Waking Up

Before I opened my eyes, before I could have registered the sky above me, I felt the grass against my hands poking me from below and decided that I was on the ground. Opening my eyes confirmed as much. 

White and blue passed over slowly, cut by nearby rooftops.

I grabbed at the same grass and used it for just the slightest bit more leverage to right myself, wiping sleep from my eyes with the inside of my shoulder in the same movement. A second push, with my legs, and I was standing. I looked down to my watch, and found time creeping into the middle afternoon. Classes were done, one or two slept through, and dinner would be ready soon.

Onwards, then, I stepped. The small dormitory complex had patches of grass and knoll scattered around, perfect for afternoon naps and forgetting where one had put their phone in the first panics of waking, only to find it in one’s pocket shortly thereafter. Nothing to do but smile. Others passed as I walked, but I did not pass them. I lingered on their faces, wondering how their days might have been, but asking no questions. They knew me not and I knew them very little. Was his name Darian? Or was it Darius? I could always have checked the registries of the classes we shared, but I did not. Did not need to, did not have the energy, and did not ever remember to do so. Instead I simply walked on, wondering how the days of the passing strangers had been, as my own day had been fine. Each day was more fine than the last.

I found myself stepping off of the campus walk and into the woods, where the overhead white-and-blue became shattered by veins of green and brown, which wavered just gently enough in the wind.

By all means this place was still a part of the campus, but it was out of the way. People so often only took to walking between their dorms and the various cafes and dining nooks dotted like moles across the campus as a whole. This, these woods, was peripheral. It was the edge. One of the only places where the iron fence could be climbed, and the uncontrolled outside could creep inside without express permission. It was a private college, and took silent pride in its isolation from the rest of the small city that it was embedded in. It was like a canker sore. Oozing and squirming, ready to burst at any moment with all the stress and anxiety of two thousand college students that had either earned or bought their way in through the front gate.

I had no room for that anxiety, so instead I walked. My head was full of the white-and-blue above the trees, and there was maybe a scratch of stress. An itch at the back of my head, the base of my skull, as I did nothing with my time but pass it along.

The ground was dry, with pale dirt and long dead foliage piled high around the bases of the trees. Ready to catch and burn with the right encouragement. It was only a matter of time before something accidentally lit the leaf litter and cleaned the forest floor of saplings and dead trees.

I walked towards the break in the trees, as wisps of broken webs whipped around in a rage, caught loose in the wind.

“So?”

“Hmm? Sorry, I zoned out.”

“You haven’t been smoking, have you?” She leaned forward, catching my jaw with her left hand. She tilted my head back, as I stopped chewing the pizza I had fetched from the cafe, and opened my eyes wide with her right hand.

“No? Why?”

“Someone took my stash, man.” She fell back into her seat. Attention had fallen on us for a moment, before it retreated and everyone returned to their own matters of discussion.

“The party. Are you going? Out in the woods tonight?”

I shook my head, cramming pizza into my mouth once more.

“That chick is gonna be there, man. You sure?”

I nodded my head, swallowing: “—Yeah— No interest. Heading to my dorm after we’re done.”

I missed the edges of a frown, the slouch, and the irritated sigh. Her whole frame pulsed with a momentary tension that wordlessly screamed her irritation into the void. The bounce of the tension was brief, a single note, but it was the most telling. My words struck her like a piano hammer strikes the string, and they bounced off, and they were out of tune. In that moment I missed it all. All signs vanished before my attention returned to the moment, and I found that she had returned a mask of joviality to its usual position.

“Whatever man, but you gotta start finding people to hang out with. How was Henderson today?”

“Didn’t go.” A smug smirk crept along my face, and was met only with a raised brow on her part.

“You can only miss three times before you start losing points, y’know?”

“Sure. Needed a nap, though. Few lost points won’t hurt. Missed Mitchel’s, as well. I’ll be fine, we never do anything anyhow.”

“Maybe you don’t, but people do!” Her tone was snappy, harsh. I watched with a moment’s confusion before letting it pass me by. As if she could watch me letting the moment pass by, she began to pack her things away and stuffed what remained of her own pizza into her mouth. “You need to take yourself more seriously. As smart as you are, you’re a dumbass. You going to class tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah, I’m going tomorrow.”

She stared at me for a moment, a deadpan expression sitting on her face like a lid over boiling water, and I missed the point. I waved at her back when she turned and walked.

I missed the point.

I fumbled with keys outside my dorm room door, pushing up against the door so that turning the key would actually unbolt it. From there I stumbled in.

It was barren. Stripped down. A bed, a desk, a second desk, and a dresser stuffed underneath the bed. There was little room for anything else to be had in the space, anyhow. Adding my own flair to it was an effort that would grow beyond me too easily. So I did nothing to it, except throw down a beige rug that spared me from the hell that was mopping the filthy dormitory floors in their entirety.

As I settled into the raised mattress I saw movement in the corner, nearest the window. A small black silhouette dangled in a web.

“Hey girly.”

“Yeah, I figured. Long day?”

“Did you come in through the window or from the hall?”

I pulled the blankets up around my shoulders, and shifted onto my side, watching the silent silhouette’s eight twitchy legs.

My eyes shut, with a tiny scratching thought. The first of many uncertainties at the corner of my thoughts, like a whisper: “What if I should go to the party tonight?”

I woke up with the tight, creeping claustrophobia of feeling another body in my personal space. The feeling dawdled over my head, down past my neck, and then locked firmly over my chest. I yawned, I took my time, I turned, and I opened my eyes. The eight legged silhouette found itself much larger than I had recalled, settled directly over me.

An overwhelming panic burned into my fingertips and arms. The foreign feeling elicited an immediate response, as my body screamed fight in adrenal tones. By the movement of my arms and my panicked will, blankets scattered to the air. 

As did the eight-legged body. Its abdomen was the size of a watermelon, and it struck the blankets and slid off of the bed with an awkward silence as I snapped to my feet. 

The bed was backed into the corner, and I found myself soon backed into that same corner standing with a pillow in hand. The bed was raised, such that my head nearly touched the ceiling, and long enough that even standing on it I could not see where the spider had landed. 

The darkness did not help me.

A voice whispered to me from the dark: “But what is it?”

My head cracked like a whip in the direction of the whisper, as I snatched a pillow into my hands.

“Who is that?”

A beat. My chest felt tight, like a thread was wound around my lungs.

“I said who is that?”

Another pause. The thread became barbed wire. Heavy, poking at my throat. I wanted to escape my own skin. To leave, and never have ever been in it. A panic began to grow.

As the panic grew, one of the spider’s pointed legs jerked from out of cover close to the bed, and heaved its entire mass into view. 

Brown. Splotchy brown, and covered from spinnerets to palps in hairs with hairs with hairs. A pair of white racing stripes along the sides of its body, where the legs connected, that looked disturbingly like painted-on lightning. It was bigger than most dogs I had seen. Even bigger than its size was its presence. It seemed to take up half the bed, even while only hanging on to the edge.

“Why did you not go to the party?” The voice came from behind the spider. Soft, coarse. The texture of sanding paper.

I held the pillow in my hands above my head. I tried to. The sharp, barbed-wire tangle over my lungs and heart seemed to tighten with my muscles, and I struggled to breathe. There was too much air. Too much space. The spider seemed to grow to fill it all, as the pillow fell out of my hands and landed with a flumf on the bed.

A second flumf came, as my knees buckled.

The spider gazed through me with eight, black orbs. It was seeing, but not looking. Like an animal. The tightness in my chest had grown so far into my throat that I felt I could not breathe.

“Why did you not go to the party,” came the voice again. This time it did not question. It simply stated, and let the thought hang. I considered it myself. She wanted me to. This wouldn’t be happening to me had I gone.

The spider’s pedipalps rubbed against its shivering chelicerae, and the voice came forth from it again: “Why did she want you to go to the party so badly?”

The spider stepped closer, its eyes taking on a sudden, sharp awareness. It came over me, such that its forelegs had pinned my arms to my sides and had locked me into something like a hug. Its hairs sent pins and needles across every inch of my body that they touched.

“Why did she want you to go to the party so badly?”

I wondered at the matter. My body wanted to scream, to run, to fight, to struggle. It could do none of these things. As the spider held me underneath its fangs with its legs the barbed-wire tightness in my chest grew more intense.

She just wanted to take care of me, she always asks about my classes.

“But why else? People do not act of their kindness, do they?”

The question was genuine, as if the spider were a small child trying to grapple with a new reality that it had only been familiar with tangentially.

Does she like me?

Its speech returned with each thought, the scraping of sandpaper matched to a rhythm of speech: “Do you like her?” Each word came out

I cannot project my own desires onto other people, she is just being kind.

“But what if?”

The spider reeled back, the pins and needles fading from my body. I watched its fangs leer above me, as its palps pried my mouth open. A foreleg retreated from its foux hug and aimed firmly for my locked-open mouth, as the whole of the spider seemed to suddenly seize down my throat. 

Impossibly large, impossibly painful. Throwing up in reverse. 

An intense heat came over me.

The urge to throw up came over me sharply as the barbed wire loosened back to gossamer threads.

I lurched from my bed, my feet tangling in threads of webbing that hung just above the floor, between the desks and the bed. Invisible in the dark. I fought to the door, each line of thread leaving sleep-scars against my skin, as I forced the door open.

In the bathroom, after vomiting, I washed my face and eyes. At some point tears had come and gone, though in the panic of the moment they had gone unnoticed. 

The sun had just set. The brief nap had maybe pushed an hour. The encounter with the spider had gone on for maybe five minutes. I hacked threads of webbing up from the back of my throat, as the tightness in my chest faded into the background.

“I need to go to the party, don’t I?”

There was no response in the silence, as I watched myself in the mirror.

“Phfuuagh, fine. Fine. Fine!” I rapped my hands against the countertop, snatched a pair of shoes from the doorframe, and slid out of the jammed front door with the slightest skitter in my step.

Skitter in my step.

“I’m surprised.”

“Why? Am I not reliable?”

“Not really, no. You’re flighty at best.”

“I do try, though. Maybe not hard enough, but I do.” I grabbed my own arms, standing at the edge of the party’s little clearing. She stood next to me, looking in the opposite direction as we leaned against the same tree.

“Just seems like you don’t care about anything.”

“I do, but I just don’t show it well. Takes a lot to push me to care.” In the shadows I saw a trio of freshmen playing with a lighter.

“Well, I appreciate that you came anyway. Party was boring anyway.”

My elbow went back, jamming her own elbow gently, as I pushed off of the tree. The dry leaves crunched beneath my feet. Her own steps crunched after me, and I clapped my hands sharply at the freshmen.

“You’re gonna start a fire, man. Who gave you three something to drink? Go burn stuff in a parking lot!”

They scattered like mice, trailing crunchy echoes behind them. I turned back towards her and the tree. She was smiling, her teeth standing proud in the forest darkness. I caught myself before I stepped too far into her personal space.

The tightness built around my lungs again. A clump of thread. A web of questions.

Do you wanna get out of here?

The sandpaper thought scraped against the back of my skull. She began to laugh as I stood dumbfounded, and the sandpaper thoughts began to scrape even more quickly into play:

Why is she laughing? What did we do wrong? Should we have not stopped the kid? What is going on? Has she ever smiled like that before? And what if..?

“You okay?” Her smile had turned into a heavy-browed concern, and she stepped cleanly over the borderline between our personal spaces. Her hand went to my upper arm, and the thread around my heart loosened.

“Yeah, sorry. Just a little... My chest is tight. I feel a little tangled up.”

“Anxious?”

“Yeah. I’m just a little anxious.”

Her sideways smile returned as she spoke, “Nice to meet you, Anxious. I’m Free. Want to get out of here?”

The thread around my lungs pulled tight once again. I spoke quickly, before the tightness could force its paralyzing power into my throat: “Hell yeah. I’m ready to go whenever you are.”

She broke into a laugh of twinkling bells. I laughed in kind. The anxiety rose and fell with my heartbeat. Rose and fell with each breath.

“Alright, Anxious, I’m gonna go grab my bag and say bye to Samantha before we jet.”

“Yeah. I’ll be here, I’ve got everything already.”

Free nodded, and crunched away into some other pocket of darkness. As she did, I turned and settled onto my knees in the leaves. There was a rhythmic, soft rubbing in the dark. Just out of view. I saw the starlight glimmer in eight black orbs just out of view.

“Why do you keep asking me these questions?”

“Why do you not ask them yourself?”

“Fine. Fine! We’ll make it work, but only because I’m not entirely convinced that you aren’t just some kind of... Psychotic break.”

“Why do you want me to be unreal?”

“Because a giant spider is mildly inconvenient, my friend!” I clasped my hands together, falling back, off of my knees and onto my rear end. The tightness in my chest grew lighter as I spoke.

“Can’t really complain though, can I?”

There was a beat, as I watched a brown leg on the edge of visibility tap against the dead, dried leaves. There was something odd about seeing the monstrous size of it sitting just in the shadows. It could choose at any moment to become something terrible, but instead it settled back in the dark and remained a quiet participant. 

Its answer finally came, self-satisfied sandpaper: “No, not if we got what we wanted. Do we even know what we want, though?”

I laughed, a humor that rode a wave of tightness in my heart.

“Fine, fine. Fair enough. Can’t complain.”

“Hey, Anxious. Ready?” Her voice came from behind me. I watched the black orbs vanish from sight. The just-barely-visible leg vanished into the night again. That tightness in my chest remained.

“Yeah, yeah. Help me up.”