Spiders get Around, Benjamin Day [reading e books txt] 📗

hand. “You’ll soon know why.”
“What is your name? So I know who to thank.”
A grim smile tugged at the corner of her thin lips. “Goodbye, Mr. Jones.” He turned and left.

He waited until just after sundown when the shifts changed, and crept through the deserted streets, feeling the tap of the concrete through his hard soles, hoping it was the last time he would lay eyes on this miserable place that had kept him alone and away from home for too long. He arrived at the wall and looked up and down the length of it which strayed away into the war-weary buildings that it encased which stood sadly against the glowing red abyss of the horizon. The easiest thing is a bird, she had said. But he didn’t think of a bird when he sipped that pale blue liquid from the dirty vial. He thought of his favorite creature: a spider. More specifically, it was what was known as a Banana spider in his youthful days among the fevered pines of his homeland.
He had thought that it would take some time, but one second he was standing there, a man looking up at the tall, grimy wall that stood as a silent guardian between him and freedom, and dropping the glass tube from his hand with a distinct tinkling sound onto the patched cement, and then he was viewing life from an entirely different perspective. He knew no time had passed, because he caught, with his eight eyes, the first bounce of the vial and its return to the earth to roll away into the littered gutter.
He wasted no time, and put all eight thin, yellow-spotted legs into action. He had been standing about ten feet from the wall, and now that distance seemed much greater. A fine flaxen thread was spun out and hit the side of the barrier and he was climbing quickly, scrambling along the nearly invisible lifeline that led him away from the torment of his captivity. Things had changed in his mind. He no longer had to take into account all of the overwhelming complex thoughts the human brain spits out every millisecond. Only one thing mattered. Escape. He flew up the sheer barricade with a speed that would have been incomprehensible to his human legs. And then he was up, and over the wall for the first time in a long time, and he was back down into another street that bore little difference from the one he just left, except that there was no one here trying to kill him. As a man, sipping the tart potion, standing in front of the wall looking up, his last lingering thought was, I wonder how long it will last

. As a spider, he did not care about answers to questions like this.

Instead of living out the normal lifespan of a spider, he lived out the lifespan of a bewitched man. The curse, set upon him by a woman that some claimed to be a bride of Satan, was quickly coming to feel like something more. She had known him to be an enemy of their people, and had worked long into the night crafting an eternal punishment for what she felt to be the worst kind of man. She had expected him to choose a bird, knowing full well about the neighboring troops’ penchant for shooting at stray pigeons flying over the high wall. She thought that even if he hadn’t been shot, the life of a pigeon was usually unpleasant and dull and would be a fitting penalty for a man of his type. She did not know for certain that this would happen, though, only hoped for it. Among all her powers there was nothing that allowed her to determine fate.
Jones did not for a second view it as a blight, but rejoiced in the blessing that had been bestowed upon him. Had he continued as a man he would have died, likely sooner rather than later, in his profession. As a normal spider, without the reflective instincts of a man, he would have been lucky to last two years. But now he had made it all the way across the sea, hiding among the swaying cargo hold of a merchant vessel, stowed away among crates and crouching under piles of rotting fruit and coiled ropes, and disembarked and made his way slowly back to his home, some undying, inexplicable call guiding him back to the land of his birth.
Most of his human sensibilities had vanished with the transformation. There was no more fear, no more sorrow, no hate or envy. There was still joy, and love. The joy of living truly among the branches of the tree of life, without the usual human contempt for the way the world spins. The love of finally fitting in the circle without forcing a remainder.
In a soft stretch of woods near the town that he had been raised in, he made a new home. And if anyone ever came looking for him, either to hire or to eliminate, whether anyone he had ever known missed him, if his family spent long, lonely nights around the fireplace wondering what had ever happened to him, he never knew, and never cared to. And though he never again knew the love of a woman, or the sweet fire of a finely aged single-malt, or the smell of an autumn breeze among the pungently scented pine needles at dusk, he couldn’t remember that he didn’t know, so he missed none of this.
He spent the rest of his endless numbered days stalking up trunks and under palmetto bushes, his keen arachnid instincts sharpened further by his years of warfare as a man. He was the finest hunter that section of woods had seen for some time, and he was never hungry again. And he drew beautiful golden silk masterpieces and hung them between the shifting branches where they shimmered in the wind and the morning dew. And in some basic, primal way, he was happy.

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Text: Benjamin Day
Publication Date: 07-19-2012

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