The Burden of Her Abilities

Just a rough draft of a story I wrote today – never mind the errors and weird stuff.

-Matt Staggs

“The Burden of Her Abilities”

The streets are clotted with luminescent algae, glittering with small drops of water, dew condensing from yesterday’s downpour. Muddy streets run slick with orange-red rivers of run-off dye from textile carts deserted all too quickly in the sulfurous downpour. Here and there a whisper-soft trail cuts through the purple clouds as a gammahawk dragonfly flicker flicks overhead.

Mephul strides with purpose her face sheltered partway and cavelike by her yellow babushka and cloak. Her old liver-spotted hand encloses the child’s little palm like a clutch of old tree branches. Coming to the market. The market.

“We won’t find them there lest we move quickly, child. Never mind the scuttle crabs and pick up the pace.” Mephul hurries; worried someone might recognize the child.

The child downcast eyes and bandages for shoes reluctantly drops the stick she had picked up two quarters back. The end had splintered and cracked with the crabclaw clacks, arthropods lashing out at the uninvited probe. Market way is beginning to get crowded anyway, and the metallic little creatures won’t be there for long. Retiring deep to a black cold place beneath the streets, their home so subtle and welcoming to a child between places, she sighs in her fugue.

Them the marketers and barkers and thieves. Over there the hookers and fishwives. Petty con men, croakers. All of them slipping out from beneath the alcoves, their palms outstretched looking for warning – a burning spatter-hiss of a communiqué: the rain has not yet ceased, seek shelter! Seek shelter! – but all is clear and a poking ray of dying orange sunlight is now rending the clouds. Back to work.

They the woman and the girl weave quicklike between these marketers, avoiding whenever possible the rank orbit of their pleas and come-ons. Lots of work here for a girl, even for you Little Mother. Sample my wares, a trade, perhaps?

The Spider People only trade once a month and even then are likely as not to retire slinking to their caravans with only a brief stop at the market. Mephul in her kitchen, an old calendar illustrated with girls and old war machines. The girl playing on the hard-dirt floor, marbles click-clacking as they rise seemingly unaided into the air, her special gifts all too apparent now as the woman scratches another sepia “X” onto the calendar with an old quill and a purloined bottle of eel-liver ink. Next month the Spider People. This week the Spider People. Today the Spider People come to the market, and she won’t be late with her assignation, lest their sentinels become suspicious.

A broom wick thin man dressed in ragged clothing held together by dirt and sweat blocks their path to the black alleyway where the Spider People hold their court. His trembly, dirty hands are speckled with mold, and Mephul is so disturbed by the canopic infection that surely glues this man in place to this world that she nearly misses the tarnished silver dirk the man pushes into the hidden softness of her rumbling gut.

“The Spiders done up and left Miss, but I’ll take your prize pig.” He needles the dirk back and forth a little left and a little right the pitted tip earning a rivulet of blood beneath Mephul’s old scavenged dress.

“Like as not I’ll be checking myself. And the girl is staying with me – least till we see the Spider People.” Mephul takes a dangerous glint to her eyes. “Best be moving along now. Don’t want more trouble what you already got.”

The starveling thief waivers a bit too much and the knife shakes staccato quick tap tap tap and drops to the filthy orange ground, an orange stream already covering the handle. He reaches a now empty hand to his ear and the fingertips come away tipped with red. He gasps, open and closing his mouth like a fish escaped from a net and onto the pier as Mephul and the girl walk toward the tunnel, quicker now than before.

“Mother, what did you do?” The girl turns her head and strains for a look at the shocked and stuporous thief, dying now on his hands and knees.

“Nothing that concerns you, girl. You’ve an appointment with the Spiders.” Mephul’s hand grips ever tighter over the girl’s as they slip into the tunnel. Quiet and dark here, like being inside a sealed box at the bottom of the ocean. Rotting paper and refuse, cardboard boxes, old cans. Something, a scent, a sense of otherness that clings to the air.

She sees them, thin figures almost completely covered with black and silver cloth. The suggestion of paper-thin bodies and pale-white skin. A half dozen of these lonely wights cluster at their end of the tunnel. Their purple eyes glittery in the half-light cast by phosphorous green lanterns set atop a scattering of cages, some of which are occupied by children who twitch in a narcotic sleep, their arms and legs bound by viscous white webbing.

“Greetings, Mephul. You bring us another child. Blessings to you.” A female voice. Iskitt, a brood mother. The five others perhaps only a third of her offspring, the rest remain at home deep within the earth.

“Yes, she displays Gifts, and will provide much nourishment to your young.” Mephul pushes the girl forward, realizing that she never even gave her the decency of a name. Not that it matters now. The five brood-sons grab the girl, yellow-white threads of webbing seeping from without their robes. She cries out, the spell broken, but only for a moment. “You’re not my mother! Where am I?” Her voice chokes as the tendrils slither deep inside her throat, silencing her for the journey to the Web Cities.

Iskitt drops a handful of silver at Mephul’s sandaled feet and whispers something to her brood. They lift the cages – one of which now contains the child – to their shoulders and slip backwards into the dark. “You, Mephul, are most honored among our Web. Your brood has supplied much rich nourishment for my own blood, and your loyalty has never waivered.”

Mephul is relieved as the Spider People slip quietly into the consuming darkness. Another month gone, another month safe from the Spiders’ Web. When she is alone, Mephul creeps out into the Market and begins her walk into the city in hopes of finding another child of Talent to steal and disguise as her own - a trade for her own life, a shield for the burden of her own abilities.