Recluse (We the Spiders)

Mr. Miller is not the first to die.

It always starts in the basement. That is where I live.

The men, or devious children, always discover the basement within the first week or two of moving. They open the poorly hidden door with some curiosity, and immediately try to find a light source due to the darkness of the room. Dust and earthly smells fill their nostrils, and after fumbling around a few minutes or so, they find the beady string that turns on a poorly lit light bulb. There is just enough light to walk around, slowly, and make out some of the chipped corners and smudged details into a variety of wooden furniture.  

They never think about the dirt moving around beneath their feet and the oddity of the wooden walls that make up the peculiar room.

They will not see the tree like figure, at first, until they trip over one of the uplifted roots that has grown from its feet.

Mr. Miller fell hard, landing on his knees and the palms of his hands. I could smell the blood emerging from his skin. Normally when they fall, they immediately get right back up and act as if nothing happened, but Mr. Miller stayed put; his eyes were already on the vast creature embedded in the wall.

The thing Mr. Miller is staring at has been here many years. He was here before I got here, and was here long before my mother, her mother, and her mothers’ mother. The creature resembles a human in the body; it has two legs, two arms, but looks nothing like a human. Its entire body is scaled into furrowed, brown bark. The chest area is impaled by two sharpened stakes. There is no recognizable facial structure other than cavernous, empty eye sockets.

Strangely enough the creature and I are related.

Behind the creature is a veiny, winding, web like my own. Only spiders can weave webs like the one behind him, and to the naked eye you cannot see the hundreds of spiders threading together an invulnerable toil.

We call him Recluse.

The fear going throughout Mr. Millers body is paralyzing. Chill bumps erupt from every pore in his skin. Mr. Miller cannot feel the youngling spiders crawling up his body.

They march politely through Mr. Millers ear canals and move onward to his tympanic membrane- which they will eat through, slowly. Every bite a youngling makes, a nanometer of poison is distributed throughout Mr. Millers body.

Moments after all the younglings have entered his body, Mr. Miller rises to his feet hesitantly, unsure of what he has just gone through. The poison is beginning to damage his optical nerves. Recluse looks nothing like the scary creature he previously viewed, but perceives the creature now, as black mold.

He coughs a few times, hastily trying to find the stairs and egress from this somber, seemingly lifeless, burrow.

You can hear him shout to his wife when he closes the door to the basement. He prohibits her and their child from ever going down there, claiming the basement is invasive of mold.

Invasive- tending to spread prolifically and undesirably or harmfully.

In a week his brain matter will be gone; his organs will be inflated and preposterous, and all the blood will be drained from his body. He will be eaten from the inside and out; his entire existence will be erased… in such a small amount of time;

Like Recluse.

Recluse was something like Mr. Miller. A man or something, but he was brown and people who looked like Mr. Miller hated brown.

Recluse had a family of many; they hunted together, slept together, worked together, wept together, and died together- except for Recluse. His family was exterminated together; all while he was tortured in the bottom of this basement.

We were here for that.

They stabbed him several times; when he slid to the floor crying out for his family- the invaders, intruders, attackers, and transgressors, took two wooden stakes that they carved themselves, and rammed it into his chest hard enough to keep him planted there for the rest of time.

He tried to yell before all the air was punctured from his lungs.

He tried to speak, but they cut off his tongue and shoved seeds down his throat.

After death, they carved out his eyes and laughed at him.

We watched as the men exited the room.

We watched for any signs of life from the man.

We waited.

And then a man with a shovel stopped by to bury the sufferer in his place. Small amounts of dirt were thrown all over him, some of his parts still showed, but the owner wanted to keep him down here as a showpiece.

Then the sufferer turned into a recluse.

He began to stiffen, and started to change into something entirely different. The abrasions on his body, from being dragged across the land, changed into bark. In his wounds, plants originated and established themselves.

His eye sockets became nesting grounds for our children. His crevices became places for webbing.

He is what we are.

He is what we kill for.

Three days will go by and Mr. Miller will pass away around midnight.

He will never hear the sound of his transgressors eating away at his insides. He will never see his invaders because his eyes have been eaten. He will never be able to scream because the poison has caused his tongue to swell and block his airway.

Then we come- the bigger ones.

We eat his flesh- his muscle tissue and nerves.

We eat everything other than the bones.

Then we eat his family.

By morning, the man with shovel will stop by and collect the bones from the deceased. He will discard the remains in the river that flows through the back of the property. He will clean the house top to bottom, then place a new For Sale sign by the road.

In two months’ time, shorter or longer, a new family will come into our home; paint over our walls, spray around the edges of the home to keep bugs out. They will scream, chase, and kill one of us if we are seen. They will step on our babies. They will throw away our wood, and destroy our webs.

They hate us because of what we are.

They kill us because of what we look like.

They think they own things that were never theirs in the first place.

They will break into an environment that was meant for survival and show it the worse murder and robbery of life that one can take from another.

They will teach an ecosystem the routine of taking, seizing, trapping, and exterminating those who are innocent of the transgressors before them.

They will assume the basement is something they own- but they will never think that the things they own will kill them.

Mr. Miller is not the last to die.