,” she croaked, finally. “Not like that.”
Something settled lightly on her neck, weightless presence and nettle sting, and Niki absently brushed it away, fought for another precious mouthful of oxygen and the stink of piss and toilet deodorizers.
“You’re going to tell me, and then I’m going to understand.”
Through her tears, Spyder said only one thing, over and over again, a name, and it wasn’t Niki’s.
Heaven was a single long room, a cavernous rectangle of naked stone walls on three sides and the fourth painted with a mural of blue sky and cotton-white clouds, hardwood floor and the rafters overhead. The bar at one end and the stage way off at the other, two or three times as big as the stage at Dr. Jekyll’s; Spyder and Niki sat with Claude and Theo on rickety bar stools, watching the show over all the heads and waving arms. Spyder couldn’t drink alcohol, because of her medication, and so they both nursed flat Cokes in plastic cups while Theo and Claude drank cough-syrup colored mixtures of cranberry juice and vodka.
Niki’s head still hurt and Spyder had an ugly goose-egg bump on her forehead, a little cut that had bled like something serious; they could both have concussions, she kept thinking, or worse. Niki told Claude she’d slipped on a wet spot on the bathroom floor and when Spyder tried to catch her, they’d both fallen.
“I didn’t used to be such a klutz,” she said, and Spyder had looked the other way.
“Maybe you could sue,” he’d said, not helpful at all, and Niki shrugged and nodded. “Maybe so,” she’d replied.
Seven Deadlies turned out to be goth, eight white-faced boys and girls in gauzy black, guitars and drums and a cello, creepysoft renditions of “House of the Rising Sun” and a couple of Leonard Cohen songs before they’d drifted on to louder, ragged rock, but everything covers.
“Wake up, dead babies,” Theo sneered in a thrumming quiet space between songs. “It can’t be 1985 for ever.”
TranSister was earsplitting grrrl grunge-metal that trebled the pain in Niki’s head, each song separated from the last only by the grace of the singer’s mike-shouted obscenities and diatribes against punker boys and pro-lifers. Halfway through their set, she unzipped her jeans and pulled out a two-foot rubber dildo and let it hang there between her legs, swinging like an elephant’s trunk while she gyrated to the guitarist’s grind and wail. And all Theo had said between two sips of her red drink was, “These chicks have issues,” and she and Claude had laughed.
3.
Daria stood in the darkness behind the stage, counting seconds and clutching her bass like something blessed, talisman or fetish, teddy bear or lover or crucifix, waiting as TranSister thrashed their way through an encore. Keith was right behind her, smoking, comforting presence despite himself, and Mort, drumming nervously along with the band, his sticks on the black wall.
And none of this seemed as important as it should, she knew, hadn’t since that morning on Cullom Street, the morning they’d taken Spyder home; the urgency, her scalding ambition that permitted precedence to nothing and no one, was slipping away, deserting her when she needed it most. The fire that she’d used to keep them all in line, working and dreaming and creeping steadily toward