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By Root 693 0

then sixteen, each a mostly equidistant speck across the massive warehouse floor. In another instant there were hundreds and a moment later the hundreds had become thousands. They were multiplying, growing, and the great big picture was coming into focus, the entire magnificent mural of lava and waterfalls and dragons and birds, and soon the warehouse was too small to contain it and the tiles were crawling up the walls like ivy—like insects—crawling like spiders, but not like her friendly spider, for these were fearsome, biting, dirty things and they were fast, so fast, and when she spun around, they were coming into the office, under the door and over the windowsill, and she begged them to spare her, and now the dripping sound had become a long tone, a violin, and she leaned out the window and gazed again into the completed mural and saw how lovely and malicious it was, with planets and comets and cities of steel and all the living things, trees and lizards, tiny proteins and mitochondria, bears and wolves.

Wolves.

Then as a long slow note was played across a single string, the light was back, like a knife slicing between the hemispheres of her mind.

She was upright. A wolf. She’s a wolf! She might or might not have said it out loud. The IV pulled painfully at the bandage and she arranged herself on top of pillows so she could look around. She was in her bed in Jameson’s home, the room of light and nothing else, fully illuminated and scrubbed clean. Her comfortable queen-size bed had been replaced by the hospital kind, but even besides that it looked different, strange, and she knew right away that the difference was her. The difference was not what she saw but the way she saw it. There was no focal point, no order, no priority attached to any of the items in the room. The bed, the nightstand, the vase, the closet door, her shoes placed neatly beside the bed, the bag hanging from an IV pole, the white box of fireplace matches on the mantel, the blanket over her legs and feet, machines that blipped and blooped, medical machines on wheels arranged in a semicircle about her—they seemed all of similar importance, no one thing more prominent or precious than any other. The light was so bright, it seemed to make everything vibrate and hum and pitch and yaw. The brightness even had sound, a high, piercing frequency like a needle in her ear.

Canada realized now that her so-white room, the spare quarters she had fallen in love with when she arrived, had been an operating room all along.

She didn’t know what day it was, but she rubbed her head and tried to remember what she did know. Right. Her best friend was dead. Her mother was a murderer. The good news was her father might not have been. Also, her last living friend was trying to kill her. She wondered if any of that was true, if all of it was true, if none of it was true. If all of that had been a dream or if this was. The uncertainty was crippling. She wondered about the others with the spider, the ones who had killed themselves. She wondered if this was the same break with reality they had experienced. She knew if it went on too much longer, the confusion and uncertainty and the ringing in her ears, she wouldn’t feel any resistance at all to the allure of suicide.

The room did one full rotation and fell away. She was staring up now at the ceiling. Lying on something cold. The floor. She thought there had been a carpet here once, but now it was hard. Linoleum or tile. White like the rest. She turned her head and tried to find where the floor met the wall and couldn’t. It was one continuous plane of white with no horizon.

Canada tried to swallow, but her dry mouth stopped her. She drifted from thought to thought, question to question, unsure if her thoughts were real, or if they were ideas like dreams, emerging from some mysterious unconscious self in her head.

WhatwilltheydotomewhatdoesmymotherhavetodowiththiswhoarethesepeopledidtheykillDadwhatisthishotliquidtheyarepumpingintomyveinwasallofitatrickisanyofitrealwhydidn’tIseeitwhydotheywanttocutmeopenandyankoutmyspider?