Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [92]
“But you’d stay up all night anyway, all goddamn night, and of course morning would come and there wouldn’t be any snow, and it didn’t matter that you hadn’t slept a wink. You still had to get your ass out from under the covers and go to school anyway. Remember how cheated you felt?”
“It doesn’t snow in New Orleans,” Niki said. “It just rains a lot.”
“Oh,” Spyder said. “That makes sense,” and Niki thought, Yeah, Old Spice, the white bottle in her father’s hand, a spot of white shaving cream behind one ear.
“I think I’m too sleepy to talk anymore, Spyder,” she said. “I’m sorry,” but Spyder didn’t answer, just hugged her closer inside Keith’s skanky sleeping bag. Niki listened to the wind and the pattering sound of the snowfall and later, when she opened her eyes, Spyder was asleep.
2.
Spyder doesn’t know she’s fallen asleep, never knows, so there’s never even that small distance from the rage and his voice and the things that move back there in the corners of the cellar, where the lamp can’t reach.
He raves, opens his rough hand and pours red earth, and she presses her face against moldy army-cot canvas; her mother’s footsteps overhead, heels on the kitchen floorboards, like hopscotch tap dancing, and there’s no comfort at all in the dust that sifts down and settles in her open eyes.
The angels are crawling on the walls, pus dripping from the tips of their blackbird feathers and raw things hung around their necks, things that used to have skin.
“Why do you think they haven’t taken me?” her father wants to know, always wants to know that (and she doesn’t know), and his baggy Top Dollar work pants keep falling down, funny, and that
“Answer me that, Lila! Why won’t they take me?” is really funny and horrible, and it whips back and forth, back and forth, like maybe it wants to tear itself loose from his crotch and come millipede slithering across the dirt floor after her.
Her mother laughs upstairs, and she can hear television voices, too.
She wants to scream, scream that she doesn’t know, she doesn’t fucking know, swear she’d tell him if she did, so he could go. But the dust from his hand fills her mouth, spills over the sides, past lips and chin, gets into her ears, her eyes.
“Goddamn you, Lila,” he says, lips trembling and sweat on his face, glistening slick in the orange light, glistening like the slug trails and shit the angels leave on the cellar walls.
“You make them keep me here, you make them come and watch and laugh and leave. All fly away to Glory without me.”
The dust is sliding down her throat, filling her up, making her his choking hourglass.
“You don’t have the sign,” he says and points, presses his finger so hard against her forehead she thinks it’ll punch on through. “I look at your face, and the sign’s not there, so they can’t take you, Lila. So they won’t take me, either.”
His dust is the World, the binding world, the soil that binds and holds her like roots and the coils of worms, beetle legs, will hold her to the World forever.
“You’re a damned and sinful freak, keeping me here, keeping your mother here,” he howls, the man become a storm of flesh and blood, righteous, and his lightning is taking it all apart; the angels titter and clap their fingerless hands for him, hang from the ceiling and drip drip drip.
The razor blade gleams in the lamplight, kerosene light on stainless steel, and he holds it close to her face, presses a corner of the blade to her forehead and recites the angels’ names. Slices in and draws the razor down
longitude
and the angels are twisting, shriek and rust engine chatter, fishhook teeth gnashing, dripping,
as he pulls the razor out and begins again, second cut, across
latitude.
The blood runs into her eyes, mixes with the dust and burns like saltwater.
“There,” he says, cautious satisfaction, waiting for their