Legs, Scopulae, Pedipalps, Fangs by Jennifer Lesh Fleck
3400 words, ~17 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)
I carry a hot pink hockey stick over my shoulder, even though I gave up the sport years ago, too busy for endless practices and games. I’m a skinny young soldier with a bayonet marching along a suburban sidewalk, making my yearly secret visit into the woods. This time, though, I’m trailed by my kid sister, Mae. She thinks she's being stealthy, stepping lightly in these shiny black heels she’s adopted lately, the too-tight footwear worn competently, confidently, and at the most unlikely of times. But the click-clack of her shoes on concrete betrayed her two blocks back.
Oh, Mae. At thirteen, two years my junior, she’s too old to be playing dress-up in Mom’s expensive stilettos. I’m dismayed and annoyed, both. It’s not like she needs the extra boost—Mae stands a full inch taller than me already. Perhaps wearing ill-fitting, teetering-tall shoes makes her feel close to our mother. Mom used to boast that she’d wear them while climbing the ladder of success. That way, literary critics and naysayers would see the black widow flash of scarlet on her soles as she passed them, headed up, up, up. She was dramatic, a person of extravagant grand gestures. Grandiose, sometimes, yet deadly sincere. Maybe the shoes are a shadowy symbol that looms over Mae: inspiring, powerful, totemic. Everyone grieves differently, after all.
Today’s Mom’s birthday. As is tradition, we spent the hot June morning scrubbing sun-blackened moss from her headstone, arranging spindly daisies and a scattering of those chalky Necco candy hearts she loved.
Dad begged off, said he felt a migraine brewing.
“His job’s stressful,” I told Mae, as always, letting him off the hook easy.
“Don’t be naive, Jessa. I found lipstick on his collar, like in the old movies. I smelled some stranger’s skank-ass perfume.” Mae fake-gagged with disgust. “Look, I know Mom’s been gone ten years. You can’t blame him for that, for moving on, not giving a shit about her. I’m sure at this point he hardly remembers her face. Problem is, we’re alive and we’re his kids, and he barely remembers us. That’s the bullshit.”
Now that Mae’s a teenager, I don’t bother chiding her for salty talk. She’s getting wise…seeing through Dad’s pretenses. Forever whip-smart, my little sister. Willful. Top in her class for STEM, too, while I’m the one who’s far more comfortable playing around with words.
We’ve reached the edge of the Safety. Here our city’s carefully maintained cement and asphalt run out, concrete buckling like rucked-up sheets. Street trees grow hunkered, scraggly, not so much neglected as bent-backed, seemingly fearful of thriving.
“Jessa, wait up!” she calls. Registering the changes, how the wind blows colder here. Meaner.
Against my better wisdom, I don’t shoo her away when she catches up to tip-tap alongside me. She eyeballs the pink hockey stick but says nothing. Beyond looms a place of trees stripped bare, the underbrush a tangle seething with thorns, shadows, and the last remaining living things. The forest where They’ve established one of five permanent colonies. Everyone calls Them the Spiders, though They’re not like any spider previously known on Earth.
Birds don’t sing here. Sound is muffled. Webs are everywhere, fine silk running in thick, silvery drapes and delicate chain-like structures, linking tree to tree in a dazzling chaos, a pattern known only to Them. It drips from the dead limbs in oozing strands, glitters like icicles out of season.
Mae’s feet are raw and chafed.
“Not the smartest footwear for hiking out of the Safety, girl,” I say.
“Well, you go in there all alone. Not exactly following civic protocols, are you.”
“This is your first time. You have to be ready for what we’re going to confront. I can’t stop you, but I want you to know…once you’ve seen Them, you won’t be the same. Nobody walks out of here unchanged, kid. Do you understand?”
“I’m not a little girl any more, Jessa.”
We follow a path carved out by others who have come and gone before us. The webbing turns so thick it forms foggy walls and tunnels. The Spiders have already gone back through and stitched over some of the wounds rent in Their webbing by recent visitors and supplicants. That’s what my hockey stick is for. I bat at thickened, scarred spots, knocking down silk, clearing only enough room for us to squeeze by. Mae gamely staggers along in those dumb shoes. Scraps of silken threads ride our shoulders and cling to our hair, faintly sparkling in the weak sunlight that makes its way through.
Despite the lack of leafy canopy, the temperature dives precipitously. The stench of Them arrives as if on cue; it always hits with a wallop and slowly thickens. Something mushroom-clammy and rotting-sweet in it, both repellant and perversely appealing. Your mouth waters against your will, yet you can’t help but breathe the stench in. It leaves an astringent sting in your throat that takes weeks to fade.
Quietly, I chant the charm I made up years ago. “Legs, scopulae, pedipalps, fangs…”
“So, Jessa,” Mae says, following close behind. “I found those old printed photos you were hiding. Tucked away in that antique tin shoved way, way under your bed.”
I bite back all the things I might say to her, continue naming Their parts. It works for me like a childhood chant, a protectant. Helps screw a lid on my panic as we wind through sticky tunnels and clawing brush, following the plastic neon-colored markers tied on the dead trees by previous visitors. My chant helps cut Them down to a more manageable size, at least for this moment. “Eyes, pedicel, abdomen, spinnerets…” If I can only hold these ghastly beings in my mind, small and mundane—soft little arthropods easily crushed by a boot—then I’ll have the strength to face Them. Whenever I go back home, that’s when the true terror always hits. In the dark and in retrospect, the risks I take become real.
Mae’s not giving up. “In the pictures…I’m this toddler in a hospital bed, tubes up my nose. It’s me, Jessa. Mom’s there with me in almost every photo. And she’s healthy. Perfectly healthy.”
“…tubercle. Legs, scopulae…”
She catches my shoulder, her grip surprisingly firm. “I thought Mom was the one with terminal cancer. Why am I the one lying there in that room, sick and dying?”
I can’t avoid her any longer. Ten years I’ve kept this secret…ten years, and no more than a kid myself. The corners and edges of it all have never fit comfortably inside. Untruths hurt the teller, too, I’ve learned. All those whitish lies Dad and I spun like candy floss, meant to protect her, the youngest in our little family. To hold us together into some semblance of normality. The euphemisms, the talking around it all, the dance. Because how do you ever explain such horrible things to a small child, such atrocities?
Mae’s not dissuaded. “If Mom died of leukemia, then why do all these memories keep flooding back? I’ve been seeing stuff, recalling stuff, and I know the story it adds up to is the truth. Nurses in cartoon-print scrubs are leaning over me, not her. All along, I was the patient. Mom sneaking me M&Ms, reading to me, singing… And this TV mounted up high… It ran day and night, slipping in and out of my little kid dreams, my morphine dreams.
"Coverage of the big invasion—remember all that? The day the world changed forever. First the crafts landed, and all these alien bugs crawled out on ramps. Little Spiders from Mars, like that band, the old one… They only wanted to meet us, talk to us. Using Their extra little hands.”
I remembered. Everyone laughed, back then. Made jokes. The media claimed They were harmless, our wee little visitors. That was the word from the experts. Harmless.
I don’t know how much of Mae's discovery comes from the photographs. Or from news, from history books, from toddlerhood memories tangled with her vivid imagination. She isn’t wrong about her illness or the timeline. The invaders came while she was stuck at Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. Sick, so sick, Mom with her day and night, both going bone-thin, but for different reasons. Bad news all around.
“They are a little like spiders,” I agree, my voice tiny. It’s difficult not to feel like something’s always listening to you in this muffled place with its church-like quiet. “But They’re so very different, too.”
“They got bigger, over time,” Mae says, growing breathless, “So much bigger.”
The size of Great Danes, Shetland ponies. Not bugs any more. Bigger and stronger and more angry. We weren’t supposed to bother Them in the wilderness where They’d made homes. We were supposed to stay in our nice planned communities with our close-in grocery stores and shiny-new shops. Where everything’s safe, where everything still looks normal. But some did, didn’t they? Some people did go to the Spiders. And nobody really stopped them.
The lashing underbrush has left thin runnels of blood on my sister’s legs. She didn’t wear pants. Everyone who comes here knows to wear pants. And her ankles have started to wobble in those ridiculous shoes. The patent leather dulled and grimed grey.
“Mom went in… She went to Them.” Her eyes are steely. “That’s why you sneak here. Don’t make up stories, Jessa. You go twice a year. Around Christmas and on her birthday. I’ve followed you to the edge before.”
I say nothing, picking loose a silvery strand of web stuck in my little sister’s dark mane. It streaks her hair, makes her look prematurely old. I won’t lie to Mae anymore. If Dad wanted to keep her in the dark to protect her, then he shouldn’t have checked out on us, left us to find our own way.
I’m the one who gets Mae up for school. The one who scrambled her eggs and cooked her pancakes, as far back as I can remember. I help her with the wildly complex ideas she dreams up for science projects. Shuffle her off to bed each night, making sure she tucks away those biochem textbooks she obsesses over. All these years, forced into being her second mom. All these years, I struggled to raise us both.
“The going’s gonna get harder up there,” I say, waving vaguely ahead. This is not meant as discouragement, but to prepare her. Mae’s not turning back. “So let’s swap shoes now. You’ve outgrown hers, I’m afraid. Come on. You’ll fit mine better.”
She frowns. When it’s clear I’m not going anywhere, she finally hands the heels over, warm and slick with sweat and blood. I stumble a few times before hitting my stride.
Confronting the offerings in the clearing is always terrifying. Especially your first time in. Mae’s eyes go cartoon-big.
Pale things dangle from tree limbs, the shapes swaying. Filthy silk swaths each object. Some are hapless creatures that wandered in by mistake. Raccoons, songbirds, a stray cat, a few smaller deer. Most were brought here on purpose by others. As offerings to please Them. To curry Their favor, to beg for assistance and mercies. Chickens and geese. Lambs, goats, calves. All as plump and perfectly preserved as the day they arrived. Each cocooned for safekeeping.
The Spiders’ prizes, eagerly collected.
Mae’s gagging, tries to hide it behind her fist.
“Hey.” I hold out my hand. “I’m here. Squeeze as hard as you need.”
She whimpers, then catches herself and frowns. “Why does it look like they’re shaking and trembling, hanging up there. But—” She licks a finger with chipped nail polish, holds it up. “—there’s no breeze? What’s moving them? They’re wriggling!”
“They aren’t dead. They’re just…slowed down. It’s from the bites. The condition you see is called stasis. They’re not asleep and not awake. Something in-between. But alive. All of them are still alive. It’s said they’ll live forever like this, because species that normally have short lifespans have already survived up to a decade here.” My voice drops to a harsh whisper. “Listen, once the experts figure out how to penetrate these places safely and drive our, uh, invaders back… Well, then they’ll save them. They just gotta proceed carefully. Spiders are territorial, aggressive if provoked… They’ll destroy everything before They’ll let anyone take Their goodies. It’s how They keep us from harming Them. They have things in here we wanna keep safe…”
“I heard people come to trade things for wishes here… Once all hope’s gone.”
“The Spiders grant them, sometimes. If They like the supplicant’s offering enough…”
Mae scowls, beginning to understand.
We hear a rustle, and she spots it. Her first one ever. She’s seen Them on the news, of course. Rare footage as They really dislike being filmed. But nothing’s like seeing Them in person. Even as a veteran visitor, I feel the familiar sickening panic, my gorge beginning to rise.
Something like a warty orangutan lopes across the naked treetops, springing tree to tree. It’s sizable—big as a man—yet gaunt. Hunched and many-legged, the stringy muscles shagged in tarantula brown move effortlessly, quickly. No visible organs of sight—at least nothing like you’ve seen before. Whatever eyes the Spiders have, they’re hidden by this finely-scaled, reflective panel, a black screen built into the knob-like head, like a limo’s tinted windshield. It looks added-on, fastened into place with corroding metal rivets drilled directly into the skull. Below the panel, where the alien’s chin might be, a set of tiny mandibles continually chews, massaging a grayish lump inside the maw with which the long, strong silk strands are made. Forever working it like bubblegum.
Nobody’s sure if this is purely a creature, or a craft, or some hybrid of both, organic matter melded with a star-made machine. We’ve never been allowed close enough to examine Them.
Because of the bites. Poison measured out in doses to paralyze or kill. Corrosive gobbets They can lob impressive distances, like napalm, firebombs. Jealously, zealously protecting Their hoard of hostages.
Eight of the invader’s long legs are designed for nimble locomotion, just like a spider’s, but with joints that fold in weird extra kinks and bends. The ninth leg with its fingers, though? That one’s special, designed more like an arm. It’s shorter, branching from what might be called a shoulder, held aloft and apart from the powerful legs. This arm has a hand with many fingers of uneven lengths, the digits spindly and withered. In this way the alien being can communicate with us, instruct us, ask us what we want and make its own demands.
Come, the Spider says. Follow. Over and over, these words flash, beckon. Come and follow me.
Mae doesn’t question when or how I learned to fingerspell. She doesn’t ask how the alien we’re following knows ASL, either. Surely, she’s read the literature, anyhow. As far as science knows, They can only “hear” via sonic vibrations picked up by their toes. We do not know how They speak to one another, assuming They communicate in any way we’d understand. The sign language seems special, something intended just for us.
We run, our eyes on the Spider’s tucked-up underbelly slipping overhead, the blur of eight many-jointed legs as the alien leaps and skitters treetop to treetop. We’re headed even deeper into the woods. Here the bundles wrapped in silk start to look different than the previous offerings. Here they are shaped like humans of all ages and sizes. Elbows in, knees tucked towards bellies. Like the shape people make curled up on the floor during their bleakest moments of desperation.
Finally the Spider stops short, freezing in place. Their face tilts and regards us silently, if you could call that knob a face. Their fingerspelling hand hangs slack and impassive.
They await my request.
I keep my expression neutral, my stance soft and as relaxed as I can force it to be. I ask the Spider for help, rapidly fingerspelling, entreat it for the small mercy They permit us, those of us who brave this journey. I point up and to the right, indicating the exact silk-wrapped parcel I wish to see, though something tells me that They already know, that They keep careful record of such things. The thing I want hangs high in a particular old fir, its trunk blackened from a past lightning strike, its needles shed a decade back.
The Spider obliges me, using two feet to free the package from its anchor of silken glue. It reminds me of someone working to start a fire with sticks, this motion, the legs expertly scissoring.
Mae’s eyes are huge as the bundle slowly lowers, seesawing, spinning. The woman’s body bucks once, twice, bending at the waist. It rhythmically shivers in its dirty cocoon. When it’s hanging level with my sister’s face and mine, I step forward, heart hammering so hard my head swims. Gently I pick and thumb away silk, peeling layers from the face.
And there she is. Mom, toadstool-pale yet beautiful as ever.
The fungal-sweet reek coming up from her trappings is nearly unbearable. Greedily, hopelessly I check her over. No damage, no change. Same as ever. Her eyes are closed like she’s sleeping. There’s a smudge of old liner still under each eye. Flecks of mascara dust her cheeks, face powder settles into her fine pores. It’s our Mom, not one day older than she was when she traded herself to the Spiders.
Her dry lips unseal, parting with a faint crackle.
“Mama?” My kid sister leans close. “Mama, please. It’s Mae. I’m here with Jessa, Mama. Say something.”
A long, thin moan slips loose from our mother’s chapped mouth. Like a ghost deer lowing, separated from the herd. Trapped in a fog and doomed to live in it always.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “She can’t talk to us. The sounds she makes mean nothing. It’s a coma, it’s stasis. But Mae, look at you now. She’d be so proud. You’re alive, healthy…you’ve been given a life. In the end, it’s all Mom wanted. You are her success.”
“She did this for me?”
“Dad tried to convince her to let you go, to let death take you.”
I remembered those terrible days. Dad saw the wheels turning in Mom. He locked her inside. Said grief was turning her crazy. He was making calls to some special, far-away treatment center when I found Mom’s blood on the broken upstairs window. We thought she’d fled to the hospital, but the trail led us somewhere much closer. Little ruby drops, splat-splat-splat. The edge of the Safety. We knew. We followed them deeper, and there she was.
“After we’d found Mom here, the call came. From Doernbecher. You were awake, asking for vanilla pudding. I’m sorry we never told you. We couldn’t. Better to allow Mom a dignified death, something even a bright toddler could accept.” I manage to wipe away a tear, but another breaks free and falls. “Believe me, you didn’t want to come here to visit her, all these years. First I came with Dad… Later, though. Later I came all alone.”
My sister’s eyes glisten, so wet and scared. Her shaking fingers touch Mom’s forehead, stroke the fine skin of her cheek. Mae’s shivering hard. All three of us are.
“I’ll come back, Jessa.” Mae’s whisper is the softest tickle in my ear, raising every hair on my arms and neck. It’s like when we used to play telephone. Or lean into each other in the dark, whispering late into a Saturday night. “Every time from now on, I’ll come with you. And when I’m done with school, too. When I’m successful–a scientist. You know I can do it. We’re going to rescue her. We’ll save her and everyone else in these trees. There’s a way to do it, there’s always a way.”
The words themselves may sound flimsy, a brave yet childish boast. Naive, young, silly. But Mae’s handshake is firm, her gaze steady. A vow whispered under the Spider, a being either watching or not watching us with its blank and otherworldly eye. I believe my sister. I know it’s all true, that future history begins here and starts now.