Silk

“You are not pure,” he says to her, his eyes shut now, shut tight. “You have to be made pure so that the angels can carry us into Paradise before it’s too late. It’s not your fault, Lila,” he says.

His arms come down slow, the Bible and the jar, and it’s not one thing in the jar, a lot of small black living things, nervous things, and he sets the Bible in his chair. Tells her to go to her cot, and then he counts backwards, big numbers she hasn’t learned yet. And he unzips his pants.

“It’s your mother. She’s a si

He bends over her, and she can see inside the jar now, can see the shiny black spiders and the red on their bellies. The bottom and sides of the jar covered with them, clinging to glass and each other; he hands her the jar, makes her take it in both hands, and now she’s too scared to say no, too scared to scream for her mother who wouldn’t hear her anyway because she’s dead or has run away. And her father puts his hands between her legs.

“When I say, Lila, you open that jar.”

All she can do is shake her head, no, no, she can’t do that, won’t let them out; her grandfather taught her about black widows when he taught her about rattlesnakes and copperheads and poison ivy.

“Don’t shake your head at me, little lady. You’re go

He touches her where she pees, slides two fingers inside her; it hurts, and she can’t help but cry.

“Open the jar, Lila.

“Open the jar.”

And his fingers come out and something else goes in, rips into her and she screams and he says it again, Open the jar. Now, Lila.

The lid isn’t screwed on tight, makes a gritty sound when she turns it, and he drives the pain all the way in before the lid hits the floor, rings like bells and the spiders flow out, tickling legs over her hands, down her arms, onto her father.

“It’s almost over, baby,” her father says, and she closes her eyes and waits for the end of the world.

Nothing Niki could say, nothing for her to do but sit and wait for Spyder to finish. Or maybe the story was finished and Spyder was waiting on her, for a sign, for sympathy or a shred of consolation. Maybe Spyder only thought she’d finished, and she sat for five more minutes, not speaking, face a white and empty canvas, until Niki asked, “You’ve told your doctors all this?” and Spyder’s head snapped around, puppet-string whiplash, and for a moment Niki was sure Spyder was going to hit her.

“Mostly,” she said, instead of violence, the subtle, instant fury on her face, “But what the hell difference does that make? They can’t undo it, they can’t fix things so it never happened. They can’t even make me forget about it, so what’s the fucking point?”

And Niki didn’t have an answer for that, either.

“My mother ran next door and called the cops, and when they finally got here they had to use a crowbar to get into the basement, because he’d put so many fucking locks on the door.”

Soft scrape against the floorboards under them, and Niki’s racing heart, wanting out; a gentle thwump against the wall of the house, and she opened her mouth to ask if Spyder had heard that, too, but Spyder was already talking again, and she made herself wait.

“I fainted or I was in shock or something. I don’t remember that part. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital. They had my mother sedated somewhere, and it was a week before I even knew he was dead, when my Aunt Maggie finally told me. It took him three days to die from all those bites.”

That sound again, thwump, solid basketball thwump against the side of the house, the basement scrub-brush sound right after it, and Niki pretended she hadn’t heard, that there was nothing in the world now except Spyder.

“It’s hard to get a black widow to bite you,” she said. “You almost have to force them, Niki. And most people don’t die, unless they’re allergic or already sick from asthma or a heart condition or something like that. Something to weaken them enough the poison does more than make them wish they were dead. He must have spent days and days down there in the dark, catching all those spiders.”

Thwump, and this time she looked at the wall and glanced back to Niki. “You’re not hearing things,” she said. “Unless we’re both hearing things. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“It’s probably just a dog,” pretend certain, pretend composure, but Niki didn’t look at the kitchen window, “or the wind.”

“The wind,” Spyder whispered and held out her arms, skin and ink, permanent, forever; turned them over to show her naked palms, unstained space but lines there, too, and she knotted her fingers together, lace of fingers, cup of flesh back behind her head, teeth gritted.

“They didn’t bite me, Niki,” almost a growl, throaty grinding up and out, leaking. “They’ve never bitten me.”

“Maybe they protected you, then,” and Niki as surprised as the look on Spyder’s face, the look that said How did you know, Niki? How did you know that?, as surprised and she knew how important it was that she’d said that, even if she was just fumbling in the dark and confusion, needing to say something reassuring, anything right and comforting.

“Like a totem animal.”

The pain from Spyder’s eyes, twisting under her skin so her forehead and eyebrows folded in like old, old mountains, so her lips trembled, and she held them open a moment before she could speak.

“But they won’t stop. They won’t ever stop. They took Robin because they thought they were protecting me. They took Byron,” and Niki didn’t look toward the thing on the table.

“You need someone to help you make them stop, Spyder.”

Thwump and the windows rattled; a coffee cup fell off the sink and shattered on the floor. Spyder covered her ears, hid her face between her knees, muffling what she said.

“Stop playing like you know what’s happening, Niki. You don’t know what’s happening. If I let you stay, they’ll just take you, too.”

“It’s my decision,” and she grabbed Spyder by the shoulders, pushed her back against the cabinet doors. “Look at me, Spyder. Look at me.”

Spyder opened her eyes, stared out through her dreads, through tears and the roil behind the tears.

“It’s my call. If I want to be here. If I want to help.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Spyder growled. “There’s nothing in the whole fucking world you can do, even if I let you try.” She closed her eyes again and began to pound her head against the cabinets, once, twice, the back of her skull against the wood, hitting hard enough that the cabinet door split the third time, and then Niki shook her.

“Stop it, Spyder! Stop it right now, goddamnit! You’re go

Crack like lightning reaching for the ground and touching, splitting sound that wasn’t the cabinet door or Spyder’s skull; hungry light before Niki could shut her eyes, light that had mass and substance, cold as zero, broiling. And she couldn’t let go, couldn’t crawl away and hide in shadows that didn’t exist in the blinding-flash moment before it was over and the kitchen seemed so completely black there might never have been even the glow of a single candle in all the world. Her hands came away from Spyder’s shoulders with a sick and tearing noise, and Niki crawled to the sink, felt for the cold water knob in the dark and held her scalded hands under the tap, tasting ozone and something like dust, tasting her own blood where she’d bitten her tongue.

And there was no sound but the soothing, icy splash of water from the faucet and Spyder sobbing behind her.

“It’s still my call,” Niki said, blinking, wondering if her eyes had burned away to steam, if there was nothing now but empty red sockets in her face.