Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [30]
“What’s wrong, Momma?”
“Right now, Lila.”
And she’s turning around, hugging the tattered book, and there’s Mr. Mouser, claws and marmalade belly and dappled paw pads, clinging to the screen door, and it seems very, very bright outside.
“Bad cat,” she scolds, and now her father is sobbing. And he’s laughing, also, and in her stomach something starts to wind itself up tight, like a rubber band. She thinks that maybe she’ll barf up the butter beans. The screen swings open when she pushes it, but Mr. Mouser is still hanging on, looking at her through the tiny wire squares.
“I can see angels,” her father says.
She steps into the late afternoon heat. Closes the door carefully, pulls the cat loose one foot at a time.
“Bad Mouser. Bad, bad cat.”
Lila sits down on the back steps, Dr. Seuss open to page one on her knees and strokes Mr. Mouser until he forgets about wanting inside and begins to purr in his loud, ragged tomcat voice.
Spyder swallowed the last bite of her second sandwich and opened her eyes. There was no globe on the kitchen light and the naked bulb jabbed needles at her. Somewhere, there was a globe, full of spare change, mostly nickels and pennies, left in a corner after the first time she blew the light, years and years ago. The globe was old, maybe as old as the house, frosted glass etched with a ring of grape leaves.
And it should be here to stop the light from hurting my eyes. It should be here to…
Spyder slammed her fist down hard on the table, hard enough to hurt and snip at the voice in her head. The empty Buffalo Rock bottle jumped, fell to the floor. Rolled away into a dark place.
Get up, Spydie. Get up and do something easy, something normal.
/but she smells red, nasty cloying crimson, and gags, thinks that she’s going to puke but/
She stood up too fast and knocked the chair over.
“No.”
/and her voice smells like sour little crab apples and millipedes/
“I’m not going down tonight, I won’t fucking go down tonight.”
Spyder gathered up the supper stuff, the plate with the leftover chunk of Spam, the mayonnaise jar (screwed the lid down so tight it’d be a bitch to open next time), the dirty knife. She dropped the knife in the sink, put the Spam and mayo in the fridge. More careful than careful, paying perfect attention to each necessary step. Twist-tied the bread closed, set it on the countertop.
She fished the the ginger ale bottle out from under the table, ignored the dry scritching beneath the floorboards.
/ignores the red smell/
Spyder put the bottle in the trash, counting her footsteps. Got the noisy carton of crickets off the top of the relic Frigidaire and the styrofoam cup of mealy worms from inside. Carried them back to the sink and set the crickets down.
/but she’s slipping now, for sure, and Dr. Lynxweiler is telling her to relax, ride it out, don’t let it freak you out this once, Spyder, don’t let it take you down/
There was something in an alley, Spyder, he’d said, and On my way home.
Spyder pulled the plastic top off the worms, stirred the sawdust inside with her finger to be sure they were still alive.
/she’s in Alice time, and crimson smells like the sound of starling wings/
She found a dead worm and washed it down the drain. The others seemed healthy enough, just sluggish from the cold.
“It’s all right, Spyder,” she said and closed the mealies, picked up the crickets.
She turned off the light above the table and stood a minute in the darkness, fighting to anchor herself, to nail herself feet and hands and cold spike between her eyes, into this moment, clinging to the sound of the nervous crickets and the growling wind outside.
This is the first night that they waited in the cellar for the bombs to fall, for the trumpets and hurricane buzz of locust wings.
Her mother lights the oil lamp and warm orangeness floods the cellar, eclipsing the pale beam of her father’s flashlight. The cellar smells like wet earth and mushrooms, sulfur from the match. There are rows of old boxes, cardboard and wooden