Silk

Her skin itches and goose bumps as big as pencil erasers, and papery crumbling noises from her guts.

Pain that is everywhere and means everything, and she welcomes it with open arms.

At the edge, her edges, at the quivering lips of the concealing, living dark, a single blazing shaft of impossible white, adamantine light singeing the ebon membrane, (“Spyder,” Niki says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that…”) the whiskery little hairs. She smells woodsmoke and ash and burning tires.

And with hands that feel gloved, rubber gloves too small and tight to contain her, she pulls the slit in the starless night closed, and is alone, without Robin or Byron or Walter, without Niki Ky. Without Him.

Sometime before dawn, and the cold and the ache in Spyder’s neck and shoulders woke her; she’d fallen asleep sitting up, hunched over, Niki Ky propped against her. No particular expression on Niki’s sleeping face; peace, maybe, maybe the face of someone who didn’t have nightmares. Not something Spyder would recognize. But no tension in her lips or brows, no frantic REM flutter beneath her eyelids. Spyder watched the snow still falling outside, the drift and swirl, and she wondered if it was true that no two flakes were ever the same.

Didn’t it hurt?, just the memory of a question Niki had asked about her tattoos, but so loud and clear that for a moment Spyder thought maybe she was awake, too, and Spyder’s fingers went to the scar between her eyes, as if that’s what Niki had meant, instead. And the dream rolling back over her, weightless feather crush, the part she hadn’t told Niki, and the truth about the tattoos. Never mind the details, all the business she’d volunteered about ink and the sound of the artist’s silver gun, time and money and aftercare. Fact, but nothing true, and she stared unblinking at the storm.

After she’d come home from Florida, but years before Weird Trappings, before Robin, before Byron and Walter, and the dreams had been so bad she couldn’t sleep at all, not even with the pills; after sundown, she walked the streets and sat alone in all-night diners and empty parks. Talked to herself and bums, the street lunatics, other people too crazy to sleep, and there had been a woman with a rusty red wagon loaded full of rags and Coke cans and newspapers. A madwoman named Mary Ellen, and one night Spyder was sitting alone under a dogwood, crying because she was so tired and too fucking scared to even close her eyes. She’d bought a pack of Remington razor blades at a drugstore and sat beneath the tree, one of the blades out and pressed against her wrist. Felt her pulse through the stainless steel, and just a little more pressure would have been enough, but she was too scared for that, also, and she’d kneaded the scar between her eyes, as if it might be rubbed away like dirt.

“Hey there, you,” and Mary Ellen was sitting on a bench nearby, watching, and she must have been sitting there all along, but had kept very quiet so Spyder wouldn’t notice. “Fuck off, Ellen,” Spyder muttered, “I don’t want to talk to anyone tonight.” But Mary Ellen hadn’t fucked off, had left her bench and come to sit in the grass with Spyder, dragging the squeaky wagon behind her.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I won’t try to stop you. I know what that feels like, when you got some bleeding to do and they stop you and sew you up like a hole in a sock,” and she’d shown Spyder her wrists, then, bony bag-lady wrists and the crisscross of scars there.

“But ain’t nothing wrong with having some company, Lila.”

“Does it hurt?” Spyder asked her, and Mary Ellen had shrugged and nodded her head. “’Course it hurts. Shit, yeah, it hurts, but only for a little while. It’s not so bad after a little while.” And she’d taken something out of the heap in her wagon, handed it to Spyder: an old pickle jar, kosher dill spears, but half the label torn away.

“I got you something,” she said.

“I don’t need a jar,” Spyder said, and Mary Ellen frowned, “No, damn it. Not the jar. Inside the jar.” And Spyder had held the pickle jar up so the closest streetlight shone in through the smudged glass.

“Found her out back of the Woolworth’s, under a box, under a big motherfucking box, and I didn’t mean to listen. I don’t talk to bugs, but she knew your name,” and there, inside the jar, a huge black widow spider, and Spyder’s mouth suddenly so dry, too dry to speak. “She said you might have forgotten her, Lila, said once upon a time she had a hundred black sisters and they saved a princess from a troll or an evil magician…”

“Thank you, Mary Ellen,” Spyder said, and Mary Ellen had stopped talking and smiled. Smiled her brown-toothed smile and hugged herself. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s cool, Lila. Anytime. I find lost stuff all the time.”

And Spyder had gone home, left her razor blades under the dogwood tree with Mary Ellen and walked back up the mountain to Cullom Street with her gift; it didn’t matter that she wasn’t crazy enough to hear the voices Mary Ellen heard. She had her own, and the next day she’d taken the bus across town, carried the widow hidden down in her knapsack, safely sealed in a new and smaller jar with some newspaper crumpled inside. She’d shown the tattooist the drawings she’d worked on for hours, colored pencils on the brown back of a grocery bag. “Just like that,” she’d said, pointing, and the money from her savings, and she’d had all the time it would take.

The salvation ink bleeding beneath her skin, beautiful scar to stand against all the other scars, the one on her face and the scars past counting in her head.

Outside, the wind gusted and the white flakes buffeted the window of Keith’s apartment. Niki Ky made a soft sound in her sleep, like something a word might leave behind, and Spyder held her and watched the snow until she could stop remembering.

3.

In the morning, gray only a few shades lighter than the night, Niki was awakened by the sound of water, the distinctive spatter of boy piss on porcelain. While they’d slept, Spyder had moved closer, had gripped Niki’s right hand so tightly that the fingers had gone stiff and numb. She looked around the room, Daria alone now on the mattress and Mort lying on his side, still snoring. Theo in a cattight ball of strange and mismatched fabrics on the other side of the room, but no sign of Keith. Down the hall, a toilet flushed and then footsteps, and he strode through the doorway, twice as rumpled as the night before. Carnation splotches beneath his hard eyes, rubbing his big hands together.

“Mornin’,” he said. “You looked out the window yet?”

Niki glanced at the snow heaped on the sill, perfect cross section of the drift that had grown as high during the night as gravity would allow.

“No,” she said. “Is it deep?”

“Ass-high to a Watusi Indian chief,” he said and rubbed at those raw eyes.

“What time is it?” Niki asked, and he shrugged, hell-if-I-know-or-care shrug. On the mattress, Daria opened her eyes, grumbled something indecipherable and shut them again, covered her head with the pillow.

Keith yawned loudly, lion yawn, and went to one of the holes punched through the Sheetrock, reached inside and pulled out what looked to Niki like a leather shaving kit. He sat down against the wall, the hole gaping like a toothless mouth above his head, his dirty hair.

“Daria says your folks are from Vietnam,” he said and unzipped the little case. “North or South?”

“Yeah,” Niki answered, and “South. My mother was born in Saigon. My father is from Tayninh.”

“Vi-et-nam,” Keith Barry said, drawing out the word slow, syllable by syllable, his heavy Southern drawl making the name something new. And he took a small baggie of white powder from the case, poured a tiny bit into a tarnished spoon, twist-tied the bag shut again with a rubber band. Mixed a little of his spit with the powder.