Silk

“What?” Niki said, but then she remembered the brochure, the miniature temples pieced together from broken soft drink bottles and scrap metal, got the joke and laughed.

“Maybe you know some kinda a blessing for doomed musicians and bands going nowhere at the speed of light,” Daria Parker said, and then someone was asking her for a steamed hazelnut soy milk and she rolled her eyes when the guy turned his back.

“One vegan pussy drink, coming up,” she whispered to Niki and headed for the cooler.

Niki drank the last lukewarm sip of her Cubano, stared down at the few stray espresso grounds at the bottom of her cup. The feeling that things had slipped out of her hands, that she was no longer ru

She’d gotten awfully good at ru

Niki left the money for her drink and a tip on the bar and found an empty booth. She set her bag on the seat next to her and took out the dog-eared copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, scrunched herself into the corner, and this time she made it through four pages before she dozed off. When Daria woke her, gently shook her shoulder and whispered her name, the coffeehouse was empty and there was blue-gray dawn outside the steamfogged windows.

CHAPTER THREE

1.

S pyder stood out of sight, almost invisible in the dust-scented shadows, and watched Daria Parker, watched her as she gazed in at something in the window display. She knew Daria well enough that they spoke, nodded, exchanged smiles whenever Daria came in to buy hair color or used records or just to prowl around the shop. And, of course, she’d seen her on stage at Dr. Jekyll’s, had sat and listened to her words and the steady hammer of her bass like a heart trapped inside the black-box speakers. When the streetlights came on, Daria looked over her shoulder, and Spyder knew that she’d seen the cop car, knew she was leaving before she even turned away.

“What do you think she was looking at?” Byron said, and Spyder ignored him. He was still sitting on the wobbly-legged stool behind the register, chain-smoking cloves in the dark. Two hours ago, he’d stuck a New Order cassette in the tape deck and now “Bizarre Love Triangle” was coming around for the third or fourth time.

Daria walked away with her head down, guitar case swinging in her hand like a portable monolith, and the cops followed, cruising slowly past Weird Trappings.

“If you don’t play something else,” Spyder said, “I’m go

“Like what, Spyder?” and without looking up, without having to see, she knew the sour, impatient expression on Byron’s face, the way his eyes narrowed and his lower lip pouted out like a wasp sting.

“Anything else,” she said. She couldn’t see Daria anymore, and the police had gone, too; the cars out there now could be anyone. Spyder turned around, and the big cardboard box was still sitting unopened on the floor, waiting right where she’d left it, only a few moments ago. The streetlights bled through the glass storefront, light pared, ski

Byron was rummaging through the cassettes she kept beneath the cash register, making as much noise as he could; big, pissy Byron racket just for her. Spyder sat down beside the box, drew her razor-toothed carton cutter expertly, schrunk, over and through the shiny membrane of packing tape. Inside, wrapped safe within polyurethane, were dozens of rubber snakes and lizards. Gently, she pierced the topmost bag, then used both hands to rip it open wide, and the rich smell of new car vinyl gushed up from the breach.

A plastic clatter across the room, and Byron cursed.

Spyder reached inside, slipped her left hand smoothly between newly slashed lips, and the air seemed much cooler, heavier, down there; she pulled something big out through the slit, molded scales and beady black eyes and a forked red tongue tasting the air.

Byron had put in her Best of the Doors tape, and Jim Morrison crooned “Spanish Caravan” through the cheesy little off-brand speakers rigged up on the walls, one each in the four cobwebby corners of the shop. He knew she knew that he hated the Doors; he was just being snitty, pushing at buttons, pulling chains, seeing how much more she’d let him get away with. Byron was leaning over the counter, looking at her.

“God, that’s ugly,” he said. “What is it supposed to be? Some kind of alligator?”

“No,” she replied. And Spyder read the shiny, gold paper tag to herself, gold and black tied around its neck with an elastic string. The African desert monitor, it said, Varanus griseus. She said the Latin aloud, and the syllables felt delicious on her tongue, like an incantation or eldritch password.

“What?” Byron asked, leaning out a little farther. “What did you say?”

Spyder set the monitor aside, hauled an identical twin from the box, one more and she had triplets. She tossed their empty bag away, deflated, transparent afterbirth, tore into the one underneath and found fifteen perfect red-eyed geckos. Digging deeper, she unearthed green iguanas with whiplash tails, a handful of coral snakes like deadly candy-striped canes and a single six-foot Indian cobra, coiled snug inside its own wicker basket. Spyder stuffed the empty bags back into the box, tossed it in the general direction of the stockroom curtain.

“God, I hate this song,” Byron said, almost a whisper, just loud enough for her to hear.

And she wheeled on him, no warning, threw one of the geckos hard, and it bounced cleanly off the side of his head.

“Ow!” Byron clutched at his ear like he was really hurt. “Christ, Spyder! Be a goddamned bitch, why don’t you!”

“Do some work, buy something, or go home,” she said.

“Jesus, Spyder. What the fuck’s your damage?” and he smoothed at his hair by the faint reflection in the glass countertop, his face dimly superimposed on an assortment of bondage gear and bongs and clunky silver jewelry. “Did you fuckin’ forget to take your Prozac again this morning or what?”

Byron Langly, pushing, poking, a mean little boy, always surprised when the animal in the cage finally bites his fingers. Spyder closed her eyes, prayed to herself that this time he would back off.

“I mean it, Byron,” and her voice was still calm, but she could hear the brittle edge that hadn’t been there a minute before. “Go breathe someone else’s air.”

A mean and thickheaded child, no regard for signs hung in plain view, the signs posted for his own protection.

Byron took a deep drag on his cigarette, let the smoke ooze like lazy ectoplasm from his nostrils. His tweezed and painstakingly penciled eyebrows raised slightly, and he cocked his head the smallest bit to one side, twirled one finger absently into his black hair.

Pushing.

“I’m not kidding,” and she was slipping past brittle fast, slipping past the carefully constructed walls and brick-by-brick control, the masonry box she kept her mind in. A little more and things might start to spill out, slosh ugly and acid over the top or leak hissing between the cracks.

And he knew that.

Byron crushed his cigarette out in the big ceramic ashtray on the counter, the ghost of a smile wrinkling his red, rouged lips.

“I’m sorry,” he said, purled in his silkiest honey-voice, “I shouldn’t have said that, Spyder.”

“Please, Byron. Just go home now,” and it shouldn’t have been so easy for him to get to her like that; Spyder braced her hands flat against the floor, the smooth, cold floor, and tried to remember if maybe she had forgotten her meds that morning.