On the shelf, near Pig, the meat scissors lay waiting. The sewing kit still bulged in his pocket. He would make her proud. He would make a fucking Piglet, and Mother would come back to tell him what a good job he’d done, even without reading instructions, or looking at pictures. How hard could it be to make a fucking Pig?
• • •
The spider was awake again and watching the new show intently; it’d never seen this one.
The scissors slipped from Morgan’s hand and he cursed loudly, bending down to pick them up from the floor, his glasses falling right off his nose this time. He didn’t bother picking them up. The cutting was more important right now. Morgan sank the scissors back into his brother’s chest.
Johnson gagged on pig biscuits and his own blood, gurgling it like mouthwash and spitting it out in mottled clots that flecked his face. He didn’t mind. It was okay, because Morgan would soon be done. Then, Johnson thought, I’ll finally be with Mom again. And we’ll go somewhere Morgan will never find us... someplace where there’s no... fucking... pigs...
Morgan continued to carve long after his brother’s eyes had glazed over. He never noticed that the coughing, gagging, and retching had stopped. He was too busy shaping Piglet from his brother’s cooling flesh.
He knew once he was done, Mother would come back, would walk down the basement stairs and be pleased at the fine Piglet Morgan had made.
This time it didn’t matter that Morgan wasn’t using Pig’s instruction book. He couldn’t help Pig with the vials and bottles, because he couldn’t read the instructions, but this was different. Mother never used a book to make things, so why should Morgan have to? The book was for Pig ‘cause Pig was stupid.
Pig was crying harder than ever now on the shelf. He tried to roll over and curl up into a ball, but his stuffing and stitching wouldn’t allow it. So he just imagined that he was curled up, like he’d had to imagine everything else. He was vaguely aware that Johnson was dead, and this might have been why he was crying, he wasn’t sure. Pig wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He just wanted to die.
The spider decided to get a closer look at the show, and moved from Pig’s head, down his face, disappearing from Pig’s view as he dropped to the floor from the edge of the shelf.
Dropping the crimson scissors to the ground, Morgan lifted the roughly pig-shaped chunk of flesh and innards from his brother’s corpse, trying to make sure nothing slopped out of his hands.
He moved over to the work table and set Piglet down on the bench. He reached for the leather that hung on one of the hooks and fished the sewing kit out of his pocket. Morgan began sewing.
By the time he’d finished, the spider had made its way up the metal table and, after pausing only briefly to check out Johnson’s mouth, nose, and ears, carefully navigated Johnson’s cold, bloody chest.
Morgan, having run the final stitch through the leather, bit off the thread and tied it. He held his creation up to the still-swinging light bulb overhead... and grinned.
“Mother will love this,” he said to Johnson, forgetting that he was dead. “This is the best one yet. And to think that it’s my first! And with no help from Mom or Pig or anyone!”
Morgan gently set Piglet down on the workbench and turned around, untying the rope that held his brother’s hands to the table. He crossed them over the gaping wound, chuckling softly to himself. Pig was in no mood for laughing, though. Pig was in the mood for dying. His heart ached and his mind was crumbling. He wished he could take back everything he’d said to Johnson—everything he’d ever said to Johnson. But even Pig knew that wasn’t possible.
Morgan shot a glance over at Pig where he still sat with nails in his eyes and spider webs covering most of his body.
“See, Pig? No one needed you. Mom didn’t need you. I didn’t need you.” He looked down at his dead brother’s pallid, blood-streaked face and whispered, “Even Johnson didn’t need you.”
Morgan picked up Piglet from behind him on the bench and opened one of Johnson’s hands, placing his creation gently inside, wrapping the bloodless digits around it.
Piglet tried to move around a little inside the cold grasp, but found that he couldn’t. He tried to say something to Morgan, told him to position him differently, at least, for comfort, but nothing came out.
Morgan walked over to where Pig sat on his shelf, and removed the nails from his eyes—first the left, then the right; Morgan was sure it mattered about the order. The order had to be right or it wouldn’t work. He was positive he’d read that somewhere.
He walked back to the table and inserted them into Piglet’s eyes in the same order—left, then right. Piglet braced himself for the pain, but there wasn’t any—just a numbing feeling of hopelessness, of being betrayed, of finding out your mother (your wife) never really loved you, and is never coming home...
Piglet listened hard for the voice of Pig. But Pig seemed to be gone. He was sure he’d have heard him chuckling by now if he were still around. Piglet wondered where he’d gone. He thought he might miss Pig, but wasn’t sure. He wasn’t really sure about anything.
Piglet settled in as best he could, and decided to just wait and see what happened.
Morgan picked up the meat scissors and sat down in the chair next to the table. He glanced at Piglet where he lay, all cozy and warm, snuggled up in his brother’s hand. Morgan smiled—a warm, sweet smile that made Piglet happy, even though he wasn’t very comfortable. He hadn’t seen Morgan smile like that in a long, long time.
Then Morgan, still smiling that sweet smile, jabbed the meat scissors into his own throat. Blood splashed into his lap, and tears sprung from his eyes.
Piglet screamed.
Morgan’s hand dropped from the scissors and hung limply at his side. His head drooped forward and another gush of blood spouted from his neck. Then his body went limp and he slouched in the chair, waiting for Mother to come home.
• • •
Dr. Wagner stopped reading my own words back to me, and I glanced up surreptitiously, careful not to let the old man know he was being watched.
I did this, I did that; whatever. Fuck off, doc. Everything he says just reminds me how much I hate doctors.
And there behind him is his fucking web. He pretends not to see it, but he continues to spin it.
Pig on the desk. You guessed it—fucking Pig. My father in stitched-up leather. To the doc here, it’s classic Oedipus syndrome. But in my version of the story, Morgan is Oedipus and Pig is King Laertes. I’m just an observer. A fly on the proverbial wall. And we all know what spiders do to flies. My family might make great tragedy, but we’re not classic.
Then there’s Queen Jocasta—Mother. Capital fucking ‘M,’ alright.
The doc doesn’t get a goddamned bit of it, but I’m not telling him shit. He won’t get my story out of me. It’s all that’s left to define me. He can whip Dad out and put him on his desk as much as he wants, but my lips are vacuum-pack sealed, motherfucker.
And the rest of my family is dead, so where’s he gonna come up with his answers? I’ll draw this little bitch into a corner, scribble his likeness onto the page, cover him with webbing and see how he likes it. Spinner becomes the spinee. ‘Cause that’s what all this is about, after all. Making up lies, telling half-truths, psychologically raping me until I cave in, tell him what he wants to know, making it worth. His. Fucking. While.
Which is all this therapy bullshit is really about, anyway. Making the spider feel less like an insect. Making him feel like he—
“...you listening, Johnson?” doc says, his words cutting into my thoughts.
I just stare at him. Same dead-fish look I give everyone. There’s too much going on inside my head to let anyone see. I know if I fuck with the floodgates, they’ll bust, and that’ll be the end of everything.
Why he goes on and on with the questions, I don’t know. I haven’t opened up to him yet, so what makes him think I’ll start now?
He hovers over me like a blob suspended in
shadow-webs, hung from the corner, feasting on what he perceives me to be. He thinks I’m his. He thinks he can influence me, bring me out of my shell. He thinks I’m a publishable paper not yet squeezed out of the pen in Rorschach blots.
All I want is more color. All I want is red. To draw blood.
To draw the spider’s blood.
So I close my eyes.
And think of home.
• • •
Insurgent.
Piglet.
Filling everything.
Every impulse is checked by every action is
manipulated. Nothing escapes his awareness. He is ASTUTE.
In his dreams, spiders spin gossamer; brothers argue and die within each other, their lives as meaningless as the nails in Piglet’s eyes. They serve no practical purpose yet are intrinsic to his function. They keep things inside...
Besides, today is a new day. Nothing can change that. Time waits for no Piglet.
Not that any of this matters to him.
Piglet is a FEAR FACTORY.
He churns his dreams and memories into something tangible; something that can be chewed, tasted—chunks of psyche that ripple through his workings and become... what he has always been...
• • •
Piglet awoke to the sensation of something crawling across his back.
The spider.
Again.
Piglet reared. He bucked. He didn’t move, stuffing mocking him. Get the fuck OFF me! he squealed. Silence.
The spider sauntered across Piglet’s head and stopped in the middle of his face, right between the nails that jutted from his eyes.
Piglet sighed.
The spider didn’t know Piglet was a fear factory, didn’t know how powerful Piglet was, what he could do with only his tiny stuffed mind. Sometimes Piglet liked to imagine what it would be like if he had a real mind instead of this weird, sloppy stuffing. That might be too much, though. What could possibly stop him, then?
Certainly nothing that he knew of.
Certainly not a fucking spider.
Piglet snorted air through his snout at the spider, but the irritating little bastard didn’t move.
Piglet sighed again. If he’d been able to move his hooves, he’d have put the back of one to his forehead dramatically in exasperation.
Why don’t you fucking LEAVE ME ALONE?
The spider didn’t answer. It plunked itself down, settling in the center of Piglet’s snout.
Fucker, Piglet said, and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the intrusion, trying to fall back into the place where he was feared, where he manufactured the fear.
The fear factory is open for business, Piglet thought, already feeling his thoughts falling in upon themselves; creating, designing... something.
I am ASTUTE. Nothing escapes me.
Within moments of closing his eyes, wisps of finely cut silk showered him, tickling as they landed all over his body.
He may have giggled.
• • •
The spider flung itself off Piglet’s face toward the floor, floating like a bulbous dust mote. Once down, it scuttled to the staircase across the room, making sure to skirt the long-dried blood stain where someone (Morhaim? Manny? Morgan?) had decided to jab meat scissors into his own throat during the last show.
The spider was the consummate voyeur.
It reached the bottom stair and began the slow trek upward. It needed to find a crack, some flaw in the walls of Piglet’s imaginings, some forgotten crevice in the matrix that it could slip through, unseen. The spider climbed; the scene shifted. From the open window above, an illusory breeze blew the single light bulb in small circles high above the metal table in the center of the room.
The window seemed the most logical means of escape, but like every other nook and cranny in the rancid basement, it was sealed tight. Sure, the breeze blew, the sunlight shone through, but the window was effectively closed, shut within Piglet’s mind.
The spider returned its attention to the door. It had tried the door over and over, because it was a door. Surely there would be one moment when—
The spider’s attention snapped back to the window... and it was suddenly brimming with opalescence: flitting images of insects, rotting, truncated body parts, and the cracked, haunted voices from a thousand dead and dying. Crimson droplets of splashed blood mixed with the pulsating, shifting colors on the reflective surface of the window. A montage of pain, suffering, forgotten love, and faithless death that imploded within itself and created something born of its own desiccation and need to be seen, to be heard—felt.
The spider backed under the first stair; watched as the images/thoughts/emotions solidified, and glanced at Piglet where he sat on his shelf, dreaming, producing, manufacturing.
Trapped, the spider settled in for the show. The colors faded, and the basement changed swiftly into something else—some place else.
The silk ribbons in Piglet’s mind turned to ebon veins of razor-blade gossamer, slicing his meaty flesh where they touched. He stopped giggling and began screaming.
The engine of the fear factory solidified and all other thoughts fell away.
There was only Piglet on the shelf, the spider under the stairs, and the sound of a clock ticking—backward.
A new breeze blew in through the open window.
• • •
“Tick! Tock! Tick! Tock! And on his grubby heels he rocked, this one here and this one there, and...”
Pig stopped. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t see what, could only sense it.
On the shelf!, Piglet screamed. The eyes! The fucking EYES, you moron!
Pig shook his head. He scanned the jars, mind churning furiously, his song forgotten, sweat beading on his lip. “Tick!” he whispered.
Fuck, Piglet whimpered.
Row upon row of glass jars, meticulously stacked, stared back at Pig through disembodied eyes. Greens to the right, blues to the left, slate grey in the center.
Brown! Piglet squealed.
Pig ignored the voice in his head. It confused him, and confusion wasn’t something he could afford. “Green with the green,” he whispered, “blue with the blue,” he licked his lips, “such an easy thing to do.”
Fucking brown, Piglet sobbed quietly.
Pig did not turn to the browns. He did not see the one jar, the single out-of-place jar, half-slid from its place on the shelf. He’d been distracted. Too many voices in his head. “Such a simple thing to do,” he whispered, sliding the last of the blues into place with a flourish.
From the top of the stairs the soft snick! of the door coming unlatched. Sudden still-life Pig art, frozen statue of fear.
Welcome to the factory, Piglet sighed.
An itch began behind Piglet’s ear. Maddening. The spider was back, had mustered the nerve to trundle across the pitted floor while Pig tried to work out what was wrong with the glass jars. It dropped again to Piglet’s shoulder to get a better seat for the show. Each journey a strand. Each strand itching like fucking hell.
Piglet lurched. He reared and bucked, trying to concentrate on Pig... and the stairs. He shivered helplessly, sat still as stuffed stone. Tears threatened to roll down his snout but, of course, they did not. Ever.
The spider climbed slowly up again, this time dropping straight from the tip of Piglet’s ear back to the snout of the fear factory: best seat in the house.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. Slow, lumbering steps. Pig turned, backing against the shelves, all hope of spotting the skewed set of baby browns departing with the last vestige of song.
“Such a fucking easy thing to do,” Morgan’s voice floated down the stairs. Each word rolled slowly from the inner pit of the boy’s sneer. Pig knew Morgan was sneering. He always sneered.
Piglet snorted, trying to dislodge the squatting spider, who watched with interest as Morgan appeared from the shadowed stairwell.
“Did you get it right, Pig?” he asked softly. “Did you do it like she said,
slow and careful? Did you sing your fucking stupid song and stack them just right?”
Pig backed into the shelves, felt the one behind his arm shake, and stopped, heart leaping to his throat. The shelf stabilized. Pig’s heartbeat did not.
BROWN! Piglet squealed.
Morgan turned to the shelf, eyeing the space where Piglet quivered in frustration and fear. Morgan smirked, seeing nothing.
Piglet shuddered.
The spider fidgeted.
“Brown, shithead,” Morgan said.
Pig just stared, face red, veins popping from his bald head.
Morgan smiled like a boy pulling the legs off his first fly. “You forgot the brown ones. Why do you always fuck up the brown ones, you retard?”
Pig flinched, sweat coursing down the pale skin of his face (no sun! no outside ever! do you understand, idiot!?), the wrinkles on his forehead like heat waves coming up from tarmac as his face contorted with grim expectation. He knew what came next.
Mother.
“Mooootheeeeer!” Morgan bellowed up the stairs, then returned his gaze to his father. To watch him squirm.
This wasn’t going at all as Piglet had hoped.
Clattering upstairs, a drawer being opened and closed, the shuffling of slippered feet on hardwood floors.
The spider had seen this one before.
The door opened and Mother walked slowly down the stairs. Her voice drifted ahead of her, softly reciting Pig’s song, his failed don’t-fuck-up mantra.
“Green with the green, blue with the blue, such an easy thing to do.” Her voice dropped to a growl as she stepped up behind Morgan. Her right hand dangled at her side, and Piglet could just make out the toothpick logo. She finished with the verse Pig had forgotten. “Brown with the brown, and then we’re through, all the way from brown to blue. Tick! Tock! Tick! Tock!”
Pig was shivering now, his entire body quivered and twitched. He glanced over at the skewed jar of brown eyes that he’d missed, closed his own eyes slowly, and started reciting the chore song to himself, biting his bottom lip, drawing blood, wishing he were somewhere else, wishing he could make Mother see that he loved her, that he only wanted to please.
My Eyes Are Nailed But Still I See Page 3