Arachnid-ism

Annie had dug a perfectly round hole in the scorched earth of the Australian North Bungulla Reserve. Her mother had kicked her out six months prior to this. No one would call the mother a deadbeat; Annie wouldn’t dare. But the thought would cross her mind over the next forty years, as she waited, for food and for lovers, waiting and imagining the Australian desert shrinking between roads, homes, and farmland, because she couldn’t see it—she couldn’t technically see anything.

Maybe her mother was at fault for what was to come, but Annie suspected that was too easy of an answer and too dismissive of her own freewill as an individual. Annie wanted to be different in the way that kangaroos who didn’t jump were: disappointing to zoo visitors but silently bursting with joy at their defiance, enough so they might as well have been jumping.

After her mother left, Annie and her siblings had no other choice but to leave the hole where they were born too. Annie scurried and scuttled atop other furry brown legs, claiming her own patch of dirt—finders keepers. Piercing her eight legs, one after the other, into the firm ground, like fanblades, like a compact half-inch drill, she made it look easy, this hole-making business. But easy was rubbish and Annie knew she had to get her guns about her and shoot a hole in the earth fast if she were to survive. It was a matter of life and death, not art, though it may have appeared like art to an outsider’s eye.

Just as her mother had done, she gathered twigs beneath the acai tree that shaded her home and placed them into a pattern that radiated around her hole, with the same care and attention one would give to organizing and shelving books or hanging pictures on a wall. Silk so fine, so delicate, joined together into its antithesis, and it was this luxurious material that sealed her hole. She waited inside, a sleeping princess, out of fire’s way, out of rain’s way, out of corpse-kissing princes’ ways.

It’s no wonder she barely noticed her few dozen siblings, who left their mother’s bungalow alongside her. And she surely didn’t see the birds that plucked them off the dirt, the bodies baked in the sun to a crisp of organic nutrients, the desperate tangles between brother and sister—the kind that ended in sister eating brother. They were mere ripples in the ground, to her senses. She was still getting a feel for the language of her sticks, of the dirt, of the vibrations the earth used to whisper secrets to those who would listen. She liked listening to things no one else could hear.