Silk

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Something else Niki wouldn’t ask about, not now, better to watch the snow, wait and see if perhaps things would explain themselves further along.

  “I didn’t know I wouldn’t be going home tonight,” Spyder said.

  Niki nodded, looked over at Keith and Daria, twined in each other’s arms and legs, Mort alone.

  “Hell’s slumber party,” she said.

  “Yeah,” and Spyder shut her eyes a moment, opened them very slowly, a drawn out, predatory blink.

  And through her weariness, Niki was amazed that she felt this comfortable so close to Spyder, someone she’d never even seen just a few hours earlier. More than an absence of discomfort, the pit-of-her-stomach homesickness all but faded away, the dread gone with it, mostly. She felt something like safe, something like peace. And she thought again about whatever they’d exchanged in the parking lot, whatever she might have imagined they’d exchanged; frightened at the possibility of it having been real, cautioning herself that it might have been nothing at all. Contradiction all around.

  “You must be pretty pissed,” she said, praying her voice wouldn’t break the spell, the calm inside. “Your friends running out on you that way.”

  Spyder closed her eyes again, and Niki marveled at her eyelashes, so black after her white hair, long and delicate. Spyder frowned, eyes still closed.

  “That was just Byron,” she said, and Niki remembered the terrified face behind the wheel of the Toyota, the boy in his velvet frock coat that she’d watched across Dr. Jekyll’s. “He does that kinda shit. It doesn’t mean anything,” so much stress on that last part before she opened her eyes again. “You don’t count on Byron in a fight, that’s all. I guess he just freaked out.”

  “You’re not mad at him?”

  And the frown softened, a little of the tension in her face melting away.

  “When I catch up with him, I’m gonna kick his skinny faggot ass all the way into next week.”

  “Oh,” Niki said, and it was still there, that sense of rightness, something she’d experienced so seldom that it felt like borrowed clothes.

  “But what I really want to know is why Joe Cool over there stuck his neck out for me tonight.”

  Niki glanced at the mattress again, at Keith Barry, one arm slung protectively or possessively around Daria.

  “I think maybe he just likes to fight,” she said.

  “Crazy fucking junky. I thought he hated my guts.”

  And then Niki turned and looked at Spyder’s eyes, eyes like marble the faintest shade of blue, palest steel, that divine wound between them, and Spyder gave her another long animal blink. And then Niki kissed her. Clumsy kiss, too fast and their noses bumping, urgent and too much force, but Spyder did not pull away, opened her mouth and Niki’s tongue slipped between her teeth, explored cheekflesh and teeth and tongue. Spyder laid one hand against Niki’s face, stubby fingers cold from the chill, and Niki opened her eyes, pulled away. She was breathing too hard, too fast, her heart stumbling, missing beats in her chest.

  She’d never kissed a girl before, had kissed no one for what seemed like a very long time. Not since that last morning with Danny; immediate guilt, and Niki pushed his memory away again. Spyder smiled at her, brushed the coarse tips of those fingers across her lips and chin.

  “I’m sorry,” Niki said, feeling the warm rush of blood to her face.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Spyder said. “It’s okay. But I do have a girlfriend already.”

  “I shouldn’t have,” Niki said, and she felt dizzy, the madness and violence of the night and then this, and the snow outside the window playing Caligari tricks with her head. Her exhaustion swimming upstream against the adrenaline flash, gathering itself like the drift piling up on the windowsill. And Spyder still getting in through her nostrils, the leather muskiness and old sweat, stale smoke and something else, sweet and sharp, that might have been Old Spice cologne, her father’s smell.

  She shut her eyes, discovering the retinal burn-in of the window and the storm where she’d expected nothing. And then Spyder was talking, words as soft as the worn tapestry of her smells.

  “Niki, do you remember when they’d announce on the news that there was a twenty or thirty percent chance of snow, just flurries, you know? But you’d be too excited to sleep because maybe there wouldn’t be school the next day? It was nuts, ’cause it never fucking snows on school nights.

  “But you’d stay up all night anyway, all goddamn night, and of course morning would come and there wouldn’t be any snow, and it didn’t matter that you hadn’t slept a wink. You still had to get your ass out from under the covers and go to school anyway. Remember how cheated you felt?”

  “It doesn’t snow in New Orleans,” Niki said. “It just rains a lot.”

  “Oh,” Spyder said. “That makes sense,” and Niki thought, Yeah, Old Spice, the white bottle in her father’s hand, a spot of white shaving cream behind one ear.

  “I think I’m too sleepy to talk anymore, Spyder,” she said. “I’m sorry,” but Spyder didn’t answer, just hugged her closer inside Keith’s skanky sleeping bag. Niki listened to the wind and the pattering sound of the snowfall and later, when she opened her eyes, Spyder was asleep.

  2.

  Spyder doesn’t know she’s fallen asleep, never knows, so there’s never even that small distance from the rage and his voice and the things that move back there in the corners of the cellar, where the lamp can’t reach.

  He raves, opens his rough hand and pours red earth, and she presses her face against moldy army-cot canvas; her mother’s footsteps overhead, heels on the kitchen floorboards, like hopscotch tap dancing, and there’s no comfort at all in the dust that sifts down and settles in her open eyes.

  The angels are crawling on the walls, pus dripping from the tips of their blackbird feathers and raw things hung around their necks, things that used to have skin.

  “Why do you think they haven’t taken me?” her father wants to know, always wants to know that (and she doesn’t know), and his baggy Top Dollar work pants keep falling down, funny, and that

  “Answer me that, Lila! Why won’t they take me?” is really funny and horrible, and it whips back and forth, back and forth, like maybe it wants to tear itself loose from his crotch and come millipede slithering across the dirt floor after her.

  Her mother laughs upstairs, and she can hear television voices, too.

  She wants to scream, scream that she doesn’t know, she doesn’t fucking know, swear she’d tell him if she did, so he could go. But the dust from his hand fills her mouth, spills over the sides, past lips and chin, gets into her ears, her eyes.

  “Goddamn you, Lila,” he says, lips trembling and sweat on his face, glistening slick in the orange light, glistening like the slug trails and shit the angels leave on the cellar walls.

  “You make them keep me here, you make them come and watch and laugh and leave. All fly away to Glory without me.”

  The dust is sliding down her throat, filling her up, making her his choking hourglass.

  “You don’t have the sign,” he says and points, presses his finger so hard against her forehead she thinks it’ll punch on through. “I look at your face, and the sign’s not there, so they can’t take you, Lila. So they won’t take me, either.”

  His dust is the World, the binding world, the soil that binds and holds her like roots and the coils of worms, beetle legs, will hold her to the World forever.

  “You’re a damned and sinful freak, keeping me here, keeping your mother here,” he howls, the man become a storm of flesh and blood, righteous, and his lightning is taking it all apart; the angels titter and clap their fingerless hands for him, hang from the ceiling and drip drip drip.

  The razor blade gleams in the lamplight, kerosene light on stainless steel, and he holds it close to her face, presses a corner of the blade to her forehead and recites the angels’ names. Slices in and draws the razor down longitude and the angels are twisting, shriek and rust engine chatter,
fishhook teeth gnashing, dripping, as he pulls the razor out and begins again, second cut, across latitude.

  The blood runs into her eyes, mixes with the dust and burns like saltwater.

  “There,” he says, cautious satisfaction, waiting for their approval. But the angels have gone, have slipped back into the walls, and he’s still here. She thinks she can hear their wings far away, wind fluttering kites stretched too tightly over balsa-frail skeletons, the way the kids laugh on the bus to school when they see what he’s done to her.

  And he’s still here.

  Niki Ky sits next to her, holds her hand; cold air through the bus window as it bounces over railroad tracks, and Niki points at the gray lead clouds hanging low over the city, tells her that if it snows, maybe they can go home early.

  Her father has crawled away from her cot, sobs in a dark corner, shadow hidden, and blames her, blames the bitch he married and his bitch-freak daughter.

  And Robin walks past her across the cellar, doesn’t stop when Spyder calls her name, Robin and the ten-penny nails like rusted porcupine quills bristling from her skin, her crimson wrists and ankles, and then she’s gone, swallowed by the unforgiving, hungry earth.

  “Is she the one? The one you said you loved?” Niki asks, and Spyder can only nod, too full of dust to speak.

  And then there is perfect and absolute blackness, country midnight, and she thinks, This is new. This wasn’t here before. “Before when?” Niki asks with Robin’s voice, Niki an empty universe away. Spyder reaches out, strokes the tangible, rubbery nowhere and nothing and never that wraps her in kindly amoeba folds. Knows that it has come from her, out of her, excreted like sweat or piss or shit, puke or dark menstrual blood.

  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.

&nbs
p; “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.

  “Yeah, my dad was there right at the start of that war,” he said and began to heat the underside of the spoon with a disposable lighter. Niki had never actually watched anyone shoot up before, tried not to stare, tried not to seem rude by looking away.

  “He was Army, two tours,” and after the powder had turned to a dark and bubbling liquid, he wrapped a green and yellow bungee cord tight around his bicep, thumped hard at his forearm with one index finger while the heroin cooled. “Took a bullet at Nhatrang during the Tet Offensive.”

  “I don’t know where that is,” Niki said, and cringed inside when he took the needle from the case, old-fashioned glass syringe that he had to screw the needle onto.