Weekly Drabble #337: Weaver (Patreon)

This week's prompt comes from GTAE with 'itsy-bitsy spider'. With this short tale. we get half of that. Enjoy!

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Weaver:

Mannequins were an essential part of Jolenthe’s home decor. When wrapped up in her silk, they looked just like entrapped humans and worked wonderfully to discourage uninvited guests. The arachne had recently moved into an abandoned shopping mall, and there were plenty of dummies at hand. The mall was an excellent place for a lair; the underground levels had been flooded years ago and the main food court had become a sheltered pool that many of the local wildlife visited.

Jolenthe hummed as she brushed her long, black hair, looking at herself in the mirror. She was human from the top of her head to her waist, but where a regular human’s hips would be, her torso fused with the cephalothorax of a spider, and behind that, she had a large, dark, rounded abdomen. Using one of her eight claw-footed legs, she picked up a hand mirror and held it up to see the back of her head as she combed her hair, wondering if she should do anything special with it.

In the ruins of the mall, she’d found a cosmetics store and though most of its product was well past the best-by date, it was still usable. Jolenthe set the brush down and touched her cheeks. She was dark-skinned and attractive by human standards – if one forgave the second set of eyes above her regular ones, dark and pupil-less, and the way her lower jaw had a split down the middle from where it would spread apart to9 create her envenomed chelicerae. And, of course, that her humanity ended just below her belly button.

When she’d been little, she’d tried to make friends, but the fear on other children’s faces still haunted her. She hadn’t asked to be this way. None of the Changed had. It had been nearly three decades since the world of ordinary men and women became something else. Jolenthe had been born to a human mother of a human father, but that was all she knew of her original parents. She’d been abandoned as an infant. She could only imagine the horror on her mother’s face as she realized what she’d given birth to.

She probably would have died if not Granny May, an old woman who adopted many castaway Changed children. It was from her that Jolenthe had learned almost everything she knew about Earth-That-Was. It had been a world where magic was just something stage performers and charlatans did, nothing but sleight of hand, misdirection and illusion. Magic didn’t actually exist, Granny May had told her rapt audience of half-human, half-animal children – until it did.

“Until all you little strange miracles were born,” she’d tell them, but no matter how hard their adoptive mother tried, the children knew the truth. They weren’t miracles. They were the sign of something new and terrifying, a world that couldn’t be neatly explained and categorized. They were something stammering scientists and dumbfounded intelligentsia tried to explain, like the hateful, leering, laughing faces that formed in the clouds and vomited, wept and drooled blood, ash, acid and more upon those below, like the rivers that boiled without warning, then froze solid around their scalded inhabitants, like the animals that split apart into new, terrifying forms, like the fields that moaned and shifted like tumultuous living flesh beneath your feet, like the cities that had fallen into perpetual shadow, where even the brightest light barely pierced the all-consuming darkness. Like every other part of the Change that turned Earth-That-Was into Earth-of-Now.

Just as Granny May had taught her children of Earth-That-Was, Jolenthe had learned to survive Earth-of-Now. She’d learned how to make clothes (she always had silk handy), to build, maintain and repair almost anything she found, how to treat wounds and how to care for herself now that she was alone. She’d also learned what it meant to be Changed, grappling with instincts and impulses no human had ever been born with, but were as imbued into her soul as deeply as any other animal’s were.

Despite the silken tunnels that lead down into her lair, the entombed mannequins that decorated its entrance and the stored food deeper in her larder, Jolenthe’s other half was not a placid ambush hunter, waiting for prey to draw close to her web. It was an aggressive predator, akin to a wolf spider. It didn’t want her to use to spear, bow or rifle. It called for her to stalk through the darkness, running down her prey at inescapable speed, sinking the fangs formed from her splitting jaws into its flesh, pump it full of venom and gorge on the softening, slowly liquefying meat, or wrap it into a cocoon and carry it back to her lair.

This region was rife with feral hogs and Jolenthe had been gorging herself on them. No matter how many she ate, the mall’s watering hole never lacked for visitors and she rarely had to wait long to fill her belly or restock her larder. The mall was usually dark, lit only by the sunlight that streamed through the broken skylights and the lanterns Jolenthe would light to read about Earth-That-Was from yellow, brittle-paged books she’d discovered in an abandoned bookstore.

She wondered all the time what life was truly like before the Change. She wondered what her life would have been like. Would she have been the daughter to a loving pair of parents? What would her name have been? Who – what would she be? So many questions that she’d never know the answer to, but among all those possibilities that never were, she knew one thing was certain. No one would have ever looked at her with terror in their eyes.

The arachne set her small mirror down, looking at herself in the larger, then to the unused and long-since-expired makeup kits, then back to herself. Not today, she decided. Maybe tomorrow she’d put it on. Maybe tomorrow she’d have a reason to.

Maybe tomorrow.