Chapter Text
Delilah, Marissa, Jade.
The diner behind them sent waves of neon light over their backs, glaring over their counterpart's face. On the other side of the street, there was a department store bleeding LEDs to the pavement. To the west, to their right, there was a row of restaurants on one side, the beginning of a city park on the opposite side, to the east, more restaurants. Amalgamations of brick and concrete, plaster, other things that bled into the sandstorm of makeup marring her vision.
Delilah's hand was crushing Marissa's, heart racing, racing beyond human capacity, racing because she knew that Jade knew. In some capacity, she knew, because her eyes flicked from Delilah's draping hair, much longer and softer than when she had last seen it, the sunglasses hiding her eyes, and Marissa's gloves that hid her claws. Jade was holding her breath, taking a step backward, smacking her lips, her mouth clearly dry. Delilah wished she could shirk the cardigan and run home with her daughter in hand.
Marissa took an equal step backward behind her mother, using her body as a shield. Jade looked both ways to ensure no cars were coming before beginning to cross the road, and Delilah tried to storm away with her daughter, her voices struggling to remain pulled together into one, her back curling over as to not give away how tall she was. Marissa didn't move with her, tugged her backwards, staring Jade down, and Delilah felt a whirlwind of input topple her over, all plans she could've made failing as her daughter whispered to her, begging her to see the interaction through, to not make themselves more suspicious. If Marissa hadn't pleaded with her, she would have taken her to the car and rushed home, absconding with her, obscuring each other from the world until they were both finally safe. Or maybe she was as selfish as she had always imagined, maybe she would want to bask in her presence in peace, but her choice slipped through both their fingers like sand.
Jade continued approaching, three sheets to the wind, stumbling, and preparing slurred words out loud. As if bolstered by the mere idea of outdoing her, Delilah purged the intoxication from herself, her raging heart and mind addled with panic aiding her in the task, old instincts from before her divorce whirred to life, throwing off rust and sparks. She felt as if she were being taken by radio waves again, becoming more than herself. Marissa tapped her fingers, and she could feel her growing hotter by the second, clammy underneath the gloves. Jade came as close as she seemed to allow herself, at least one slab of sidewalk away, latex dress squeaking as she moved, circling them like a lion stalking prey just to gain the distance she seemed to feel was necessary.
Delilah, Marissa, Jade.
Click-click-click.
"Hey." Jade said, back arched to look Delilah in the eyes. She opened and closed her mouth, sentences aborted before they could manifest.
"Hello." Delilah said, wishing she wasn't being so dramatic about craning her entire body.
"You grew." She snorted. Her voice was boisterous from the alcohol, the liquorice stench of some odd vodka fuming from her mouth.
Delilah hoped the caramel scent of whiskey was masked well enough, but when she thought of what sweet thing would’ve been hiding it, she wasn’t sure what option was more appealing.
"Acromegaly." She sighed, forcing air out of her lungs, repeating an explanation she had researched. She briefly felt as if she were suffocating before the gusts of wind blew through her. "Over-production of growth hormones in adults. It's particularly hard for me, so I'd appreciate some sympathy."
"Doesn't make you grow that much." She fumbled around for something in her purse. "Plus, your hair, I mean, that's not how that works."
"It can, if the hormone is potent enough." Delilah angled her head in such a way that she could see her daughter. Marissa was trembling behind her.
"I'm sure that's basically unheard of."
Jade retrieved a phone, and held it up to Delilah's face.
She put a hand over the camera lens.
"What do you think you're doing, Jacquelyn?" She scoffed.
"Don't, don't even call me that. You of all people, you should know that's just wrong. Nobody knows that name anymore." Jade let her arms sway limply to her sides.
"Well, isn't it so frustrating when someone doesn't respect your privacy?" Delilah smiled. "My daughter and I are going to go home now, if you have nothing else to say."
"No," she blurted and stepped only a little closer, putting a hand in front of them, "I won't let you."
"Let us?" Delilah put a hand over her mouth, imagining the gossamer dress. "Who do you think you are?" Delilah jabbed a thumb towards the group of Jade's friends, Delilah's old friends, that she knew would have stopped to watch, that she thought she could barely see out of the curtain of hair over her right lateral eye. "Because right now, it doesn't really seem like we're friends, does it?"
"Why would I care what they think of us?" Jade crossed her arms. "They're not your friends anymore. I'm a grown adult woman, I can talk to you however I like."
"Worry more about what they think of you." She let her grin grow wider.
"Whatever, Lily." She groaned. "Whatever, I mean, everyone already knows about you being a fucking freak. What are you doing with our daughter, by the way? What's wrong with her?"
"Is that really the best insult we can come up with?" Delilah bent down to whisper to her, releasing Marissa to put her hands on her knees. She ignored her questions.
"She's got fucking claws." Jade spat. "What did you do?"
"Acrylic nails." Delilah said. "Why, did she not want to show you? I really can't imagine why. Did you, say something, maybe? Did you make her uncomfortable?"
"Mari, baby." She reached a hand out to her. "If you're not safe at home, then, just come with me, okay? If your mother is doing something to you that you don't want," she trailed off.
Delilah stood to her full height, and shied away from her daughter, suddenly assaulted by the memory of what they just did, of something else she would rather forget. Marissa gave her a look of abject betrayal, and rushed to stand behind her again.
"Mom," she whispered into her braid, the sound vibrating up into her skull. She didn't hear her, it was more like the words played on her mind like she was plucking the strings of a harp. She shivered, first the urge, then the action, click-click-click. "You, you, remember, you promised."
Delilah ushered her further behind her.
“You can’t fucking, do this to me, I mean, I birthed the kid!” She put a hand to her forehead and half-laughed her words. “I saw those scars on her arm by the way, is she hurting herself?"
”I made her, Jacquelyn. I made her, not you, do you understand?” She growled. “I’m going to keep her.”
”Keep her?” Jade backed up.
“I think we're going to go home now." She found her daughter's hand, and she pulled her closer. Somehow she could never feel Marissa was close enough. "Goodnight, Jade."
"Yeah, whatever. Goodnight." Jade stormed off in the opposite direction, beginning to cross the street again. "Mari, call me."
The wind continued to wag its many steel tails, whipping across her face, lifting their skirts just barely. Marissa made an attempt to hold both the hems down.
Click-click-click.
Their footsteps tapped against the concrete as Delilah turned to the car. Marissa broke from her grip, and skipped to her side.
"You okay?" She said as they slipped into the car together.
Marissa slammed her door, and Delilah moved her braid out of the way before doing the same, wishing she could undo it. It felt as if she were tied into a straight jacket, the nerves in her hair strung taut. She couldn't break free from it until they were home, just in case someone saw how much it had truly grown, how it could reach down to her knees.
“Mom.” Marissa called, clasping her hands together in her lap.
“No.” Delilah felt each crease of the fabrics of her clothes, every fibre so garish against her. “And I’m sorry for talking over you. You, tugged on my sleeve, you clearly wanted to speak to her.”
“Uhm,” she took off her gloves, licking her teeth, “I dunno, I guess, yeah, I did, but I didn’t really think, I dunno. I’m sorry mom, I just, thought that, I dunno, maybe I could explain all of this? To her.”
“I understand.” She said, and she did, she did. She wanted to be frustrated, she wanted to scream, she wanted to feel something unfair, but she did understand. Maybe it was just something you had to experience to be persuaded it was going to end poorly, she thought, maybe it was a mistake she would have to make for herself.
“Yeah.” Marissa nodded. “I kinda, like, I figured.”
“Sweetheart,” Delilah began, easing into her triad of voices, “do you see a way out of this? With Jade.”
“That, doesn’t like,” she cracked her fingers against her hand, squishing her knuckles with her thumbs, “uhm, mean, you know?”
“It might.” She said, tone flat and even.
“I don’t, I do, I don’t think it’s that serious, mom, I,” she struggled for words, wrestling with them, starting and restarting her sentence, “that shouldn’t be your first thought.”
“I know.” She shifted in her seat, realizing she was reclining backwards far too much. “I’m asking you. I don’t like the idea any more than you do.”
“I don’t, I guess, I don’t see a way out, but,” she bit her lip, “we ran into her by accident this time, it’s not, I mean, you know. We can, like, refuse her.”
“As long as that’s what you think.” Delilah thrust the key into the ignition and started the car, relief filling her as it crunched into the socket and wrenched to the side.
“Well, she did, she, she did call the cops on me.” Marissa admitted, wiggling her hat on her head, her ears twitching under the fabric. “I think, uhm, that's why they showed up. The first time.”
“What?” Delilah froze with her hand on the gear shift.
“After she saw my claws.” She pinned back her ears. “Sorry, mom, I—”
“In what world is that your fault?” Delilah put the car into drive and sped out of the lot. “I’m sorry, I, I’m not mad at you, sweetheart. All I want is for you to be happy, I just, I can’t do it. I can’t be in your life anymore.”
"Why?" She took off her hat, unable to stand it anymore. Her ears puffed out of it.
"You know why." Marissa’s eyes went wide as she watched her mother race to the highway, the engine screaming. Delilah saw it from her lateral eye, and she tried to slow herself down, slow her heartbeat, click-click-click.
“Mom, stop it, I can’t, that's not true, I don’t want that.” She warned. “I don’t think I can—”
“Why not?” She said. “And shouldn’t we talk about what happened? What I did to you?”
“Did it,” she tilted her head, “is that really how it felt? To you?”
At that, Delilah did slow the car, far below the speed limit, her mind decelerating with it.
“And, you want my honest answer, I’m guessing.” Delilah said, maintaining her measured tone. “Just so we can skip past the part where I ask you that.”
“Uhm, yeah, but,” Marissa began.
“It didn’t.” She said, “But, for you,”
“It didn’t.” She interrupted in turn.
“Don’t be stupid.” She sighed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, and it’s because I hurt you. I hurt you, and now we’re both a mess of feelings.”
”Mom.” Marissa whined. “That’s not what I said. Just listen to what I said, please!”
For a while, the only sound was the engine rumbling like low thunder. Delilah imagined all the different parts of her car connecting like the threads of a web. She imagined the ventricles of her heart like a web. She imagined the grey matter of Marissa’s brain held together by webs. She imagined the moon was a many-legged spider that stared down at her, lived in her eyes, graced the night with its silken light.
“Marissa,” she put a hand to her mouth, fingertips just barely not pressing against her lips, “I don’t know how to talk about this anymore, then.”
“Oh.” Her daughter said, and Delilah could feel her retreating into herself. Click-click-click. Click-click-click. “Yeah. I guess, I dunno, I don’t know either.”
Another bout of silence.
“I don’t even really know why I brought it up, I guess. I think, I, I just wanted you, I don’t know.” She raked her claws against each other, the scraping sound vibrating through Delilah’s hair. “I’m just, I, I’m causing problems again.”
“No.” Delilah shook her head, laughing. “No, no you’re really not. Is there something you’d like me to say, to, remember, to do? Anything for you.”
“I don’t think I can go to university, mom.” She whimpered. “I don’t think I can have friends, I don’t think I can, I can’t live like everyone else.”
“I know.” She said, staggered by the sudden change in topic, “I won’t make you.”
“But you can. Everyone’s trying. Everyone. And if you just, like,” she could hear how her throat clenched, “change your mind, even if you, tell me, that it's fine now,” Delilah itched to speak, felt the need rising inside her, but she just clenched her hand around the knife, holding it flush against the wheel, “you can always just, decide that you actually, like, want me to do all that stuff.”
“I know.” She repeated.
“It’s not fair.” Marissa choked. “And you, you already did it, when you forgot, mom, when you kept denying that, when, you got to make that choice. You just, you just, you just brushed me off, just now, mom!”
“Sweetheart.” She pulled the car off of the highway. They weren’t far from home, now, and Delilah could feel all the energy of their conversation diminishing as they came closer to arriving. “I can’t promise that I won’t hurt you, again. I know I will. But,” she thought of their future shared bank account, of the swipe of blood that came with the strike of the knife, of their promise they made to each other, “I’ll do everything I can, everything I can to,” the words felt unnatural in her mouth, sober as she was, “save you. If I put it like that, do you…”
Marissa was crying, she realized. She could hear her, hear her soft pouts. Delilah couldn’t remember her daughter had made so much as a noise when she was crying. During her worst moments, when it was no longer her choice, when it was as if she could not control herself, but not when she was simply crying.
“We’ll figure this out, together, okay? I’ll never leave you on your own, I won’t make you deal with anything by yourself.” Delilah felt herself begin to cry, yet no tears came, just sobs. “The money, Jade, even if the problem is me, we’re,” she sniffled, “you remember, right? We’re a team, baby.”
There was an amber glint in her daughter’s eye.
“If I have to, I’d, I’ll, I’ll kill,” Delilah hesitated, searching for different words, “her,” she shivered, but only beneath the surface of her skin, “if that’s what needs to happen, I will.”
Then, it was gone.
Marissa stayed silent as Delilah parked outside of their apartment.
She kept her hands on the wheel, the car still in drive.
The car had lurched to a stop seconds ago, but Delilah still felt it in her stomach, her larynx, her skull.
Each groove of the seat revealed itself to her, dry and heavy in her hair, dust and grime working their way in between the strands.
Delilah bit the inside of her cheek.
Outside, rain began to patter on the hood of the car, like slender fingers bouncing off of a piano.
Someone speaking into their phone walked by, and at first she thought it was Marissa.
She whipped her head around on instinct, but turned back to her daughter and pulled the hair away from her lateral eye instead.
Jade stood outside their apartment, describing them both, Marissa’s claws, how Delilah had changed.
Her daughter’s eyes widened. The amber starlight in her eyes returned, a tear ran down her face.
Sixty-seven thousand six hundred people, roughly, go missing every year, she thought.
Jade described a neglectful mother and a young girl who was a danger to herself.
Sixty-seven thousand six hundred people go missing every year, she had found that out after she had killed Theodore. Adding one more to that number, with no trace of evidence, with nothing to link her to the crime, a crime that didn’t seem to exist, a crime that was all for Marissa’s sake, only thinking of her murder in those terms had truly calmed her.
She went on to say that they should show up the next day, or better yet, tonight. Marissa whispered the words on the other end of the phone, brownish-orange furred ears twitching, and Delilah leaned into her, unbuckling her seatbelt to be right next to her face.
“...The fourth time you’ve called about this,” she said, barely loud enough for her to hear, “we’ll see what we can do in the morning, but to be frank, it doesn’t seem urgent, miss. One more night won’t kill either of them. Seven AM, we’ll be right on it.”
Sixty-seven thousand six hundred people go missing every year. Two people, two of sixty-seven thousand, yet she had barely known anybody who died, less who truly mattered to her. Click-click-click.
“If it needs to happen,” Marissa whined, grabbing Delilah by cheek, “I should do it, mom, please, don’t, I, I need to do it.”
Delilah felt as if Marissa could peer into her mind, see what she was going to say, what she wanted to say. Maybe it was her muted crying, maybe it was the gravity of her begging. Maybe it had something to do with what she had whispered to herself in the dying day of the week prior, something Delilah likely wasn’t meant to hear, ‘We’re the same, mom, we’re the same girl’.
She didn’t know if Marissa was only forestalling her, or if she meant it. Delilah stayed as still as she could, biting her cheek, her daughter biting her lip, tapping her fingers.
Delilah nodded, slapping her palm against her neck, heartbeat raging at a pace well above one hundred sixty beats per minute. She counted, until the sound of Jade’s voice was gone, until all she could hear was her daughter’s breathing and the fluttering drops of rain. The arachnid arms twitched in tune with them, writhing under her cardigan.
Without a word to each other, they rushed inside, Marissa leaping up the stairs, Delilah’s stride taking her up them only a little slower. When they got in the door, Delilah checked for her spiders, and there were none. She reminded herself of Mariam’s burrow in the living room, Rosa’s in her bedroom. Two had survived to become her daughters, two.
Two of sixty-seven thousand six hundred.
Delilah’s legs carried her body to her room, her mind was left behind, or rather, it was everywhere, in every last moment she had ever lived.
The pump of makeup remover was in her hands, which were soon smearing the cream over her face, ridding her of the foundation, the concealer, the blush, the false eyebrows.
Her vision cleared, the world came into focus.
“When the boot falls down the carapace is crushed and you can’t undo it.” She said in her mind, or out loud. “When the boot falls down the carapace is crushed and you can’t undo it.”
It sounded like something she would hear in a fantasy novel, weighty and satisfying, poetical. Yet when she said it out loud she knew how unreal it was, how fake it felt, how it would sound if someone overheard it.
She kept repeating it, too distant from her vocal cords to stop, shame wriggling inside her as if she were an egg sac full of spiderlings.
The cardigan came off, along with her shirt. The sextet of arms wriggled free like a long unused stone door, she could imagine them shaking off debris and moss. Her braid was ripped free unceremoniously, without gentleness.
A highball glass, absent of whiskey, sat on her desk, magnifying some three of the four hundred sixty-two lines in the dark oak. She hadn’t moved it since that night she had called her mother.
It found its own way into her hand. What did Marissa see in smashing things, hurting herself, was it all just a release? Hadn’t Delilah, could she remember a time when, wouldn’t it feel good if she broke it against the floor, wouldn’t that make her feel better?
In the corner of her vision, the very corner, as she was facing the high window that revealed the moon, Delilah saw Marissa, standing in the doorway. She turned to face her, leisurely, fury hidden under the surface.
Marissa put two fingers over her mouth, and shook her head. Delilah nodded, understanding she didn’t want to talk.
It was a gesture she hadn’t used since she was young, since Theodore coaxed it out of her physical vocabulary.
There were so many little things she could remember, so many she would forget again, memories on memories that would become new memories once more.
Delilah responded in kind, playing out her same movements. Her mind began to soak back into her body.
Marissa mimed throwing the glass against the floor. She gave two thumbs up. Her tail swished under her skirt.
Outside, the rain plucked softly on the strings of the roof.
She slipped on a velveteen glove, the fabric thick enough to resist the faintest of cuts.
The glass found its way into her newly gloved hand, and she squeezed. Cracks across its surface spider-webbed, as if it was the ice of a lake creaking beneath her foot.
Each second it resisted, she felt something build inside her, or it had already built and she was finally using it. Whatever it was, it teemed through her veins, matching each new open pathway of the breaking glass, until it was crushed in her hand, exploding outwards.
The glove tore, the fabric shrieking as it bore a new laceration. Delilah stomped on the bottom of the highball glass, shattering it as well, as it was the only piece that remained intact. She was glad she had kept her boots on, though she was unaware that she had.
She stomped again when that wasn’t enough, repeating the phrase which she had spoken in secret through a clenched throat, through tears that could not pour from her new eyes, arachnid arms knocking things from her desk, from her rotating bookshelf.
She stood in the aftermath, glove thrown to the floor, fingers to her throat, counting the beats of her ailing heart. The moon shone through the window.
Cleanup happened without her, Marissa carefully sweeping up everything with a hand broom, Delilah absentmindedly shunting books back into their rightful place.
Both left the stack of paper that had been flung all across the room, neither of them felt it was immediately important to clean.
Marissa waltzed off, then returned with her sketchbook and art supplies. She sat on the floor, back against the bed, and began to draw.
Delilah couldn’t make much sense of what she was doing, as she only drew vague shapes before erasing them, restarting from the beginning over and over.
She took a book from her rotating shelf, any random book, and flipped open to a heavily annotated page, sticky notes teeming from it like, as tired of her repetitive connections as she was, the legs of a spider squashed flat between the paper.
She lay lithely on the bed, lavishing in the comforter, rid of whatever she had needed to be rid of.
And when the book did open, she saw a line, the line with a hundred multicolored notes:
Resurrection is a rather special event. Extraordinary, beyond description. The world is attractive on a beautiful day, after one has slept well. Resurrection is a day more beautiful than the rest, as though you had slept better than ever before. You thought that you knew the stage of life, but resurrection turns on all the reflectors through clear glass and suddenly shows you the stage in fullest light. You thought that you had seen life pretty cleverly, but resurrection holds a telescope to your eye, and a microscope at the same time. It is an event completely spring-like, as spring discovers unsuspected magic in surroundings most familiar.
Delilah remembered a time when she read that with such fire. She remembered when she swore by it to Theodore, who told her that eventually everyone had to grow up, stop being upset by the natural order of things, since everything had all been working out fine for longer than she had been alive.
If she had lived her life a little, a lot differently, would she have come to the same place Marissa had come to?
Resurrection. She eyed her daughter.
Some distant and internal boundary seemed to crumble, though she couldn’t tell what it was, she knew it was because of her, and she knew that her daughter had long surpassed her in terms of intelligence, that it was better to trust her judgement on paper, and better to trust her own in practice.
Her daughter yawned, and Delilah, though unable to produce quite the same effect, mimicked her, wondering on the idea of what it meant for them to be a team, like they were before, if they were not united against a common enemy.
But weren’t they? Not Theodore, nor the idea of him, nor Jade, but something equally familiar and ethereal, something she knew Marissa could explain, if given the time and patience, and she could only experience.
Delilah made a mental note to ask her daughter about what she was reading when she was more up to talking, made a physical note on her phone when she sensed that wasn’t enough.
She shut the book after just a little more reading, and rolled over to see what she was drawing.
Two rudimentary outlines of spiders from a birds-eye view, Mariam and Rosa, each labeled.
Delilah watched for a while, as she added details like their thin hairs, the patterns of their backs.
Marissa, she admitted to herself, in full, would probably never go to university, even if they had the money. And if she did, what then?
The moon hung high outside the window, and she tapped two fingers to the side of her neck. Her heartbeat had slowed significantly. One beat for every five seconds.
Delilah draped herself over Marissa, avoiding her touch but keeping herself near to her, near enough to watch her stuttering process continue.
She didn’t draw her lines in all one stroke, nor did she go back to fix it and draw one consistent one, though Delilah saw that she had tried to do so, through ghosts of pencil markings erased over and over again. It seemed she had given up on the strategy. Her lines were made up of many smaller strokes, as if each one were equally important, their own event.
The scraping of the pencil, and the rustling of pages as they were assaulted by her eraser were the only sounds in the room, Delilah could still hear the electric hum and the clock ticking, but she focused on what noises were closest to her.
It almost seemed, by the time the drawings were more fully formed, that she had ten different ideas of how they were going to end up, each giving way to another as she moved on to the next detail to complete.
It felt as if she could peer into her mind, see each neuron firing, see each bit of connective tissue like, well, like a web.
An hour of watching, and she had returned to herself, composure filling her in equal measure, the slashes of her pencil like the lapping waves of a tide over a beach.
She twirled her fingers through her hair, letting it fall onto her hands like sheets of water, spinning it like a seamstress. Delilah was settled by the sensations, busy enough with it to begin wondering if this would cement into a sensorial habit, like pressing the release trigger of her knife.
‘You can keep me now’, that moment repeated in her mind like a chant.
Delilah jumped back as Marissa shuffled on her knees, turning the sketchbook towards her. No smile crossed her face, but she felt something like it in her body, something just the same, something like hope.
She tilted her head. Delilah reached a hand out to pet her head, stroke her hair, scratch behind her ears. Marissa accepted the silent praise.
She searched for the sway of her tail, but there was none.
Delilah kissed the tips of her ears. She had so much she felt she needed to say, but there was nothing she wanted to do less than speak. Each time she tried, there was. guttural stop in her throat.
So she kissed the top of her head, her forehead, her cheek. Nodded in pride at the page, for what she had created, desperately hoping, hoping, hoping.