Root Beer

cw: drowning

I drowned in a paper cup once. One of those free ones that fast food places give you when you ask for a cup of water but then secretly fill with root beer, or whichever drink you like best.

Only this cup was filled with water. Just plain tasteless tap water and nothing else.

In my previous form, as well as every other form before that one, I had never been the type to fill my free water cup with soda. For one, I wasn’t a thief. Apparently I wasn’t a good swimmer either. I learned this as soon as I hit the water and my many spider legs began kicking and thrashing around quietly under the loud insect-like buzz of the overhead lights. By some instinctive force, I was drawn to water — tubs, swimming pools, and cold puddles of rainwater. I was always careful, but this time, thirst got the better of me and I’d crawled too close to the paper cup’s edge before I lost my footing and tumbled straight into the water, the cold, slick weight of it pressing against my new though soon to be old body. 

I had only been in this body since spring, which made it still relatively new and strange to me. In this form, my limbs were light — uncomfortably light — and, worst of all, they were flimsy. What they lacked in strength, though, they made up for in agility. I spent both spring and summer climbing blades of grass, garden fence posts, and meaty green sunflower stems. As for my vision, I saw the world mostly as an abstract field of shifting lights but had retained a small part of my senses from my previous human form. I could see well enough to make out the tall white inside of the cup circled around me.

Because it was autumn, the cold was what drove me to find warmth through a cavern near my web. A cavern, in any of my human lives, I would have referred to as a crack or a crevice.

Although I was now a spider, it was the same human relief as getting into a warm, sunbaked car after shivering in short sleeves at the doctor’s office. It was the same feeling as when you step out of the ocean and Mother Nature blankets your bare, shaking body with the warm August sun.

If I were to guess, it was probably October. There were plastic versions of me decorating the walls, and with what limited vision I had carried over from my past forms, I saw cushioned booths and yellow tiles. I had found shelter, and now death, in a fast-food joint.

Halloween seemed close. Maybe even it was Halloween. There were people dressed in costume that day, pretending to be the people they were never meant to be but somewhere, deep down, probably wanted to be. Maybe, in the end, that’s what Halloween was really for.

I’d shifted into nearly everything and everyone throughout my lives. The funny thing was, no matter which body or life or family I was born into, whether I was an herbivore or an omnivore, I disliked every version of myself. There was always something—my height, my nose, my GPA, the way I pronounced the letter S. Two lives before this one, I hated the way I closed up in groups of more than three people and the way I was too afraid to break any rules. The way I always held a grudge. The way I failed as an elk once during mating season.

Each time, I carried a piece of my former self into my new one. Sometimes it was an anatomical structure like a collapsable skeleton. Other times it was something like a fear of needles. I collected strengths and vices like I collected consumer debt, each one piling on top of the last one until I became an eclectic mix of living organisms. Despite being only six millimeters long in this form, I contained years and years of consciousnesses, pain, phobias, and memories, all packed tight within my small body, which was somehow still clinging to life.

“I found it in my water,” the guy who almost swallowed me told the cashier. He looked down at me unsettled. He was scared of me, a tiny being flailing around helplessly, just as I was scared of the water as my abdomen dipped below the surface.

This wasn’t like the time three years ago, when I had shifted into a small child and fell into my aunt’s pool at a Fourth of July barbeque. Before I could make sense of what happened, my father pulled me to the surface, and I inhaled the smell of hickory-smoked ribs.

When you drown as a spider, on the other hand, no one cares. They just look at you, and you feel even smaller than you already are, like you don’t matter—like you never mattered, even in your better forms.

I found it hypocritical that, with how many plastic spiders there were on the walls, with how many tiresome hours the staff probably spent sticking each one to the cobwebs, they were somehow unappreciative when a real one showed up.

The guy handed the cashier his cup, and she looked down at me for herself with her deep, worried frown and forehead lines. “Disgusting. I’d never expect that, especially not here.” She looked closer, and it made me hate her even more. “We clean the water filtration system all the time. Not like our other locations.” She swirled the water around, and without any surface left to cling to, I clung to the fleeting hope that she’d pour me down the sink, and I’d have a chance to escape out a drainpipe.

But instead she just watched me flail, watched the liquid fill me, as if she enjoyed it, and then left me on the counter until the lights turned off and everyone went home for the night. Not until about an hour later, when my legs finally curled into my body, I knew it was over — at least in this form.

***

I never know how it’s going to happen. I only know when and where. I prefer to stay in the same region, because Half Moon Bay, California, is the only constant in my many lives, and I can only will myself to let it happen once my organs have completely given up. What I turn into is out of my control.

That’s why I’m so relieved when I open my eyes to a living room. I’m wearing leather shoes and have two adult man legs that won’t get swallowed by water. My hands are strong too, though slightly segmented — a residual trait from my last form.

But there is also something different about me in my new form. It’s sinister and calculating, and it scares me.

I find what are my car keys on a mantle lined with Styrofoam pumpkins. There is a picture of who I assume are my children, two girls, and my wife, but that is not the priority right now.

I fill a backpack with what I need and get in my car. I find my old spiderweb in Half Moon Bay — sad and abandoned — and the fast-food joint I built it on.

My stomach hurts when I walk in. There are the yellow tiles and the cushioned booths, clearer now with my human eyes. There is also her.

I wait for my food at the booth, and I wonder if it’s the same booth I drowned at. She slides my tray on the table carelessly without acknowledging me, and I feel the urge to say, remember me?

I’m too angry to eat, and this new calculating part of me reasons that it wouldn’t matter what laws or rules I broke, because, eventually, by means I may never understand, I will get a fresh start as someone or something else.

And so, as I glare at her from my booth, standing completely oblivious behind the counter, I sip my root beer, cold and crisp, from my free water cup.