I've sat with my legs crossed in the corner of his room at night in the shadow of his door while he slept. I've even watched him sleep from the edge of his bed. All while he lied there still — looking at me uncomfortably, his eyes black as the moonlight glows through the blinds. He yelled out as loud as he could but no one could hear his mumbles.
He had become a little tiny fly caught in a web that was spun up on the corner window of a little red barn in the countryside. He'd have to wait before the spider had come down to free him from his entanglement.
I've watched the insects of my mothers garden snatched by prey, but most of the time — it was never quick. Their suffering was long, unpleasant, and exotic in nature. A brown bear in the pacific northwest doesn't soothe the salmon before she descales it.
I can remember the prickly grass that had poked me like tiny needles, red chiggers crawled from their blades and latched onto my skin upwards in the dozens. They'd dig and bury themselves underneath my skin, they made me itch, a lot. I'd scratch and I'd scratch, and I even scratched some more. Eventually, I had started poking them directly into my arms and legs. Their little tiny lives poked and smeared across the surface of my body.
Gone in an instant.
I never stopped to think if they had loved ones such as us, instead they'd never return home. And those that loved them, waited. They waited a long time, sometimes only seconds. Sometimes days. Maybe sometimes, the rest of their little tiny lives. Which was likely short in their span. But if there never was an end, would it ever taste so sweet?
She had finally crept out of her tunneled web, cautiously. On all eight legs, slowly as she approached the poor fly and even pausing between each couple of steps.
One step at a time, it started with her front right leg.
Then the front left, as her legs moved in a crescendo played by a pianist at the show of their lifetime. Rehearsed, after all she had done this many times before. Or perhaps a puppeteer would have served as a better description. If a web-like string had been attached to each of her legs with a slight tug and a pull there that would heavily influence her spider like movement.
(It literally could not be stated anymore that this was not her first time doing so.)
I could see in slow motion the neurons that passed through her nervous system to her cephalothorax that controlled her little tiny spider legs. Each one finely danced on the web. Her home — a throne of bones and trapped souls. Each one, finely pointed like the tip of a sharp pencil that was chiseled perfectly by the shiny silver serrated sharpener.
She moved like a dancer, each step so silent and carefully choreographed. The wind had a wolf like howl as it tore through the garden, passing slowly through the web, it flowed freely in the air while attached to the stems of the recently bud chrysanthemum. A flower for his funeral, already prepared. How convenient.
She wrapped him ferociously into a beautifully threaded silk ball of web. Her fangs from her chelicerae were thirsty for blood. They could chew and snap his head right off with the bite force of a gator — or at least to him. The fangs clamped down mechanically like a vice grip, crunching its shell. Her legs worked feverishly hand in hand at disassembling the unlucky fly that had been caught in her web.
She devoured it.
She did so in such a disgusting way that was no different than a feral starving pig tearing and oozing at the mouth while a man's rotting leg hung from its hog hole as it dripped from the bone.
First, she snapped apart its little tiny head and fed on its brainless shell.
Second, she dug her front two legs with damn near surgical precision very nearly mirroring a doctor with a scalpel in his hand while he half-heartedly carves at a patient's beating heart like it's some jack-o-lantern.
And lastly, that same fly that had been caught in her web had been turned into pieces that were carelessly scattered around her web — each piece resembling a dog's bloody footprint on a neighbor's new white carpet or the home of a neighbor who hoards bodies buried in his basement.
And then I thought for a simple moment how long its loved ones would wander the earth about their days as they wondered whatever happened to their friend.
Sometimes they wondered for days. Maybe sometimes, they'd wonder for the rest of their lives.
It didn't matter though however long they wondered — he was already on his way to New Orleans.
Until he arrives, he will be shelved for now. Shelved in a large room with a tiny world inside of it. A world that held New Orleans, his life and the lives of others around him. So carelessly fractured over the years as they had been handled and thrown for a spin time and time again. All while the music box played in the background with a dancing glass woman spinning atop.
Yes — there were screams that could not be masked by the music box. Shouts distilled and filtered through the drywall that had separated the rooms. There had been a lot of shelves in this particular room of the home. There were also a lot of windows. Even the windows had been painted a dark green, as black as the inside gap of an evergreen tree. Most of the room could contain a child's laughter and snickering giggles. It was the perfect room for whispers to be shared between siblings on a late night. Or grown women whispering to each other from neighboring cells.
Most of the nights, the whispers were all we've heard. All night long. This too, was a whisper.