Awiti Moss was a block of a woman with a dusty cast, and great rolling brown eyes spinning in an abundant expanse of white sclera shot with silken threads of red. She had thick ambitious black brows that pulled across her egg-shaped forehead, and underscored the fine dusting of hair scattered over her skin. Her uneven braids were pulled tightly into a headscarf, and glistened with heavy-scented oil.
Her mouth was a constantly churning verbal kiln reeking of teeth in the early stages of decay, and the nascent tang of last night’s cock-sucking in the tin-sided shantytown shack; her knees still bore the muddy crust of kneeling on the hard dirt-packed floor, while Inacio leaned back against the car-seat makeshift couch and thrust his pungent phallus into her tooth-crammed maw.
Awiti was a shape shifter, a changeling, a Jill of all trades – she wasn’t fully formed and her interior landscape was as hard and chilled as the dirt floor of Inacio’s mother’s garishly painted tin hut. She felt oddly at home there, almost peaceful; as far as she was from her original state she always found a way to return through the reassuring portals of poverty and her artful way of mixing fact and fantasy. She was a spiritual spider, an Araneae Fabulist – a poisonous little arthropod with wildly grasping legs and chelicerae that greedily devoured the flesh of other people’s lives, while injecting them with a small pocket of her toxic venom.
Awiti Moss was a dead woman, encased in living flesh and walking the earth in shrouds of half-realized dreams, trailing musty gossamer wisps of failure and spiritual decay behind her. In the fetid waft of Awiti’s wake, a wall of words was her only foundation for a life increasingly lived in the purgatory of other people’s perceptions.
As Inacio pumped his hot white seed into Awiti’s arid womb, he felt a shiver of primordial fear – somehow he knew as he pulled himself away, shriveled and spent, that he had crossed the line from making a conquest into much darker terra infirma; the lust-haze cleared and he saw the dark form heaving beside him in the night take on a strange shape, and as she lazily reached over to touch his cheek, he felt with growing horror the unmistakable sensation of a spider’s dry scritch pulling lightly at his skin.
What at first appeared to be a generously endowed hourglass torso was a body pinched into two halves; and the sharp, pointed nipples of only moments before began to spin out fine silken threads of titanium that wrapped around him silently and inexorably, squeezing each labored breath out of his chest until all movement stopped, and his eyes clouded over in terror and relief.
With the first damp light of morning, Awiti wrenched the remnants of the titanium threads from her arms and sniffed the air. She placed her hands on the curve of her belly, and smiled. Inacio wasn’t going anywhere; what was left of him, the only part that mattered, was feeding the hungry little egg inside her, her spider baby.
Awiti walked through the morning chaos of the shantytown, smiling condescendingly as the mothers bargained in the alleys for the overripe fruit they would feed their children. She was satiated, and temporarily fattened from her protein infusion to the extent that her skin looked hard and shiny as it stretched over her plump limbs.
She was moving past the Caribbean ghettos, she needed to find a nest for her hatchling spider, a place both cool and dark; a place that she could retreat into the half-light and bring the spider baby forth in her exact image. The spider baby would be a hybrid and would serve as her living mirror, unhesitatingly speaking the words all spider-mothers consumed like fly flesh: “You, dear mother, are the fairest and smartest in all the land.”
Awiti’s every cell thrummed in anticipation of the hatchling’s exodus from her womb, and as was in her spider nature, she rode a stream of hot air up and away from the teaming slums and brackish rivers of the islands and sped for the comforting environs of a colder slum built with solid walls.
Awiti watched her body bloat with the life growing inside her, and she noticed all the mirrors seemed dimmer and her reflection began to fade. As cold, icy rain slapped at the windowpanes, and tendrils of frigid air snaked through chinks in the battered casing and under doorjambs she felt the niggling sensation of regret. What good would the spider baby serve if her reflection were muted? What if the spider baby was pulling the vibrancy and color from her image and absorbing it into it’s own life force?
Awiti lapsed into a melancholy state, and her mind drifted back to thoughts of warm tropical rain, and heated lovemaking on the makeshift car-seat couch. When she felt the steady hum of the spider baby growing inside her she wondered if the part that was leeching her vibrancy and stealing her reflection was the part of Inacio that recognized her inhumanity in the last moments before she consumed him with her carnivorous web of deceit. She wondered if her hybrid mirror was a Trojan horse, and would invade her fragile psyche and shatter her image altogether. Now when she rested her hands on the curve of her belly she saw the husks of her nails turn brittle and yellow, and her bones ached as they shifted to hold the ever-bigger spider child. She no longer cradled her stomach in a gentle embrace; she gripped the sides in a barely subconscious desire to contain it and suppressing the wild urge to pound her fists into the hard flesh and scream in primal rage.
Awiti realized as her time drew near that she had badly miscalculated the endgame of spider mothering. She withdrew into her madness and created an alternative reality, even as her reflection faded into sepia-toned obscurity and the silken titanium threads gathered thick coats of dust, her words began to take on literal shape and mass – she could recreate her reflection by crafting an Awiti of uber-proportions. As the words flowed from her virtual pen, she began to look for higher ground. When the spider-baby came she needed to feed her reflection or the mirror would shatter and she would be left staring into Inacio’s eyes again, only the horror that dawned in them and dimmed his life force would now belong to her.
Just as the ferocious bite of Arctic air began to dissipate and the cleansing breezes of spring washed over the ghetto, Awiti felt the sharp cramps of childbirth as her baby began its descent into the world. She screamed as the baby slid out of her, and the doctors quickly gave her morphine to dull the pain; but she was screaming in fury and fear and the morphine couldn’t really take the edge off of that. As they brought the baby to her she glimpsed the soft bronze skin and satin curls, the hungry little mouth already knowing how to feed off of her. Her heart sank as she offered her breast to the tiny orifice that was devouring her, and she realized her reflection could only survive in the shadow territory of her false words.
