Spider Bait held the morning in his hands. The brilliant blue and white sunlight thick and new pooled together on the surface of the dewdrop in the basin of his palms. He drank it in.
It was still early, still just morning on the first day of the rest of his life, and the first sunny day after an unusual bout of rains. That, he thought, was surely a fortunate sign.
Spider Bait wasn’t a particularly fortunate name, especially if your mother was known to be prophet-able, but he was the youngest sprite of a hefty group of five, and his parents had stoked up a solid hatred for one another by the time he came along, so he was never quite sure if the name was meant to be a curse or the predictor of a tragic fate. The fact that he had grown up in the orphan log despite having two living parents made him think it was probably the former.
Probably.
It was on top of the orphan log, still damp with rainwater, that he sat now, waiting for the rest of the meadow to wake and knitting with a pair of wooden needles and a pale ball of silk in his lap. He watched several spiderlings disperse on the morning wind, translating the dawn in signals of light reflecting from their ballooning webs and paid no mind to the shadow descending behind him, sprouting eight slender arms.
He had grown up envying the courage of little spiders, to drift away into the unknown and make their own lives far from the place they were born, with no one but themselves to decide the course of their life. It was frightening. It was tempting. Especially to a little sprite who couldn’t quite understand why he wasn’t living in the lavender with the rest of his brothers and sisters, with his mother and father.
But that would all change today.
“My own flower,” Spider Bait said, mostly to himself, but also to the shadow looming over him, its darkness made harsher, its edges sharpened by the crisp light of this bright day. Its slender legs formed a cage around him, a grasping hand. “My own home,” he continued, as the dampness of his present one seeped into his ass.
When he turned, he found himself reflected in four black eyes, round and staring and larger than his head. There were four more somewhere on the top of her head. He and the spider towering over him regarded one another for a long moment, the long lengths of her jewel green fangs just inches from his shoulder. Then he realized he’d lost count of his stitches.
“Don’t look so confused, I’ve been telling you for months.” He carefully counted the stitches of his current knit row, and Hop moved up, beside, and around him. “No more orphan log for me. No more termites or rotting wood or Brother Clod’s acorn cakes. Or all the other unwanted Sprites,” he added, mostly to himself.
Because it didn’t matter if you were wanted or not. It didn’t matter if your dad hated your mother and she hated him back, but you were somehow their fifth child. It didn’t matter if they couldn’t stop arguing long enough to decide who should feed you breakfast or dinner or put the roof over your head. It didn’t matter if they scrapped over every petal gone toward his clothes because they felt more about each other than they did about him. It was a fortnight until mid-spring, and that meant a new round of sprites would receive their Inheritance – the plant or flower under which their fathers had buried their caul on the day of their birth and would become their home and industry for the rest of their lives. He would come into his own, and no longer have to rely on them or the kindness of Brother Clod. He would provide for himself.
No one knew for sure where their caul was planted. It was a secret until Inheritance day, but they all knew what they could reasonably expect. Misty Morning Clover would get their clover in the patch where eight generations of his family had lived; Mountain Shadow Rosemary their fragrant herb sprig in a frankly overgrown patch of it near the ditch. And of course Spider Bait’s very best friend, Crab Killer Reed, would finally have her own by the creek.
But he, well. He was Spider Bait Lavender, wasn’t he? As much as his parents loathed one another, they were both from the lavender field. It was no contest, no guessing where his Inheritance would be.
Oh, it was going to smell so much better than the log. And just think of the things a sprite could trade with that. He’d been preparing, planning for his mid-spring Offering every damp, horrid night in this dark, rotting bit of oak. There were good textiles in petals, especially when they came in coveted shades. And a good, dried flower bud could make a fine tea, especially if there was a merger involved, which reminded him that he needed to apologize to Moon Light Chamomile for suggesting that his birth parent had been too lazy to provide them with two given names and had instead separated one word.
But there would be plenty of time for building bridges and burying the old rat bone hatchet later. This was a good day. A sunny day after weeks of gloom. Who knew, he might even enjoy seeing his parents. Spider Bait balled up his knitting and rose to his feet.
“I’ll see you at my flower-warming later,” he said, and immediately slipped off the damp, mossy surface of the oak. From his back in the weed patch, he saw Hop look down at him with her usual cocked head. “Much later,” he added, or everyone would run off screaming. He picked himself up, brushing off as much dirt as he could from his withering clothes and trying not to think about the damp spot on his ass. “And you know, a bit of silk would make a nice present now that I can count my stitches in blessed silence for once.” With that, he went into the orphan log for the last time, where he discovered that Brother Clod and the littlest sprites had made him a going away berry cake, which they had to scarf down while saying their goodbyes and farewells and we’ll-miss-yous around choking mouthfuls because the termites were swarming.
Of course they were.
All the sprites of Spider Bait’s generation gathered under the lowest branch of the largest oak. It stretched out from the trunk of the tree like one thick artery, briefly dipping into the ground before skimming the forest floor in a table that they would all gather around in a fortnight. After Inheritance, it was each sprite’s responsibility to prove to the peers of their generation how they would contribute to their trade and the continuation of a healthy meadowland industry, and this was the stage upon which they would present it.
Also food.
He said half-hearted hellos to familiar faces and received distracted good-to-see-yous in return. Spider Bait had never made many friends. There was only Hop and one other sprite who didn’t mind the smell of mold and musk that clung to all log-dwellers, probably because she smelled worse than him anyway. It was she that he looked for now, since he didn’t have anyone else to mingle with while they all waited upon the arrival of their parents.
Crab Killer found him first, wrestling him into a one-armed hug – she was strong for someone who’d lost a limb to a particularly mighty mud-bug, which was, of course, extremely cool. “I’m going to bring back a great big one to boil, just for you, Spider,” she said, and her voice was deep and sharp as a river stone.
He couldn’t wait.
Normally, he was against eating the rear ends of things, but he made a special exception for crawfish.
“Spider Bait,” he corrected. “I’d give your other arm for a crawfish boil,” he said, with an awkward laugh to indicate that he was joking, though she didn’t appear to care either way.
“That one got a lucky snip,” she said, boxing at him with her whole arm and the nub. “I know all their tricks now.”
“I know,” Spider Bait said. Crawfish slaying was Crab Killer Reed’s family business, though her dream was to take down a crab and live up to her name.
“One day,” she said, in the same tone of voice that one might talk about finding true love.
“I was thinking I’d bring back some lavender,” Spider Bait said to change the subject, and realized that was a stupid thing to say because of course that was what he would be bringing. “You know, like, the buds. I want to dry them out and give tea making a try.” He hoped the process wouldn’t take longer than the requisite two weeks. He was going to have to find that out. “Just for you,” he added, because it seemed polite after she’d dedicated a crawfish to him and everything, though he wasn’t certain if Crab Killer had any particular fondness for teas.
“You will not,” said Mountain Shadow, hardly sparing a glance. “You were a surprise shit in the field, Spider. Your dad probably buried your caul under some dead grass because he was just as drunk as your mom.”
“Spider Bait,” Spider Bait said. “And how would you know? You weren’t there.”
For a moment, Mountain Shadow was quiet. “Still not going to bring back any dried anything, I’m sure,” she muttered.
“Which reminds me,” Spider Bait started, turning to Moon Light who was passing nearby.
“I’m not getting involved in your herbal tea scheme,” they replied without stopping and soon mingled into another cluster of sprites.
Parents trickled into the shadow of the oak not long after, leading their sprite children away one at a time with happy, hopeful words. With, “Come, let’s show you,” and “Right next to us!” It wasn’t long before Spider Bait found himself alone in the stirring leaf litter. Well, except for Hop, who had parked herself up somewhere in the branches and was watching from above. Probably watching. He couldn’t see her just then and gave a thumbs up in the general direction that he had last spied her to show that he was definitely not nervous. There was no way his parents weren’t going to come, even if they didn’t ever want to see each other again. This was one of those moments where you had to set your ego aside and come together for your child.
Like you had never, not once done before.
But this. This was just too big. This was his livelihood. His Inheritance. His destiny for the rest of his life, decided in the same moment that he’d burst through the first threshold of life, which was now part of the soil on which he would erect the final threshold of home. This was the way it had been since, well, the beginning of time, he assumed, and he was definitely not starting to panic.
“Spider Bait, dear,” he heard, and never in his life had he been so relieved to hear the voice of his mother. She gave the clearing under the oak a once over, noting his solitude, no doubt. “I can’t believe your dad isn’t here yet, the good-for-nothing bastard.” She yanked him into a hug before he could escape, then pulled back with a look of disgust. Some of the scarf he’d knit from Hop’s silk had come apart in her hands. It was always doing that. “What are you wearing?”
“It’s – “
“Spider,” his dad said, dipping his head toward Spider Bait’s mother. “Morning,” he said to her by way of acknowledgment, which worked both as a stingy greeting and also happened to be his mother’s first name. She greeted him back with only a glare.
“It’s Spider Bait, actually -”
“You kept us waiting here all day, you know,” his mother accused, but before Spider Bait could point out that she had only just arrived herself, his dad called her a lying, old whore.
“You’re lucky I came here at all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Oh, oaks, this old argument. “Could we just – “
“Still insisting this one’s mine? He looks nothing like me.”
“What, you don’t recognize your own stupid face when you see it?”
They went back and forth at each other’s throats while Spider Bait nervously picked apart the thin, ephemeral threads of his latest scarf until there was nothing left of it or his patience. “If you’ll just take me to my flower now, we never have to speak to each other again!” he shouted over them.
“Well,” his dad said after a few moments passed. The older sprite kicked at a bit of leaf litter underfoot and avoided looking at Spider Bait. “To tell you the truth – with the name and all – I hadn’t really expected you to. Live. This long.” Then he paused long enough that Spider Bait began to worry his father was about to admit to something terrible, like that he’d lit the caul on fire or thrown it in the creek. Or ate it. Spider Bait’s face was still frozen in disgust when his dad finally continued. “Follow me.”