Arachnodactyl

by Danny Knestaut

  “Should I light the candles?” Ikey asked. He pointed up.

  “Hmm?” Cross mumbled. He craned his neck back. His Adam’s apple glowed in the lantern light. “Why? You think you’ve figured out how to strike a match now?”

  The stairs creaked with Rose’s return.

  Ikey leaned toward Cross and whispered, “Why’s it so dark in here?”

  Cross nodded at the lantern. “How much light do you need?”

  “What about Rose?”

  “She doesn’t need any light.”

  Rose ascended with a porcelain tureen clutched before her. Steam swirled up and swished past her as she carried it across the room. Ikey sat up straight in his chair and stared at her hand as she approached the sideboard. In the light, he made out the four delicate rods which radiated from her wrist and ended at her knuckles. The skin dipped slightly between each one. Except for the exaggerated length, it looked like a human hand.

  Once she put the tureen down, Rose dished up a bowl of chicken stew and set it before Cross. She then served him a plate of parsley potatoes and a slice of bread.

  As Rose returned to the sideboard, Ikey folded his fingers together and bowed his head. Silver clinked against porcelain. Ikey looked up. Cross pursed his lips and blew steam from a spoonful of stew.

  After Rose served Ikey, she fixed herself a bowl and sat at the foot of the table and placed her hands in her lap. Ikey waited to see if she ate, if she would lift the veil before her face.

  “How was your first day in Whitby, Ikey?” Rose asked.

  Ikey looked to his stew. A slight blush washed over his cheeks. “Fine.”

  “Rubbish,” Cross said around a mouthful of bread. “This man has had a perfectly miserable day. You should see him, you ought to—”

  Ikey looked over at Cross. He spoke to Rose, but stared at Ikey.

  “He looks like he was dragged out here behind Admiral Daughton’s carriage. He’s been moping about, face so long that it’s a bloody wonder he doesn’t trip over it. Can’t pay the least amount of attention to a damn thing for all the moping. What’s the matter, Ikey? You leave behind a tight little piece of a neighbor’s daughter?”

  Ikey’s face reddened. He stared into his stew as Cross chuckled to himself.

  Rose tsked. “I think what has him so miserable is that he’s stuck here with the likes of you.”

  “What?” Cross asked. He swallowed his mouthful of bread. “I ain’t got nothing to offer on par with some randy little farm girl, for sure, but I ain’t a bad person.” Cross pointed his spoon at Ikey. “What’s not to like here? The lighting?” He twirled his spoon at the ceiling.

  “It’s fine,” Ikey mumbled.

  “He thinks it’s too dark,” Cross said. “It’d be a bloody morgue in here if it weren’t so damned warm.”

  “You can light a lantern, or a candle if you wish,” Rose said. “I don’t want you tripping over anything.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Cross shoveled up another spoonful of stew. “So why don’t we just open the doors and throw back the curtains then?” He shoved his spoon into his mouth.

  “Where is it that you hail from?” Rose asked.

  “The Dales.”

  “Did you leave some family back there?”

  Ikey nodded. “My uncle. And a dad.”

  “You must miss them.”

  Ikey closed his eyes and nodded, then felt stupid for doing so.

  “Not as much as he misses that little farm girl’s—”

  “That’s enough!” Rose announced.

  Cross chuckled and tore off a bite of bread.

  “Do you have a sweetheart back home?”

  Ikey fished in his stew and pulled out a coin of carrot. “No.”

  Rose picked up her spoon and plunked it into her bowl. She lifted it towards her face. Ikey held his breath. As the spoon approached her face, Rose leaned over the table. The veil swung forward and revealed the peak of her chin. It was pale and pointed and hinted at a long, clear jawline.

  Rose passed the spoonful of stew under the veil and into her mouth. Before Ikey could see her chew, Rose sat up straight. The veil fell over her face again and hid everything except her neck.

  Ikey’s mind raced with possibility. What would the point of eating be for her?

  After she swallowed, Rose asked, “What did you do back home? Did you work on machinery? I can’t imagine you found much opportunity for shipbuilding in The Dales.”

  “For the Lord’s sake, Rose,” Cross said. “The guy can’t eat for your nebby questions.”

  Ikey’s grip tightened on his spoon. “Farm machines. My uncle and I fix things. Mechanical things.”

  “I can see why Admiral Daughton would want you on his team.”

  “Oy!” Cross called out. “That’s my team.”

  “And how is your team supposed to know that if you’re never at the hangar?”

  “What business is it of theirs?” Cross asked. “If they need me around to tell them the difference between their peckers and their spanners, then we might as well all pack it in now.”

  “How would you know? Unless Admiral Daughton moves the hangar to Turk’s Head, you wouldn’t recognize your crew if you passed it on the street.”

  Ikey’s heart stuttered in the currents of Cross’s and Rose’s banter. If his mum had spoken to his dad that way…

  “Aye!” Cross cried. “I’d recognize them all right. They’d be the ones what needed a bloody diagram to figure out which goddamned foot to put before the other.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  Cross tossed the bread to his plate. “The sad truth is that it’s no one’s. It’s just the best we’ve got here, and it bloody well isn’t good enough. None of it. Myself included.”

  Cross pushed his chair back. It squealed as it scraped across the floor. As he stood to his terrible height, Ikey gripped a butter knife lying beside his bowl.

  “Are you finished?” Rose asked.

  Cross glared at Ikey’s fist. He looked up at the young man, regarded him a moment. “I’m finished. Ikey, I’ve got some work to do tonight. Stay out of my way.”

  He stomped across the floor. Music boxes sang out with each clomp of his boot. The shimmering voices crescendoed into a cacophony of noise as Cross slammed the scullery door on his way out.

  As the chimes died out, Ikey’s heart climbed down from his throat.

  “You must excuse him,” Rose said. “He’s being perfectly dreadful, I know, but it’s his way. Do not take it personally.”

  Once the last of the chimes petered out, silence welled up around them, loud and overpowering with the absence of a fist punishing a wall, a foot kicked into a chair. Screaming. Crying. For all he could tell, Cross had simply ceased to exist once he slammed the door.

  “He’s mad at me,” Ikey said. His words felt so much larger than intended. “I messed up. In the workshop. He wanted me to find some coils, but I found the arm and…”

  “And?” Rose asked.

  Ikey slurped at his stew. He wasn’t sure where to go with the statement. He wanted to ask about the nature of Rose, but the question sat lodged in the bottom of his belly. The thought of asking embarrassed him, like asking a woman he just met about her bathroom habits.

  Ikey set the spoon aside. “I got distracted. I saw the arm and I forgot everything else because I had never seen anything like it. It was… beautiful.”

  “Cross is clever, when he’s not being a jackass. But believe me, Ikey, what you saw this evening is a version of what passes for dinner around here every night. Cross has a lot riding on this project. It’s putting a strain on him. But that’s no reason for him to behave in such a boorish manner. Honestly, if he spent less time in the pub and more time in the hangar, he wouldn’t have these problems.”

  Ikey took another spoonful of the stew.

  Rose asked what he thought of it.

  “It’s good.”

  “You didn’t mention a mother. Wh
o did the cooking for you, your dad, and your uncle?”

  “Dad cooked.” Ikey looked back to the stew, his gaze weighted with overstatement.

  “I don’t mean to pry, but is your mother deceased?”

  Ikey nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear that. How long ago did she pass?”

  “A couple years.”

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. How dreadful,” Rose said. She extended her arm and her hand settled to the table not much farther than a foot away. Her fingers curled into a slight cup.

  Ikey placed his hands in his lap to prevent himself from sliding a finger into one of the gaps formed by Rose’s fingers. He wanted to hook his finger around hers, squeeze, and feel the material of it under his touch. He wanted to run his fingers along her palm, take her wrist, gently turn it over and feel for the motion and machination in her wrist and arm.

  “It’s all right,” Ikey said, his statement hardly more than a whisper. “They’re in a better place now.”

  “Are you concerned about leaving your father and uncle at home?”

  “No.”

  “They’re in a position to take care of themselves, then, are they?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Still, it’s a brave thing, what you did, to leave them behind when you have no one else in the world. But you must do what you must do. Many young men are leaving the farms. But those not sent to the Continent are leaving for Manchester in search of work, or so I hear.”

  “Where are you from?” Ikey asked. The question leaped from his mouth before he realized he had asked it. He picked up his slice of bread and stuffed it into his mouth before anything else jumped out.

  “I’ve been here my whole life.” Rose returned her hand to her lap, then took a bite of stew.

  Ikey swallowed his bread and returned to the stew. His last question lodged itself in the air, like a stone that needed to be rolled aside before the conversation resumed flowing. He looked at the lantern. Its oily, hunchbacked flame writhed at the end of the wick. He wanted to blow it out, plunge the room back into darkness. It was Cross who had brought the lantern, the light.

  The conversation remained moribund. Ikey watched Rose eat, content to sit in the silence until the awkwardness boiled away like water in a sauce pan.

  Finally, she asked, “Are you finished?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Rose stood and extended a hand toward Ikey. “Pass me your dishes, please.”

  He set his utensils in his bowl, set the bowl on the plate, and handed it to Rose.

  She carried them towards the scullery. The chimes stirred with her passage.

  Ikey stood. “Can I help?” Without awaiting an answer, he moved towards the head of the table and picked up Cross’s dish and bowl.

  Rose stopped at the door. “That’s awful sweet of you.”

  Ikey wished to rush over, toss aside the plate and bowl she held, and swipe the veil aside to see Rose smile. If she smiled. But the warmth in her voice said she did. Her tone. Those words held a small slant like words he might imagine passing through the curve of smiling lips.

  Ikey smiled himself as he followed her out to the scullery.

  Chapter Seven

  Inside the scullery, hardly enough light to see by leaked in from the dining room. Ikey stopped and listened. Water plunged into a tub as his eyes adjusted. From his left, hardly visible patches of Rose’s skin emerged. She took dishes off the drainboard and dunked them into the sink. As she leaned forward, the veil fell forward and revealed the curve of her delicate ear and the upper part of her jaw. Once the dishes rested in the tub, she turned to Ikey, held out her hands, and asked for the rest.

  Ikey stared at the outstretched hands a second. He stepped forward and held the dishes out to her. When she made no move to take them, he lowered them into her palms. Upon contact, she lifted, took the weight from him, and asked him to fetch the rest.

  The experiment suggested that Rose was indeed blind. She moved around in the dark because light didn’t matter. So what was the point of the veil? What did it hide?

  After Rose placed the remaining dishes in the tub, she picked up a bowl and rubbed a rag around and around the concave side, then swiped her fingers around the interior. Once finished, she scrubbed the convex side, dunked it in a pan of rinse water, and placed the bowl on the drainboard. After Rose washed a couple more dishes, uselessness settled over Ikey. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He should have joined Cross, but he didn’t feel compelled. Cross made no secret of his annoyance. Close to Rose was where he wanted to be. He wanted to study her, learn her secrets, divine how she functioned.

  But as the music boxes defied Ikey’s ability to derive function from form, so did Rose. Just as the scroll work on Smith’s arm had been strictly decorative—all form and no function—what was the purpose of the black dress, the veil, the drapes and the dark?

  “Are you in mourning?” Ikey asked, the words out of his mouth before he had finished thinking them.

  “Why do you ask?” Rose set a plate on the drainboard with a clink.

  Ikey flushed and looked into the shadows where the cupboard sat above the sink. It was a daft question. A private question. He had no right to ask. “When my brothers and sister died, Mum covered the mirror with a black shawl. And she wore her mourning dress for a week after each passed.”

  Ikey swallowed and shifted his posture. The weight of the memory surprised him. It had gotten lighter over time, but when he dug it out from where it lay stashed deep inside, the burden of it compacted him, reduced him. His mum drifted around the house, her black skirt rustling a ghost’s whisper. Though she didn’t wear a veil, Ikey wished she had so that he didn’t have to see her swollen, red eyes avoid him.

  “I didn’t lose anyone,” Rose said.

  The admission blew away thoughts of his mum in mourning. He dropped the memory and it thudded to the floor of his brain as his mind raced in a new direction. What other function would explain this form? His brow dropped into heavy furrows.

  He took a deep breath. Ridiculous. He was being ridiculous. He had grown up being told not to pry into the affairs of others or they might pry into his and his family’s. But he was far from home, and he was an adult. He shouldn’t pussy-foot around the issue like a shy boy in knee pants.

  “Why do you wear the veil?” The pit dropped from Ikey’s stomach as he swung out into the silence behind the question.

  Rose’s back straightened, though she continued to face the wall behind the sink. “What do you look like?”

  Ikey rocked back on his heels. “I guess I’m five foot and six inches or so. I have brown hair. My eyes are brown.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I…” Ikey shrugged. The room pressed in. Invisible shadows slithered across the dark walls and rippled over the floor. “I don’t know.”

  Rose leaned back over the sink and plunged her hands into the water. “If I tell you my hair is black and my eyes are blue, does that tell you what I look like?”

  “Are your eyes blue?”

  “Answer my question, please.”

  In his head, Ikey drew a picture of Rose’s face with a long, graceful jaw to match the neck. A thin wedge of a nose. High cheekbones and a high forehead anchored with brilliant blue eyes, the color of which he saw once in an icicle on a clear, brutal winter day.

  “I can imagine,” Ikey said.

  Rose scrubbed at the bottom of a pot. The water sloshed at the sides of the tub.

  “I’ve never seen brown,” Rose said. “Or blue. I’ve been told that black is all I see, but I’m not sure how anyone can know what I see.”

  “It’s what you know,” Ikey said. He nodded to himself.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The black,” Ikey said and swept his hand across the room. “It’s what you know. It’s familiar.” He hel
d his tongue before he spoke of the safety of it, the security.

  Rose gripped the edges of the sink. Her long fingers folded over the side. She looked like she might lift it up, tear it from its moorings. Could she? Ikey tried to imagine how much force Cross’s mechanical arm might generate.

  “How old are you?” Rose asked.

  Ikey told her. It seemed an inadequate answer.

  “You don’t seem to be listening, Ikey. You’re just like Cross. Stop thinking for a moment and listen.”

  Ikey nodded.

  “No one can know what I see, because I see nothing. My world is not black. My world is not any color at all. And no one seems to understand that. Everyone wants to assume my experience is one they can understand, as if my world is equal to their own minus the ability to see. And it is a senseless way.”

  Rose let go of the sink and put her hands back in the tub. “I cannot know what you look like. But I can know you down to your very heart. Frankly, for all the more depth of thought people seem to give, I’m glad to not be one of them—burdened with sight if it means I can never understand anything deeper than the surface of it.”

  Rose yanked the pot up and tipped it over the tub. The water gushed out loud and hurried. The scent of strong soap flowered up, sharp and slick, but it never completely obscured the musty odor of mildew.

  “Deeper,” Ikey whispered with a nod. His throat clenched at the notion of the question working its way down from his mind. He shoved the question past his throat.

  “What’s at the heart of you?”

  Rose placed the pot on the drain board, then tipped the tub into the sink. Again, the wave of soap swirled around them pleasant and clean, yet it highlighted the cedar-like scent of the mildew. Rose left the tub upset in the sink. She plucked the towel from the rod and drew her long hands through the cotton folds. None of the failing light glinted off rings. How had he not noticed that before?

  Rose arranged the towel back over the rod. “Why do you ask? Are you out to prove something?”

  Ikey shook his head. “No… It’s just that I’ve never seen anything like you. Your hands… They’re incredible. Beautiful. I only wanted to know…” His words stumbled from his mouth malformed and hideous; nothing like what he had imagined saying.