Where Are My Spiders?

So I was hoping to post my own story today, but the sad truth is that I haven't finished it yet. I've got a good idea that I'm excited about, but I haven't been able to actually sit down and write it. Here's why.

The last few weeks have been really ... interesting and exciting and kinda stressy. You might already know that I spend a lot of time writing about plants. It's kind of my hobby, and it kind of became my job through a lucky series of events. Anyway, two weeks ago, I got a phone call from a morning show on the local CW affiliate, asking if I wanted to start doing weekly "Gardening Guru" type segments. My first reaction was no. My second was hell no.

My third was yes.

I have zero TV experience—until last week, I'd never even seen a TV studio. And I hate, hate, hate cameras. But the more rational part of my brain said this was a good thing. I thought, It can't possibly hurt to get live TV experience. And the whole idea was a tremendous challenge: I was always the guy who said I NEVER wanted to be on TV. My friends would sit around talking about wanting to be famous, and I was always saying, "No way."

Believe me, my first 1.5 seconds on air were just sheer terror. It's kind of funny, actually. Just before the segment started, when I was standing at the demo table (we were planting papaya from seed), all the cameras in the studio rotated and moved in for the shot. For some reason, this completely unnerved me. The host introduced me and the segment, then turned to me and said, "Nice to have you here, Jon."

But I was frozen. My mind was a complete blank. I was on live TV. The cameras loomed off my left shoulder like predatory, one-eyed aliens. But I knew I had to fill the next second with words. I had to say something. So I reached and came up with the only thing I could think of: "Nice to have you here."

Yep, I parroted the host like a babbling fool.

She looked confused for a split second, but thank goodness she's a professional and just moved on. Anyway, the rest of the segment went off OK, but when I watched it back, I saw a million things I wanted to fix, correct and change.

My second segment was this Tuesday morning. This one was on planting tomatoes. I felt MUCH better after this one. I knew what to expect, I had a plan going in (although there are still lots of things I need to fix). I'm hoping next Tuesday is even easier, and the one after that is easier yet, and someday, live TV will be no big deal. Then I hope to have a need to use my TV skills. :)

And doesn't it figure that right at the same time, other things got really busy. I'm shopping a nonfiction book proposal right now and got a request for a proposal from a leading agent in my market—but she has very specific requirements and I have to basically redo the whole proposal. Then I finally settled on my next fiction project, and of course, I've got the normal full-time workload. So the upshot is that I didn't get my story written, a story I was really excited about, for a prompt I took myself and saved for a month. Drat.

Anyway. I know what the next question is. "Where can we see these clips? Do they really put monkeys on TV?" Indeed, they do.

Revenge, by PM

“The itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout.

Down came the rain, and —” the kids sang.

“Die, spider, die!”

Whack. Whack. Whack.

“Aunt Pammie!” Bella and Nick said.

“I’m sorry, but the only good spider is a dead spider,” Pam said while carefully holding the newspaper with spider guts as far away as possible. “Uhuhuhu-uhuh.” She shuddered.

“Mom said we don’t kill spiders. They eat other bugs.” Nick frowned. Pam could tell he was wondering if, somehow, he was going to get grounded over it.

“That’s insane, Nick,” Pam said.

Bella shook her head. “Don’t be stupid, Nick. That’s not it. Everyone knows if you kill a spider its mother comes back and steals your soul.”

Pam sighed. “That’s even more insane. What is your mother teaching you guys?”

Both kids skipped away, laughing. “The truth, Aunt Pammie, the truth,” Bella shot over her shoulder.

*******

A whisper, a breath, woke Pam. The clock blinked 3:01 a.m. She brushed at a stray hair as it tickled her cheek.

Wrong.

“Shit!” It was a spider.

With a flip of her wrist, Pam sent it onto the covers. She stumbled out of bed, falling as her leg snagged on the covers.

Wrong again.

Twined around her leg, sparkling in the moonlight, was spider silk.

“What the …?”

She hit the floor and beneath her spiders of all shapes and sizes scattered and reformed. Like an undulating furry blanket they covered her.

Oh God oh God oh God.

Choking, she tried wiping the spiders off while ripping at the web on her leg. It wouldn’t come off as she scrabbled up and onto the bed. A line of spiders the size of her face skittered toward her. Each one was covered in iridescent fur and stared with bottomless eyes.

Oh God oh God oh God. They’re after my soul.

She squashed two as she rolled across the bed toward the door. When her bare feet hit the floor there was crunching and something warm and thick oozed between her toes. A faint, high-pitched scream wrapped around the room.

“This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening.”

The screaming went on, grew in pitch as she stumbled to the door. It was coming from the spiders, and Pam slammed her hands over her ears as the screaming grew into something else.

“One of us. One of us,” the spiders chanted.

Oh God oh God. Have to get out. Have to get out!

The door was blocked—covered by webs woven over and over each other. As she shook the white silk, thousands of tiny red-spotted spiders burst out and ran up her arms. Above, stirred by the reverberations from the door, tarantulas dropped from the ceiling.

Pam’s screaming couldn’t block out the spider’s words.

“One of us, one of us. You killed one of us,” they said.

She spun, eyes wide, trembling all over, short of breath.

“Please,” she sobbed. “Please. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Please. Oh, God.”

Don’t take my soul.

Skittering, flittering, chittering, twittering—black furry bodies swarmed. Up and over her eyes, they blinded her. Up and into her mouth, they drowned her.

“One of us. One of us,” they sang.

*******

Pam stared unblinking at the man. “You don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t. You really really can’t. Do you know what’ll happen? I mean really really really happen? They know and they have friends. Family. Lots and lots of them. You wouldn’t know just looking at them but,” Pam laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t know anymore. Is the only good spider a dead one? Or is the only good spider a live spider?”

Movement behind the locked window casement caught her eye. A brown spider with spindly legs wove an intricate pattern on its web.

“SSSSSSsssssssssshhhhhhh.” She tried putting her finger to her lips, but the restraints held fast.

“They’ll hear me. If you listen you can hear them. Can’t you hear them?” She said to the man who shook his head and approached with a half-filled syringe. “Can’t you hear them?”

The needle entered her arm and the world’s edges blurred. The spider winked. Pam smiled.

It hadn’t been her soul they’d been after at all.

The Web of Many Colors, Natasha Fondren

A boy crouched in the shadows of moonlight, his blue eyes glittering.

By the window, a crystal swung from the ceiling. It glistened in moonlight; in twinkled in starlight. When the sun shone bright, it sent rivers of color splashing across the walls. Only in the cloudiest and darkest of nights would the crystal blacken, hanging shiny and still, as dead as the mother of Tommy the spider.

Tommy worked in the corner, swinging the first threads for his web from wall to wall, wall to ceiling, and ceiling to wall. It was an ambitious design for a spider as small as he: it spanned four feet and stretched halfway down the wall.

That's when he heard a rustle and then a sound. Not a snap: nothing so loud as that. It was a sound so small, it was almost a non-sound. It was such a tiny sound for the ripping of limbs. Tommy twirled in the air on his thread, unable to find his feet for footing.

Or, at least, two of them.

The blue-eyed boy giggled, holding up two of the spider's legs to view in the moonlight. The spider scurried up his thread. The boy climbed on his bed, careful to first fold Tommy's legs in a tissue and place them in a small, beat-up box on his dresser. The spider watched the boy's glistening blue eyes until they shut, disappearing into darkness.

Tommy spun his web as the boy slept, working until the radials made a thirteen-pointed star. It was not easy work, but he found he could manage with only six of his limbs. He imagined his long legs calling from the box, begging him to finish, to give reason for their removal and imprisonment.

It was morning before Tommy began to work in circles and spirals around the middle of his web, stretching his long legs from radial to radial. He worked all day; his mother would have been proud. With every trip around his web, his ease with being a six-legged spider grew.

But as evening came, so did the boy with the twinkling blue eyes. Tommy heard him when he stepped below. Tommy spun at the top of his web, certain the boy was too short to reach him.

The boy was not.

He plopped a chair beneath the spider’s web and crawled on top. Tommy felt his one leg stretched as far as it would go. He gripped his web; his leg snapped off. The blue-eyed boy screeched in joy, then plucked another leg.

As the spider, in agony, folded its four remaining legs to its belly, the boy jumped off the chair. He ran to his nightstand and repeated the ritual with Tommy's legs, the tissue, and the box.

Tommy flopped on his silk. He imagined he clambered higher up his cord, but it is not easy to climb when you're not sure which legs you have and which you don't.

The next amputation was quick: the boy giggled gleefully, running around the room with a spider leg between each thumb and forefinger. He jumped on the bed, then turned those blue eyes towards the shivering spider.

Tommy could hardly look at those brilliant blue orbs, so afraid he was. As he clung to his web by thread and two legs, he kept thinking of the first time his mother had taught him to spin a web. If she would've been there, she would've said, "Just two more circles to go, Tommy. Never give up!"

The blue-eyed boy rolled the legs back and forth on his hand, then twirled one in between thumb and forefinger. (His third leg? His sixth leg? Tommy didn't know.) Finally, he smushed the spider’s legs in his palms, until they were nothing, until it was as if they had never been.

Tommy tried to climb a little ways up, but his body was too heavy for his two remaining legs. And so he hung. He dreamt his six lost legs danced in circles around him, demanding Tommy finish the web. The spider waited as the crystal cast colors, then diamonds, then colors, then diamonds.

Only then was his shriveled body light enough for his two legs to carry him. He slowly crawled up his balancing line. It took all night long to make the last two circles around his web.

When morning came, the boy stood below, his hands on his waist, his mouth slightly open. His blue eyes glowed in the purple sunlight of early dawn. He dropped a pile of books on the chair, then climbed up.

Tommy waited for the plucks: he was done with his web, after all. The boy stretched both legs as far as they would go, until Tommy feared his body would be torn in half. The two legs tore off, and his black body spun on his silken thread. He blinked at his tormentor, who now was not looking at him, but at the spider's web.

If the spider had ever been in a museum (he had not), or if he had ever visited the Spider Pavilion in the Natural History Museum (the greatest and grandest collection of webs from spiders spun), he would have known that his web was neither the finest nor the commonest. Tommy's web was museum-quality art, but it was not remarkable amongst masters.

Without the crystal, that is. For now his silk weave glowed with every red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple in the spectrum.

Then the spider, only a shiny black orb, stilled. The blue-eyed boy wrapped the dead spider in a tissue, then placed it in his treasure box.