She
Chapter 1
Red Light
He had always known there was a spider in his chest. In his heart. He was very young when he first felt the pain. Older but still young, when he felt the eight warm feet, kneading the organ, carefully spinning its web so it covered the heart entirely, nourishing it with the juice of her prey – of anyone who came near it. That was quite an unorthodox prey for her, it seemed; she, naturally, had cannibalistic urges she couldn't always resist. And in defending their heart, she often destroyed it. Steadily, the carrousel continued until there lay more web than flesh in his heart, and more pain than her eight feet could ever comfort.
Young eyes fractured.
Squeezed shut again.
To the darkness, the boy might have been ten. The boy may have had a fully working heart. But he was thirteen, a small thirteen; an age where people don't usually lose their minds. He remembered how lifelessly his grandmother would sit there, watching television, after losing hers. And how he almost wished for her death, to relieve their mutual discomfort. It was a selfish wish, but most wishes were.
Before she did die, she forgot his name first, then him face, then his existence. Guiltily, he would feel frustration as she clung to her memories, begging them to answer her question of her only grandson's name. But now he understood. For now, even his own name was unknown to him. If the mechanical cycle was set on the same path for him, as it was for her, viciously; death was next.
Another fracturing.
A stark, forested landscape. Black trees stood straight and uniformly, yet underneath were twisted and notched; they anchored their expressions, pained with the lesser, powerful wind and bred an unwelcome atmosphere between them. Heart stuttering in apprehension, the young eyes' keeper watched a single hand of red colouring stain the above cloud line, which filled the sky, imprisoning it uneasily as his heart was imprisoned in that moment.
Stare intensifying between them, blanketed only by the darkness produced by his Castro cap and the trees' waiting silence, the boy's bones became less pale than his skin, yet twice as light. He couldn't see the hiding sun, for it didn't lie within a thirty-centimetre distance of his tarred, golden eyes. But he could still feel its tall, commanding, maternal presence.
Another strange wind bent the wood around him, antagonising it, which made the bark sound like it was splintering. This inspired the adrenaline within to appear; it manipulated the strings that commanded his muscles, and he ran. Mostly bloodied now, the veiled sky leaked smoke and sleet, with the dark intentions of keeping the boy incarcerated within the forest. His flaxen hair darkening with the anger inside the perspiration, he continued to move, his chest too frightful to gain height against his sleeping shirt.
His bare feet pushed from their contact with the grass trod beneath them, letting no oxygen escape their lungs, and seemed to steal the green from the roots long buried behind them. He ran hard. The trees moved more, leaned more, followed more, each tall figure passing on its curiosity and frustration to the next, while the runner remained the catalyst. He turned, sharp, then another, then blunted change, change of direction, trying to lose them, trick them, deceive them, but their eyes were ever-present, watching, learning.
The boy's aching, deprived muscles faltered. He fell. He stopped.
Ready for his death; almost wishing for it, like he had for his grandmother.
Desperate breaths beat against his white, stained ankles; his, obvious to him, madness, was all around and choking.
Where was he?
Why was he alone?
He asked two clear questions, knowing of one answer only. For he had always been alone. Alone like his grandmother. Alone like mom. Alone in each of their sufferings. Though he was, physically, undeveloped, his mind was sharp and intuitive – a curse in itself, he came to realise at an early age.
If he could so easily wish for his grandmother's death, and have his wish granted, then where was his own? Where was his mother's? He knew she had wished for her own, too, though she would make him believe it was merely a nightmare, one which he had yet to awaken from. This couldn't have been a nightmare. He hadn't pissed himself - as his mom always worded it; full of worry, full of disgust – and woken up in relative safety.
His heart rubbed its neck, almost to the point of strangulation. He shivered with quick breaths, full and wanting. The trees hand long pushed out and into the dry, aching, moaning earth, suspending themselves against ruthless gravity. It was hard to judge who held more masculinity between the two, almost like their strategies for conquest lay wholly the same. They stared at the boy because he was different than them. And with envy, like the envy he felt back.
He was still clearly afraid, clawing for sanity, and was turned red. A circular, consuming heat covered him. The source of the heat was a light; he appeared as an actor would, on a stage of ghosts and birth, and stood to disguise himself, or discover who had cast it. He followed the beam with his eyes, traced it back to what he knew as the moon; although it usually hung in neutrality, now it stared severely down onto him, like an executioner from behind its black mask.
Invisible, tiny spiders painted gooseflesh onto his arms. They struggled to climb the thin, juvenile hairs, then fell back, sliding from the smooth surface, then were hanged by safety lines. They dangled and spun webs, to join arms to his chest, where their brood mother protected her egg sack. The fast thumping of his heart had accelerated the growth of their birth and they had been born like a deer, who must walk immediately or perish to the wolves.
The red light tainted his body and vision maroon. He searched, begged for his thoughts to obey, line-up uniformly into his squeezed palms. With a pained stretch, nothing scattered as the cell doors of his hands opened. But all the convicts had long escaped or perished from serving their life sentences. And like a prison, that empty, full heart was surrounded, like an illness, by a smothering wall of metal and meat. It had grown toward the moon's eyes, higher; it was grappled to it, and relatively, hadn't moved an inch.
It was shiny, like a silk mirror; it reflected back all the dread of the brood mother and was returned to herself to be reflected again. He hid behind the palms of his hands, the perfect darkness inside more comforting than the flawed darkness outside. That self-inflicted embrace teased him into believing he would live after all, and not die.
The imposition of the wall lightly stroked the boy's hands first. A deception. He held no skill in detecting deception, but much in being a victim of it. He allowed the fence to, coyly, separate the sweat on his hands from the sweat on his face, and they saw each other again. The wall knew every thought he'd ever made and touched them gently.
Now she had gained his trust, the wall pulled him, closer, harder than before, unwanted, but he moved closer still. Closer, sharp grass underfoot, then stopped. His fingers now bare, like the intentions of the monstrous line, he began to cry. Even the last of his hopeful, rational thoughts, the thoughts which might've convinced him he was still sane, had deserted him. And, like a blink, the remnants washed away down his wet cheeks.
The chained meat was so tightly interwoven that it resembled a sheet of red marble. The metal was sharpened at its corner angles, which allowed the flesh to be clung to it. The display of refined savagery continued, from his eyes, along the entire perimeter of the forest – a prison fence. Though who was a prisoner and who was free, was unknown to both sides.
Tearing. Tearing. Tearing of wood. Fall. Tearing of flesh.
The noise cut the stare; between the boy and the moon, there was only red light. One black tree had fallen, as the others watched. Its medicinal leaves scattered without reaching the ground, feeling much like him in that moment. He turned and stepped slow, noiseless feet, even among the silence. Still haunted by the crawling red light, he didn't try any escape from its heat, and incarceration. He stood next to the deceased tree, respectfully quiet, even his heart, like it was a coffin. Like it was her coffin again, the one he'd wished for.
The only answered wish.
A dull, animalistic grunt vibrated the wood then his ears. He stepped back, noisily now. Again. This time pained, like the grunt. Pained. The boy took steps forward this time, closer to the coffin again. It was wide and obstructed the view onto its lateral side, where the noise had been birthed from. The ebony wood was red with the permanent moon. Hands rubbed the sides of his covered thighs, wettening his sleeping shirt with the sweat forming on them. The boy's distance from the coffin seemed to increase, though that was impossible, as his feet took smaller motions toward it. The idea of possible and impossible was jarred here, unclear, like a broken reflection.
His eyes were wide. Staring. Grasping through the red light. Beyond the coffin, clutching close.
As if hiding, there it lay.
Unbathed from the stare of the moon.
A cow. She looked foreign in the darkness, in her natural light. Laying on her right side, she was protected. The boy leaned closer, like the trees, momentarily becoming one of them, momentarily aiding the fugitive. She breathed quick, laboured breaths, her body rising and falling like a judgment in water. She was distressed. He stared again. He was too young. Too small. Too helpless. His closeness, somehow, magnified her fear. Still, he didn't move. He didn't detract his stare. She looked back into his eyes, like she wanted to share the pain with him.
Like she hated him.
She squealed in alarm. He flinched back, tried to release his hand from the tree, tried to unhinge its hold on him. The squealing grew in volume. He wanted to blind his ears, sever them, but the wood grew thin wires. They tightened around his wrists, imprisoning him to it. He tried to rip his hands away, bleeding them. The coffin then lifted into an upright position, leaving him suspended from it like Christ himself. This movement left her unprotected from the moon and its red light. It burned upon contact with her skin, unleashing her fears. Carefully and with precision, a single, wide and long incision was made on her left flank. She squealed, relentless, as her layers of skin were cut away. One of the coffin's scalpel limbs had performed the violent act, brutally, yet with a measured, almost surgical accuracy. She bled into the red light, feeding it.
He screamed for help, but with no sound. The words had left, too, as well as his name. The pain grew with tightening. He squeezed his eyes shut again.
Silence.
Only a hard sealing away of gold was then heard.
Withdrawn.
The coffin had gone. It was alive again, cleansed of its sin, reborn as a tree. The boy looked down at his thin hands and wrists. Nothing.
Unblinded now, the boy's naked eyes met a break in the full shadow, cast upon the cow; it resembled, acutely, the shape of a measuring device. It didn't exist. He knew. Despite his grasp upon reality diminishing. It was only the red light becoming more fatally focused, and more cruelly alive. He leaned closer over the creature, like a spider, over its staring, glass eyes. Desperate, he traced each line of the measured shape with an imaginary pencil and drew, in his imagining a judicial scale. He knew what they were because of the boring courtroom dramas, which would play out, merciless, back-to-back, upon the ward's only small – like they all were – television set. People would argue abut things he was too young to appreciate, and to young to be miserable enough to enjoy.
The moon still hung, blameless, even when tried against a spider, on the judicial scale.
The cow was unmoving. It was as if she'd been cut apart by some unseen entity, and if seen, hidden behind mask. He couldn't see her blood, for the red light made all things appear bloodied. But he knew it was there. And he knew.
He knew she was dead.
