Fate Deals the Cards: Fifty-Two Pickup
Part 2: The Hermit
Ch: 1 Dancin’ With Myself
Riding a bicycle is an inherently dangerous activity, like anything that happens on the blood soaked pavements of the good ‘ol US of A; no matter how one might choose to travel on them. I had the mangled face, twisted spine and malformed leg to prove the point, if the absolutely shameful department of transportation statistics aren’t enough for you.
With that in mind, not just because my bike was a rusty mess and just pedaling was enough to make my crooked body scream; I was a very careful rider…
I’d already died once and the experience was super educational; the world at large seemed eager to keep pounding those ‘lessons’ in, as if to be certain that they stuck. The point was made, I assure you; the world made its opinions known, with pain, disfigurement and everyone’s all time favorite: Abject Poverty.
I was still paying hefty tuition to the school of hard knocks for that early education in ‘Life Aint Fair’ studies and was not eager to seek an advanced degree.
I’d foolishly thought, while I was trapped in a hospital bed, being poked, prodded and goggled at by a parade of med students, social workers and curious assholes; that ‘my life was over…’
Of course that wasn’t true; I spent the next two years scrabbling and scrounging to stay ‘alive’ and ‘free’ in the state care system; then another two years on the streets, once I escaped with the classic ‘hide in a laundry bag’ move. They don’t give bonus points for style or originality when breaking out of detention, results are all that matter; and I got out.
I knew full well what would happen if the forces of ‘Law and Order’ got their hooks in me again, so I was beyond careful in my daily activities. I wore my surgical mask at all times, even when the pot bellied convenience store loungers jeered from their sticker covered pickup trucks and shared their highly intellectual and well reasoned opinions on my face-wear.
I didn’t really give a warm squirt of piss if the mask would help stave off the ‘Rona… It hid my twisted and mangled face and that was enough.
I kept to the edges of society and stayed there, hiding among migrant workers; I avoided the homeless camps, fearful of the inevitable presence of Johnny Law and his greedy hands.
In the same spirit, I obeyed all the traffic laws scrupulously, steered well clear of trouble and just tried to get through each day without coming in contact with any kind of authorities.
One quiet evening, on my way ‘home’ to my tent hidden in a disused industrial lot; I just up and died behind the handlebars.
Right there by the side of a lonely road on the outskirts of a little rural town, I pitched off the side of the blacktop and rode into a ditch, already stone dead.
The scent of toast and strawberry jam was the last sensation before I became a statistic, again. Traffic safety and those kinds of concerns stopped mattering to me at that point.
I never saw a white light, or my dearly departed calling me to join them, nor did I find the ‘Peace and Love’ the christians of my acquaintance insisted was waiting beyond this life. All that met me was cold, darkness and a sense of being utterly and completely lost, alone and beyond fully naked to the void, on a level I didn’t fully comprehend.
The closest analogy would be having your colonoscopy video shown to a colosseum filled with everyone you ever have or ever will meet in your life; cheerfully narrated by that old British nature guy.
After an endless and sensationless ‘time’ that was a serious challenge to my already well tempered, tested and tried mental fortitude; something finally happened. A tiny point of light appeared, dim, but incredibly obvious in the endless dark and emptiness.
Slowly it brightened, then more quickly as the tiny mote became a blue dot. In a few seconds? Or minutes?
Whatever, the unmistakable truth slowly revealed itself, as a planet; a beautiful blue marble, wreathed in white clouds and streaked with land-masses that were pretty unfamiliar.
A big, yellow and gold moon circled the world and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a smaller, dismal gray orb orbiting in the larger lunar body’s shadow.
That was definitely not Earth.
Just about the time that it occurred to me that I was streaking down at the unfamiliar planet like a freaking meteor, everything turned subtly to the…
I’m going to call it stage left, because the planet, moons and stars all shifted out of view, replaced by a narrow, frayed, worn and suspicious looking fissure in the void…
That ragged slit in reality’s tattered underwear opened wide before me; it was the kind of thing that waits and lurks, until the moment comes to leave your balls hanging out, at the worst possible time.
Through that highly suspicious opening I shot, aimed at a dim, vaguely insubstantial planetary body, a shifting, fragmentary and slightly not quite real reflection of the world I’d just seen in all its splendor.
I didn’t crash to the ground, or plummet, screaming from miles in the sky… I just sorta slowed down, as I neared the surface. I spent a few minutes drifting lazily for the last mile or so, suspended head down from something I couldn’t see and was too terrified of falling, to sneak a peek at.
Instead, I kept my eyes forward as I descended slowly into a dense forest in the dead of night.
I got tangled in a tree, of course. Whatever parachute or… Whatever, immediately got stuck in the upper canopy, dangling me head first at least eighty feet up above the dark forest floor. I swayed there for a few seconds, trying to get a handle on a whole lot of new and weird stuff that was crashing down on me all at once, without also crashing down.
Distracted and ‘stressed’ to say the least, I operated on instinct, doing what my body seemed to know was needed in this situation. I passed myself a loop of shiny, slick, silken cord and quickly climbed up my dropline, reeling the cordage in after myself on my hindmost pair of legs. It wouldn't do to get tangled in my own slack; that would be embarrassing!
'Hold up.' I said, through the medium of interpretive dance, while suspended on my own spidersilk above the forest floor.
'The fuck is this shit?' I demanded, when I realized I was not just having trouble speaking, I had no vocal apparatus at all… and my lungs felt super janky with every breath. There was a weird, fluttery sensation in my underbelly, like I was breathing from behind an enormous belt buckle. ‘What the hell?’ This time I shouted my demand at the silent and dim forest all around me.
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I nearly slipped back down my line, while doing the side to side ass wiggle with my big hairy abdomen that the profane interrogative required.
I had no voice, way too many legs, breathing felt weird and I could see… Everything! The big hairy ass was just a bonus, tacked on at the end.
'Spider?' I saluted the moonless sky with all eight legs splayed… Which was how one asked the universe at large if one had been reincarnated as a gigantic white, hairy spider and been dumped on an alien world all alone. Dance is the most expressive medium of communication… among the wise and subtle of mind.
I managed to climb up that smooth silk rope almost without effort; something crippled and broken, human me would have failed at hilariously. It took only a few seconds to clamber up the length of my own silk and get my many, many legs onto the tree. After that, climbing down was… uneventful.
My mind was still in a whirl, when I landed silently among the bracken and horsetail ferns, at the foot of a redwood tree that felt a mile tall. I was pretty disoriented, but it felt like I was not itsy bitsy spider sized… If the underbrush and lower story was anything to go by, I was pretty terrifyingly huge.
The local maidenhair and fiddlehead ferns only came up to my mandibles when I stood on all my legs, leaving my eight eyes above the general height of the plants… If this were a pacific northwest temperate rainforest, I would be an eight legged and fanged monster the size of a VW beetle.
Since I was alone… I decided to take stock and get a better idea of what I was working with… And, even if anyone was around to see me struggling to get a look at myself with my weird new field of vision, who cares?
It turns out, I’d become a beast fit to haunt Lisa Frank’s most fevered nightmares… My fur was soft, smooth and immaculately white, with poofy little tufts at the joints of my legs and along my wide, flattened ovoid abdomen. Those tufts of fur were variously; cobalt blue, violet, rose pink, amethyst, coral red and pale spring green.
All the colors of childhood fancy and whimsical delight adorned my sleek and furry new body, which felt… good. I was not in pain; all eight legs were straight and truly spidery; as a mixed bonus, I no longer had a spinal column, twisted or not.
I may have sat down on the forest floor and had a full breakdown, I don’t really remember for sure... I suppose that suggests that I had a complete wobbler; I’m not too proud to admit it.
The next thing I really remember, I was in a meadow, under a foggy gray, misting sky, wondering… just all sorts of things and getting nowhere fast.
“Hey! Hey you!” Someone said, somewhere behind me. “Get lost, Jumpy… you’re messing up my hunt!” The voice was female, but bassy and smooth and pitched so low that I felt it with the sensitive hairs of my tufts, rather than perceiving it as sound. I looked around for the speaker, but she was hidden, somewhere among the tall reeds and grasses.
“Oh, you’re a male… My bad…” She sighed, in the tones of a contrabass cello that just realized it was speaking to no one at all...
“What’s a peacock jumper doing here? And a male as well… Not that you can answer…” She seemed to have decided that I was an animal, since she switched to talking to herself halfway through, sounding embarrassed.
I felt pretty confident that I knew where the hidden woman was; I’d plotted her likely hiding spot by triangulating her vocal vibrations with my farthest spread pair of legs. With just a few quick turns and skitters, I had her pegged. I wish I could take credit for that neat trick, but it was instinctive; like web climbing… and leaping at people who hide in bushes.
Mid-jump, I decided that I’d made a bad choice, on a whole bunch of levels.
Whoever my hidden person was, she seemed to have no fear of my terrifying form… and I had no Idea what my body was leaping into, without consulting me. I had a whole nest of tangled instincts screaming at me to do all sorts of things at once.
Bounding over the reeds at my concealed conversationalist won out, while I was still struggling with all the new info. I reflected on the problem while my enormous new body sailed in a staggeringly long and accurate leap, into the unknown, beyond the greenery.
Best case, I would terrify whoever it was; worst case… The worst case was pretty abstract at the moment, there were just too many ways for things to go wrong… And deeply wrong they went.
“Hello…? Is anybody out there? Your male is caught in my web, I’m going to eat him if you don’t come to collect him soon… Hello?”
The basso profundo of her voice nearly shook me apart, since I was entangled in the web of steely, silken cables, suspended over a lovely little river. Her trap spanned fifty feet and made a complete, if irregular circle horizontally over the entire channel, about ten feet above the water at its lowest point.
I was that lowest point, neatly entangled in the sticky cross threads and once more suspended off the ground by silken cordage.
A half dozen strands were stuck firmly to me, forming a loose pouch that slowly closed off, as I struggled. I probably couldn’t have wrapped myself up more securely if I’d tried for that result. I slowly rotated in the breeze, snug in my little pouch, while the lady I was intruding on contemplated what to do with me.
The vast and awesomely low voice I’d been hearing came from a gigantic silver orb weaver, who was lurking at the center of the web, plucking her strands to create her voice.
She was smaller than me by about half, but I was tied up in her net, literally twisting in the wind and not exactly prepared for this situation. Also it was my first day as a spider.
I know, I’m saying ‘spider’ a lot… it kinda sticks out as a pretty relevant detail.
“I’d just hate to eat someone’s mate, that’s pretty bad form... What do you think, Mabel?” The shiny arachnid strummed her query into the woods, shaking me within an inch of my life, with her song.
“He’s a serious cutie, I saw him scamper past my funnel a few minutes ago; he’s totally lost, poor thing. Tell you what, we can share him.” A much higher pitched voice sang from the other side of the meadow I’d just jumped out of.
From the trees, a long legged, shiny bodied, dark green horror stalked, picking her way with deliberate and careful steps of her too-long getaway sticks.
She strummed a harp made of bones and spider silk, as she walked on six of her slender legs; moving in silence, despite her size. Her frontmost pair of limbs was busy creating that sweet, melodic voice from her harp of mortal remains… And those bones looked human.
The giant funnel web grass spider stood at least ten feet tall, putting her in the giant SUV, or cargo van size rating… Or maybe an elephant, with skewed proportions. It was hard to say, under the circumstances.
I was panicking, half crazed and coming up with size comparisons, because I was neatly entangled in a web and hemmed in on both sides by giant freaking spiders; of which I was one.
Things were not improved by the way they were discussing ‘eating me’... that seemed like a solid worst case outcome candidate, right there.
It was a seriously messed up morning already; and dawn was still struggling to peek through the fog.
My unnamed captor strummed a thoughtful chord and considered me, as I dangled there, helpless and absolutely numb from multiple, rapid fire shocks to an already fragile mental state. Since I was completely mute, I couldn’t even try to protest the darkly comic injustice of it all.
I’d barely cobbled together a handful of unconfused and uncomplicated thoughts, since watching my body ghost ride into a muddy ditch full of cattails and drape itself ass up, over a rusty, abandoned shopping cart.
I’d died like I lived, without dignity and with my ass just hangin’ out there for the pitiless world’s cruel amusement, now I was getting the same treatment in my weird ass afterlife..
Even all these years later, I feel the bite of my darker emotions, the scourges of self pity and anger always strike from within us, where doubt and fear linger in our mortal essence. So too, are we all subject to the fleshly demands and needs of mortal life, anchoring us to the world around us…
That is the only struggle worthy of a sentient mortal; self improvement, self awareness and cultivation of the self. Only through diligence, study and rigorous spiritual practice can a mortal be free of the shackles of base instinct and find a higher form of existence.
Not that I was considering anything lofty or profound, while dangling over a river in the web of a spider lady who seemed keen to eat me.
I was desperately trying to untangle myself, picking at the threads and sorting my way through an awfully tangled mess… While trying just as desperately to avoid shaking the web or attracting the attention of the two ladies who were debating my flavor and or nutritional value.
“...He seems a bit odd, aside from being so out of place. Have you noticed, Jessie? He’s not really struggling or panicking like one would expect.” The big green one said, through her highly suspicious harp.
“Maybe he’s just exhausted.” The silver one strummed, nearly turning my insides to goo with the vibrations that shook me all over. “In any case, I can’t have him cluttering up my web. I won’t snare anything with him just dangling there!”
“Let me have him, darling. I’ll get him down and haul him off for you… I’m intrigued, it almost seems like he’s listening to us and understands… On some level.” Mabel the grass funnel weaver murmured gently, as she strode over to the bank and reached out to grab the entangled male jumper. “I’ve always wanted a pet.”
“Suit yourself, silly child! He’s a cute one, but be realistic… He’ll become a pest and nuisance before long, no matter how well you treat him.” The orb weaver scuttled down her web and snipped me loose, into the waiting ‘arms’ of the big green one.
“Let me know when you decide to eat him; I want a taste.”
I had a lot of things on my mind and I really wanted to tell these ladies a thing or two… I was too busy being dragged along behind the bobbing backside of the venomous green monster who’d taken possession of my bundled form.
I’ve been this way for a good long while now; and it still takes some… focus and no little willpower and concentration to keep my instincts under control. Needless to say, I was a mess when she dropped me near her silvery, silken funnel in the tall bushes.
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