CW: violence, death/dying, blood/bodily fluids, bodily harm, mental illness.
The image flashes only briefly on the television screen, but that’s all it takes.
In that millisecond before Libby squeezes her eyes shut, the spiders are already at work in her mind, weaving sticky new synaptic bridges. They twist and shape the unlikely connections, binding thoughts of white faces, red noses, and oversized shoes with fear and terror and syrupy blood. The smell of candy floss and peanuts immutably linked with rot. Calliope tones with danger.
She shakes her head to disrupt their work. They scatter into darkened crevices.
• • • •
Libby sits with her friends in the back of the Driver’s Ed class, listening to their whispers of all the worrisome ways that serial killers prey on girls like them: crouching in backseats and under car carriages, feigning flat tires and empty fuel tanks. All the best podcasts corroborate the latest crimes. Pick them apart. Analyze every angle.
The spiders work frantically, hurriedly. Their tiny legs match the girls’ excitement. Half-remembered newspaper headlines link with a friend-of-a-friend’s definitely true tale, deftly constructing a web woven from lack of experience, swirled into strands of suspicion, and dappled with cortisol dewdrops.
That night in bed, her dreams dance unflappably from axon to dendrite to axon, pirouetting on the edge of abstraction before slipping, entangled in the web. The dream takes a turn—hands on ten and two—and a hitchhiker lumbers from the cold graveyard, only to disappear again. A blade-slashed tire bleeds like a throat. Bodies lie buried beneath forestfuls of fog. Every shadow cast across the road’s center line conceals meat-hook hands and children with empty eyes.
Libby wakes in a cold sweat, the blood rushing to her brain. Her fingers grasp at the net that had ensnared her, but it slips invisibly away.
• • • •
The advertisement pops into her inbox, triggered by self-diagnostic queries and a sleepless night’s watch history. Libby blinks at it, trying not to think about how her eyelashes tickle her face like tiny legs. Trying to keep her mind in check. Nearly overnight, it has become a no-man’s-land of tripwires. Triggers to send her heart racing. Traps to freeze her in her tracks.
FREE YOURSELF FROM FEAR! the email message entreats. TURN DOWN THE DIAL ON TERROR!
She doesn’t remember a time without the spiders chattering in her brain, but they weren’t always so strong. She used to be able to brush them aside. To dust their cobwebs from her mind. She used to be able to play “Bloody Mary” and tread sidewalk cracks unflinchingly.
The spiders sit silently, their only movement the swish of their forelegs. Watching through optical nerves.
Libby places the order with her dad’s credit card, knowing the charge will go unnoticed among the online purchases he makes to dull his own discomforts.
She sits by the doorway, awaiting the delivery. The spiders sit with her. They wait.
• • • •
The packaging is graffitied with all the legally required warnings, but Libby’s glances are cursory at best. There’s a bonfire tonight; she wants her head free and unfettered so she can enjoy it like everyone else. Without fears of lurkers or stalkers or monsters. Without dreading the dark.
The item inside has the shape of a tiny bird, with its wings tucked closely against it. It writhes in her palm, and she nearly drops it in disgust. It reminds her of the nursery rhyme about swallowing a fly. Swallowing a spider. Swallowing a bird. Consuming ever-increasing creatures, each solution outweighing the problem.
The spiders in her head pull their web tense, flashing flares of warning in rapid succession: the shout of her father’s outrage. Bird bones caught in her throat. Sharp beaks needling into her stomach. Don’t do it.
Feathery wing-edges slide behind her tongue before she can talk herself out of it.
In the corners of Libby’s mind, the webmakers scatter.
• • • •
The car speeds on into the night. From the passenger seat, in a breath of beating wings, the webs in Libby’s mind are torn apart. Severed strands of silk float aimlessly, connecting emptiness to emptiness, igniting bursts of laughter about nothing at all. About the absurdity of it all. The meaninglessness. The lack of cohesion of fate.
Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything.
Libby’s friend laughs along, right until the moment Libby leans over.
Until she grabs the wheel and pulls it.
Until tires fly from the pavement.
• • • •
Partygoers gather like flies around the wreck. Crawling, flitting, rushing, buzzing.
There’s blood beneath her fingertips. Blood upon her palms. Upon the friend that scrambles, shaking and swearing, from the driver’s seat. But still, Libby cannot stop laughing. The spiders are silent, slaughtered, gone.
She wipes her face and looks up through the spiderweb fractures of the mirror.
Her smile is circus-clown red.
I’d written this story during a time when I’d been doing a lot of study on psychology and mental health. One of the things that stood out to me was how often we try to get rid of anything that makes us feel “bad.” It reminded me of how we treat spiders: They make us so squeamish and uncomfortable that our instinct is to kill them, even though they serve so many positive purposes. The title, of course, refers to the idea that people swallow eight spiders each year in their sleep. (Don’t worry; that one’s definitely a myth!)
