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.”
The thing about having parents who hated each other was that sometimes, oftentimes, in Spider Bait’s experience, they forgot that you weren’t responsible for either of them.
“It’s…” He didn’t know if he could finish.
“A weed!?” his mother provided. “A weed, Winter!?”
A dandelion, specifically. And it was covered in aphids, if she wanted to point out more obvious things. Spider Bait’s mind couldn’t decide whether he thought this was a joke, whether he ought to test how high a sprite could fall out of a tree without dying, and wondering whether anyone, in the whole history of the meadow, had ever made anything out of a dandelion.
“You see?” his mother continued. His father, duty concluded, was already walking off back toward the lavender. The lavender that should have been Spider Bait’s home. He’d already had plans for it. “You see what an awful man he always was to us. Oaks, damn it, Spider!”
He could only look at her like the speechless, heartbroken, utterly terrified orphan that he was.
“Oh, don’t look at me that way,” she said. “You know I’m sorry about the name.” Did he? He couldn’t recall that she’d ever apologized for it before, and that hadn’t even been what he was thinking about at all, but now that she mentioned it –
Well, she hugged him again, and a mother was a mother, after all.
Right?
“Could I…?” he began, unsure where the thought might be going. It was probably following his father. If Spider Bait smelled the breeze hard enough, that future still seemed real. “Couldn’t I just have one of the lavender flowers that are available? There are lots – “
“No!” his mother nearly screamed, as horrified as if he’d just asked if he could go ahead and light the whole lavender patch on fire. “No! That’s not – That’s not how it’s done. You can’t own a flower if it’s not got your caul in its roots, that’s…” Now her face curled in upon itself like he’d suggested pissing on an oak or marrying his sister. “You can’t live here though, can you,” she said, her voice softening. “What will you do? Go back to the log?”
“No, no, it’ll be alright,” he said, glancing at the dandelion. He wasn’t sure if he was comforting his mother or himself, but he would feed himself to a termite if he had to go back to the log.
“Well,” his mother said, looking at his withering clothes and his equally withering spirit. “I could – bring you a fresh petal?” She offered it in the form of a question because even he knew how embarrassing it was to have to rely on your parents after Inheritance day.
“No.” He squinted up, wondering how well those thin, yellow petals would hold up as a shirt and trousers. He wasn’t much of a tailor. “No, I don’t want that.”
With nothing else to say or offer, his mother fell back on her usual mode of conversation, disparaging his father. “Take this anyway,” she said when she’d worn herself out, no doubt ready to spread her newly ignited outrage among her friends and the family back at the lavender. She handed him a clay jug of lavender wine. “Flower-warming gift,” she said and sighed. “And I think it’s just what you need, right about now.”
He looked inside it when she’d taken her leave and was touched to find that it was full.
Hop snacked on the aphids consolingly, but she wasn’t hungry enough for all of them.
“Thanks,” Spider Bait said, then commenced getting blackout, dandelion-forgettingly drunk.
It took him two days to finish the jug, and he knew it would have taken his mother only one. He didn’t know if that made him feel more or less ashamed.
This wasn’t what he had prepared his whole life for. Oaks and elders, he had to make something useful out of this stupid, yellow weed, waving its stupid face all around at the stupid sun in just twelve days.
Make that eleven.
He’d spent the third day horribly hungover while Hop watched over him from the new hammock of soft silk she had spun under one of the long ground leaves. Spider Bait was lying in the dirt underneath it, contemplating what to do while knitting.
The aphids had made building a home in the stem, as he ought to have begun three days ago, impossible, so he was unspeakably grateful for Hop’s industriousness, not just because she had moved the supply of spider silk straight to him and he could stitch nervously for hours, but maybe she wouldn’t mind a roommate.
“Wonder if anyone’s got any ladybug pups they’re looking to find a home for,” Spider Bait mused threateningly at the aphids.
So really, without the ability to build himself a home, which might have occupied him the first few days of his independence, eleven days to come up with an industry for the dandelion was probably right on track. Nothing to worry about.
Except that his clothes had torn during these past drunken days and where they had been withering before, they were now beginning to brown. And smell. He pinched a bit of silk from Hop’s hammock and kept stitching.
Her silk was so, so soft and fine and comforting, he thought as he tried to work up a swatch and considered making a shirt out of it. He quickly amended that ambition as the thread pulled gently apart in the middle of a purl stitch.
“What can you even do with a dandelion?” he wondered aloud, even though Hop wouldn’t know. She scuttled over to cock her head this way and that over the latest patch of her nest he had filched, churning her pedipalps thoughtfully. Or in annoyance.
It if weren’t for the aphids, he could probably tap the stem. But then again, if it weren’t for the aphids, he’d have a proper home at least and besides, being a moonshiner had never been his dream.
He nibbled a little of the ground leaf for lunch and considered that while it made a passable shelter, it was oaks damned hideous as a textile.
“Well,” he announced to Hop, setting down his knitting after another stitch casually separated itself before his sanity decided to follow suit. “I’d better get a closer look at those petals.”
Spider Bait muttered – “ew ew ew” – the whole climb up the stalk. “You are literally snacking on my hopes and dreams,” he told the aphids in between his audible disgust.
He’d noticed that the dandelion closed up at night, but during the day, it was wide open and a shade of yellow he could only describe as blinding. Now, standing amid the burst of its petals and swaying in the breeze, he looked out at the sprawl of the meadow and its carpets of color. From here, he could track the slow march of white clouds in the cerulean sky, see the distant blue and purple of the lavender patch, and in between the two, a few more spiderlings dispersing on the wind. They drifted away from the woods behind him, out over the open field, and away. Spider Bait followed the path they were taking back toward the deep shadows of the tree line and a cluster of vine crawling up the base of a nearby tallow tree. When he turned back, the spiderlings were mere specks in the distance.
Late bloomers, he thought wistfully, envying their sturdy silk.
“This isn’t so bad,” Spider Bait said to Hop when he crawled back down the stem with one of the smallest, inner petals from the flower. Sure, it was flat and shapeless compared to a lavender or bluebell petal – now those were fashionable – and yellow wasn’t really in but he thought it just might do.
He wrestled with the unfamiliar, uninspired shape of it from afternoon into the evening, thinking that he really was more of a weaver than a tailor, and just before nightfall would have halted his efforts, he held up his new shirt in the rosy twilight and announced.
“Shit, it’s unwearable.”
The sleeves were two different sizes and the torso was askew. He tried to pull it on over his head anyway and ripped it.
That was OK. This was OK. There were plenty of petals up there, and he just had to get the hang of this. He’d collect a few more tomorrow and try again.
Hop backed up into her hammock, her large eyes round and dark and shining blue in the falling shadows.
“Mind if I room with you for tonight?”
And so, he crawled under her head and slept in the warm, windless down of Hop’s nest, curled beneath her abdomen, and thought that it really wasn’t so bad to sleep with a spider.
He was wrong.
It turned out spiders didn’t sleep, but he was grateful anyway when he emerged from under the ground leaves the next morning, rubbing at his sandy eyes.
He looked up and rubbed them again for good measure.
The flower was closed, even though the sun was a great big golden yolk bursting over the meadow.
“Hello!” he called up at it belligerently. “Some of us have work to do!”
Ten days. Just ten days left to prove himself and the flower – that he was currently kicking. “Wake up!”
Maybe dandelions weren’t morning flowers. Maybe they opened up around midday like teenagers or drunks. But as the hours passed, the top of it seemed to curl tighter into a fist, crushing his hopes and dreams for good.
He ran under the ground leaves.
“Hop, there are no petals,” he said, and it came out almost as one word. “I think it’s dying.”
Hop churned her pedipalps in worry. Or indifference.
“I know!” he shouted, then knit furiously and futilely for several hours before he was sure the damn flower must have had enough sunlight to open. If it wasn’t utterly doomed.
It was still closed.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Surely tomorrow.” He crawled back into Hop’s hammock, and even though it was only early evening, she retreated into it too, settling her comforting weight on top of him.
The flower was still closed the next morning.
Nine days.
Nine days!
He couldn’t wait any longer.
Tea had been the plan, hadn’t it, he thought, looking around at the leaves he’d been nibbling. Maybe that could still work. It wasn’t flower buds or pretty smelling herbs, but maybe he’d be surprised, and dandelion tea would turn out to be the most delicious of any variety, even his dreamed up herbal medleys, the meadow had ever produced or tasted. That would show Mountain Shadow and Moon Light.
Or maybe subpar teas needed to exist so you could better appreciate ones like lavender and chamomile. Either way, he spent the whole morning sawing off one of the ground leaves and digging up pungent strands of fiber out of the stalk with a rat bone knife Crab Killer had once gifted him.
“Oaks and elders,” he said to himself. It was so much bigger than a flower bud. It took him all of the morning with a makeshift harness about his shoulders to drag it to the tallow tree to hang in the shadows there. He had meant the harness to be for Hop initially, endeavoring to enlist her help since she was twice his size and had double the limbs, but she had only stared at him sideways with her dark, round eyes as he tried to explain. She did follow him across the meadow though, so at least he had company.
“I ought to drop it, don’t you think?” he asked her as she scuttled and jumped after and around him. “Just drop it and walk off somewhere. To some other meadow.”
But he couldn’t do that. Could he?
No.
His caul was here. His family, however horrendous, was here and that had to count for something. Crab Killer and crawfish were here. Hop was here.
He couldn’t just leave and spend the rest of his life alone, maybe. There could be other sprites out there. Maybe. Ones who had other ideas about economy and community, but he didn’t know what those might be or where to find them or anything at all about economy, really. Maybe this was how it worked everywhere.
The shitty home you knew was better than the… possible not-home somewhere else.
He was pondering this as he climbed into the branches of the tallow tree, searching for a thick, shady spot near the trunk that would still get a breeze, when something glinted in his eyes. Just for a second.
He squinted up into the tree. Then nearly fell out of it.
Up in the branch above him was the largest, most expansive spiderweb he had ever seen. It was an honest to oaks web, not like the soft, nesting silk that Hop made. The fine silver strands moved gently in the breeze, but held their shape.
And also, square in the middle of it, was the largest spider he had ever seen. Her legs were black and banded with yellow, paired up so that they made a neat and formidable x.
Spider Bait thought of what he could made with good, sturdy silk like that, but then remembered his name and his mildly prophetic mother. He tore his eyes away and tied his leaves with more haste and focus while Hop scuttled over and underneath the branch, seemingly oblivious to the spider twenty times her size overhead.
It rained the next day.
Of course it rained when the leaves were supposed to be drying, and he was just sure that the wind was splattering it all over the tallow tree.
Spider Bait didn’t bother leaving Hop’s hammock.
There were still eight days to go.
It rained the next day too, and he languished some more in the hammock, idly trying and failing to spin Hop’s silk into stronger strands.
What else could he do?
Maybe there was something to be done with dandelion roots, but it was plain bad luck to dig up your caul flower.
He was still considering it – how much worse could his luck possibly get? – when Hop re-entered the shelter of the ground leaves, wearing a raindrop hat to cheer him up.
And it worked.
Briefly.
Seven days.
He covered his face in his hands so he couldn’t see her anymore or her hat and groaned into his palms. At this rate, he was going to show up to the Offering naked and empty-handed. There was only a loincloth left of the lavender flower petal because he couldn’t quite bring himself to abandon propriety altogether, no matter how much the rotting petal had begun to smell.
“Maybe Crab Killer will marry me,” he said. She was happy enough in her own trade and didn’t really need another’s Offering. He could learn to wear reed leaves and he’d raise her babies while she was out hunting down a crab and achieving her dreams.
He also really loved a good bit of crawfish.
But it wasn’t his dream. It wouldn’t ever quite be his idea of home. It would never quite be his own.
So he fell asleep, thinking – marriage, only if there was no other option.
And maybe not even then.
The next day was cloudy and the ground was wet, but Spider Bait trekked across the meadow to the tallow tree. To check on the leaf, he told Hop. And told himself. It wasn’t to see if the spider had moved on and left her magnificent web behind.
When the two of them passed under the shadow of the branches, into the circle of leaf litter and the rich smell of the damp soil, he saw that it was actually worse than he had feared.
The roots and branches of the tree were soft and dark, the inner leaves still dripped as they shivered in the wind, and the leaf he had hung to dry from the lowest branch was nowhere to be seen.
The spider was gone too, her web likely blown away in whatever gale had taken his leaf. Spider Bait curled down, trembling with the wet and chill to crouch over the leaf litter and hug his knees. In a moment, he felt Hop’s pedipalps bop him comfortingly on the head.
“It isn’t any use,” he told her, but she kept on. He’d failed at tea. And flowers. And petals. He’d failed at having a home and even clothes. His peers didn’t want him. His parents didn’t want him, and as much as he tried to remind himself that it didn’t matter because he didn’t like them either, there were times like this when it felt like just one more box he couldn’t check.
What was wrong with him?
It was when he lifted his head to wipe the rainwater from his face that he saw it. That same little slice of light that had pricked him the last time he had been under this tree.
She was not in the same place she had been before, but up further in the tree. The orb weaver’s web was new and jeweled in dew. Just looking at it, he thought of the comforting repetition of knitting, the tangible weight of progress pooling in his lap, the turning of a single, straight thread into the highs and lows of stitches.
He couldn’t make tea. But he knew what he could make.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, ducking from under Hop’s limbs. But she didn’t stay. She followed him up into the tree, jumping from branch to branch in powerful bounds almost too quick for him to see.
The orb weaver was a gargantuan x in the center of her web, patient and still. Hop inched nearer to him, her gaze cocked curiously. Or disapprovingly.
Spider Bait tested the bottom left corner of the web, sawing at a strand with the rat bone knife. The weaver stirred, turning on impossibly long legs that ended in dark, delicate hooks.
Her strike was almost as quick as Hop’s jump.
Almost.
Spider Bait had time to recoil, falling down to the branch below, with his heart pounding, a fistful of silk – strong silk – and a terrible idea.
The orb weaver hadn’t left her web. She rested now in the corner he’d just abandoned. Hop peaked over the side of the branch at him.
Spider Bait crawled up to the bottom right corner and began gathering silk from that edge. Hop waved her two front legs at him wildly, and when the orb weaver lunged after the disturbance in her web again, Spider Bait only backed up, pushing his back against Hop’s face. There was part of him that was sure his theory would work, and another, larger portion that waited for the larger spider to spring straight off the web and snatch him in her hooks and the crescents of her fangs.
But that didn’t happen. His laugh was much more relief than amusement, and now Hop’s waving was much more frantic, motherly and scolding. “Alright,” he said. She had a point. He didn’t want to take too much from either side and ruin the integrity of the web. It was still the orb weaver’s after all, and if he ruined it, she might move on and leave him with no sturdy silk at all.
He started spooling the silk in his hands into something he could carry, imagining what he might be able to knit with it.
Imagining what he could make with just a little more.
If it worked…
If it worked, he wouldn’t need a flower at all.
Spider Bait climbed to the branch just above the web. Hop barely paused in her constant signal of danger to spring after him.
“She’s all the way down there,” Spider Bait whispered to her as he started sawing a few strands off the top. He worked as quickly as he could, hands trembling with nerves. The orb weaver was already turning, getting ready to rush the staggering size of her body toward him. If he worked fast enough, he might manage to get enough for –
He yelped as he slipped on the soft, slick wood of the damp branch and went tumbling down. He passed under the belly of the orb weaver on her way up to the top of the web, and for one wild moment, he thought he might fall all the way down, missing the crisscrossing of rain-dotted silk and plunge into the branches below.
But then he stopped falling, caught in the thin strands that were just as strong as he had hoped they would be.
His first instinct was to slash at the webbing sticking to him, hoping to fall out of it completely, but it didn’t take long for reason to catch up. Above him, the orb weaver was turning. Above him, Hop was waving her little arms into the air, scurrying futilely around the edges of the web. Spider Bait tried to be still, but he couldn’t stop the quivering of his nerves.
When he met the spider’s great and many eyes that had turned right upon him, he heard himself muttering, “Hophophophophop,” in a harsh whisper.
There was nothing left but to keep sawing. Threads came loose one, two, three at a time, but too few, too slow.
He barely saw the movement of those deft and deadly legs as they sprang toward him one last time, and he closed his eyes tight. Nothing that big should move that fast. “Hop!” he shouted, shrill and loud enough to overcome the rustle of the leaves all around them.
Then silence.
There wasn’t any pain. Just the cold prickle of fear in his fingertips. The silence gave way to the sound of his own blood in his ears, and then even that subsided until he could hear the jagged shuddering of his breath. He opened his eyes and found himself reflected on the surface of four dark, familiar ones, knowing there were four other smaller ones, hidden on the other side of her head.
“Hop?” he said, but she didn’t seem to see him. Her pedipalps didn’t move. The sound of his own sob shocked him back into action, and he sawed himself free while the orb weaver carried away Hop’s curling body. He lay where he fell in the criss-crossing shade, weeping into the rough bark of a tallow tree branch beneath his cheek. Fear cocooned him. Grief took hold and drained him until the loud keen of his despair turned into silence, into nothing more than the creak of the branches above and around him.
Twilight roused him only as much as the rising shadows, and he walked back to the dandelion, alone.
Four days went by in a blur. Spider Bait slept in Hop’s empty hammock, tucked in the last of her soft silk.
He drew the orb weaver silk through his hands. It would be uncomfortable but sturdy, where Hop’s had always been so downy, like feather white clouds falling apart in his hands.
But there were only three days left, and he had to make something.
Spider Bait smelled spice on the wind from across the meadow, but it failed to inspire his stomach. Or his heart. Or his limbs.
There was little of Hop’s hammock left around him, a tattered pale thing in the shade of the ground leaves. Shafts of morning speared the ground around them, leaving footprints of bright brown between the blankets of deep blue shadow.
He rose the way that plants did from seed, with the motivation of rain falling from a gravid sky, simply because he had to, and steeled himself to go to the oak clearing, where that dipping branch was no doubt laden in bright color and rich scent, with the purples and pinks of petal textiles, the earthy browns of woody stems carved into useful tools, the cups of liquors, and in the center of it all, the red of Crab Killer’s impressive crawfish, with its articulated tail split and bursting with pale, boiled meat, steaming in the fecund air.
He would enter that clearing with a meager offering that was not of his flower, not his caul. Over his shoulders, down past his waist, hung a cloak and tunic of mingled threads. He had not settled for the harsh, sturdy reality of the orb weaver silk, but held it double with the comfort and hope of Hop’s soft one. It was durable. It was wearable, only when he’d married them together. But not something he could recreate for everyone.
He’d made a swatch of it anyway, to place on the rough surface of the oak branch, and he held it in his hands as he walked out from under the leaves, looking back only to curse the cursed flower that had taken Hop from him some more.
And stopped.
There, the dandelion flower had bloomed again. But different.
Gone were the butter-yellow petals, thick and many, and in their place were stems topped in a white-like spider silk, in the symmetry of a hundred little webs.
Spider Bait scrambled up the stalk, ewing and ugh-ing at the aphids, but then he stood on the little rounded platform that had once been the center of his flower from which, now, so made seeds had sprouted. Their canopy spread above him, like a little forest, with sunlight dappling down.
When the wind came, he stumbled into the stem of a dandelion seed and held on, while many of them lifted loose around him. He opened his eyes when the gust passed, and wondered if this was the answer. If this was something the other sprites might accept for the Offering—an umbrella? A fan? He didn’t know, but he’d have to harvest them all and soon if he didn’t want them blowing away.
Except.
Except he could track the path of the seeds, going gently up and away on the breeze. He watched them the same way he watched the spiderlings disperse.
What if, he thought, his grip tightening on the seed he’d used to steady himself.
Then loosened.
No.
This was his home. His family, what it was, was here. His peers were here. The things he knew were here.
And they sucked.
He put his hand around the seed again a second to steady himself and pull it up. It was something to bring them, if nothing else.
Something to bring, like the spider silk swatch in his pocket.
He knew what the outcome would be. He could anticipate the disgust and the disappointment or worse –
The pity.
He knew what his life would be like here. It was in the weight of the humiliation he would shoulder when he entered that clearing. It was in the bickering of his parents over who had ruined him more. It was possibly becoming the next Brother Clod.
What he didn’t know was what it might be like out there. What sort of life might be tethered to the other end of the wind.
He had watched so many spiderlings drift away on blooms of silk with the same kind of wild hope. So he gripped the seed, ready to hold on.
Or to pull.
Pull it back with him to the oak clearing that was just there in the distance.
He was scared, he realized. Of course he was. Who wouldn’t be? But the wind was stirring again, and he was no more scared than he had been, watching the orb weaver plunge toward him.
He looked back at the oak. Loosened his resolve again. And when he gripped the dandelion seed one last time, it was not with a fist that might yank, but both arms, in embrace.
He breathed deep of the spiced wind, of the taste and comfort of familiarity, no matter how it might fall apart. And when the world lifted beneath him, when his spider silk cloak and the dandelion seed caught the breeze, he reached for the future, thirsty, with his hands full of the sky.
E. N. Dawson is a full time, queer, tattooed librarian and part time swamp hag writing and living in Louisiana’s left big toe with their husband, two kids, honestly too many cats, and a handful of crabs because why not.