The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “Settle down everyone.” Ryebald’s hands wavered at the air, urging everyone back. “They can’t get out. Rest assured. I’ve already tested the lid.”

  By that time, I managed to get close enough to make out the egg crates behind the glass. I was less than seven feet away. My legs stammered in place when something scurried across the inside on a tiny spray of legs. I covered my mouth with my hand and the skin on my back seized up like it had some place to go.

  “Toby, why don’t you begin by sharing with the class where you found these?”

  Toby’s eyes drew across the floor in restless twitches. He smoothed back his stiff black hair in an attempt to speak. “Found them in the barn, under the dog’s house. Pepper got bit real bad by one. Took her nose off. Plus they been getting hold of the live stock.”

  Toby collected 17 Brown Recluse spiders from under Pepper’s dog house, but four died he said. There was probably twice that many inside the jar. Back then they were called Fiddleback spiders. And farmers knew how dangerous they were.

  Ryebald settled in next to the jar and picked it up. “You can differentiate this particular species from other spiders due to the fact it only has six eyes. Three pairings actually. However, I wouldn’t recommend getting that close. The easiest way to identify these hunters is by the small violin marking denoted behind its head. With that said, you would do well to stay away from this particular breed of spider. If it bites you…well, that’s another story.”

  He tapped the concave edge of the jar like a fish tank and ten or more spiders crawled out of the egg crates. The disorderly shape of their webbing caused the milky quality behind the glass and it was dizzy to look at the way a blind eye might struggle in its socket. I couldn’t turn away from it.

  “Wait a second.” Toby rubbed his greasy hair to the side and reached into his pocket and pulled out something. “I brought a picture of what it did to Pepper.”

  I almost fell over to get closer. “I want to look,” someone said. Something became apparent to me as I looked up into Toby’s face. I saw the ripple of flesh that bridged his wrecked nose, how it rounded over into a set of troubled eyes. There was a feel of desperation about them that I couldn’t explain. I believed he sensed it in mine, when our eyes connected. I needed to see what happened to his dog.

  Ryebald caught his hand before he could fully unfold it. “Let’s keep that for now. There’s no sense in working everyone up.”

  I stood there dumbfounded by the lost opportunity. I wanted to yell for him to stop, even as the words escaped me. Standing there, panic strung itself like lights through my chest, all brilliant and white. And finally I went back to my seat and sat down to think. My hands danced inside each other so nervously I could hardly control them. With that I laid my head down and began to cry. I almost didn’t feel the nudge at my arm.

  I brushed my face against my arm to dry the tears and looked around to see Toby cutting across the aisle to his seat a few rows over. When he sat down he stared at me and nodded with his broken face. Lifting my arms, I found the photo folded at my elbow. I picked it up and glanced at Ryebald, who busied himself introducing the next project.

  My hands slid into my lap and unfolded the picture.

  The corners were worn thin as I pulled them apart and peered into the shadows of my desk. It took only a second to see that Pepper was a poodle. Her enlarged nipples exposed the fact she was nursing a brood somewhere. My eyes slipped along the upper crease and found her head resting in gloved hands. For a brief period, I sat there confused. A vein tensed around my right eye like a twitch, clear and singular, until it settled into the bone almost and I started perspiring. Her muzzle appeared irregularly shaped at first glance, as if turned upside down. With that, I understood what Toby meant. Half of Pepper’s nose was gone. Eaten through. Only her bottom teeth protruded up in some hellish smile that severed a line in her face. I sat there the rest of class staring at the monstrous form of Toby’s dog, swarms of dangerous ideas circling inside my head.

  That night I slept with the picture under my pillow. Every so often I’d wake up to the light beside my bed, pull it out and stare again at the tangle of teeth that rose out of Pepper’s jagged little mouth.

  The next day, I tracked Toby down in the hall after lunch and asked what he had done with the spiders.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Nothing. They’re nothing to me.”

  “Yeah, that so?”

  My eyes drifted down the hall. I listened to a throng of students pass by the lunchroom. It was a far away sound, like cotton in my ears. “I’m sorry I didn’t give this back.” I offered up the photo and he stared at it a second before shoving it in his pants. “You still have them?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Just curious, I suppose.” I nodded at the pocket his hand just came out of. “What happened to your dog?”

  “Pepper? I took her out and shot her,” he said, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “She couldn’t eat nothing no more. Besides we done weaned the pups.”

  Two girls passed around the corner, headed to the gym. One snickered at us and I ignored her. “Did you take them home?”

  He shook his head. “You want to see them?”

  “Can I?”

  Toby led me to his locker. I stood behind him, legs numb and shaking, and getting worse, as he removed the lock on his door. He turned to me, dropping a book in my hand. “Hold this.” He shifted something else around inside his locker.

  “One of those things bit her on the nose didn’t it?”

  “Ate right through her face,” he said. “Why you want ’em anyway?”

  I thought of the picture, Pepper’s upside down grin. “Who said I wanted them?”

  “You don’t gotta lie to me.” He turned away from the door. “Ain’t like I care.”

  “I’m not,” I said, looking over his shoulder. “I don’t want them for nothing, I guess.”

  “Like I said, it ain’t like I care. So what if you like spiders?”

  “It’s not that,” I tried to explain. He pulled out the red bag, the bulging jaw breaker jar wide in the shape of his hands, and I decided it was better not to say anything. His fingers fumbled with the knotted cord only a moment. I watched the flap stretch wide, the lid appear over a moon of dirty glass. Something stirred along the shadows under its surface. I stooped down to where I could see its deadly captives swirling over one another, legs flexing over their web as they scurried from the light.

  “I keep them in the dark,” he said, his eyes leveling over the top at me. “It settles them down.” He began to pull the bag up closed.

  “Wait.” I placed my hand in the way. The touch of his skin felt cold against mine, but not nearly as cold as his eyes.

  “Wait what?”

  I swallowed hard over the words that frantically wanted to come. “What will you take for all of them?” And I realized right then just how far I would go.

  He slipped his arm inside mine and pushed close to my ear. “I want to fuck you on your back,” he whispered, not shy at all.

  Toby’s request lacked any shock value. I’d already seen it in his eyes. “I can’t give you that,” I said. But he didn’t know enough about me to understand the things I’d been forced to do already. Sex with him would have been easy. He wouldn’t have hurt me.

  Then what? His face seemed to say.

  “But I’ll give you something else instead. You’ll like it, believe me,” I said, unable to meet his gaze. “Take it or leave it?”

  His mouth drifted at the edges. The thin shape of a smile curdled on his lips. “I’ll take it.”

  Before he could change his mind, I acted. “Let’s go then.” I lifted his hand and led him back to the gym. The bell rang halfway there, and our footfalls were the only sound that followed us. Other than their echo we were all alone. We didn’t speak. Stretched out somewhere in the back of my mind existed the idea that those spiders were already mine. As far as I was concerned, nothi
ng would keep me from leaving the school without them. Nothing.

  Before I knew it, we were standing in the last stall of the boy’s bathroom facing each other. Toilet paper littered the tile, where it disappeared beneath our feet. Beside us, a black seated commode sagged open like a restless eye out of the wall. Urine stains painted its rim. The smell of metal clouded my nose.

  “Why do you want them?”

  I shifted against the stall partition and stared at the piss. “Just give me your locker key.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?”

  Toby’s face melted into a seedy grin as he placed the key in my hand. I looked at it on my palm, its shiny surface glimmering in the dull light of the green stall.

  “I wanna feel your titties.”

  I stepped to the door behind us and closed my eyes. Blackness found its way inside me. After a moment, I let it go. The latch hit its holster under my finger. In the quiet of the stall, past the movement of our breath, it was the sound of the lock on my door at home. When I turned around he was staring at me with those flat eager eyes. “Put your arms on the wall,” I said, unfastening his belt. The clear static of his zipper pulled apart. I pushed his shorts down his paper white thighs, as he tried to kiss me, and I turned away. In the grip of my fingers, I felt him grow hard beneath my touch. His smallish cock ridged in my grasp. I forced his waist around until he stood facing the toilet. I didn’t want to look at him. My chest pressed into his back while his pants fell around his ankles. Reaching around, I found the warmth of his throbbing penis again and pulled at it so quickly my wrist hurt. The flapping of his skin became a chafing whisper, a dirty secret in the confines of the filthy stall. It did not take long. A minute later he groaned and braced himself across the wall. His warm semen showered the tops of my knuckles; the smell of it maturing in my mind.

  When it was over I left him standing there, the hardened rope of skin already shriveling against his leg. I walked to the sink on the way out and ran water over my hand to clean it. A stack of paper towels finished the job on the way back to his locker. The key Toby gave me was still clenched tightly in my left hand. I popped the lock, placed the key inside for Toby, took out the jar of Brown Recluse spiders and left school.

  *****

  For three days, I fed them nothing but the darkness of a closet; I wanted their hunger to grow. As the days passed, the spiders spent less and less time in the egg crates. I would find them pulsing at the edge of the glass, eyes like black blood pricks.

  I woke to the dim light of my lamp on the fourth night and, gently moving my desk from the door, crept down the stairs while everyone slept. The jar of spiders lay trapped against my side. From down the hall, I could hear the Good Shepherd asleep as I walked out the front door.

  I made it down to the barn in two minutes. Once inside, I pulled on the light cord and placed the jar in the feed trough; when I looked down the spiders were crawling at the glass. I carefully pulled on the rubber gloves from chemistry class and laid out a pair of dissecting tweezers. Up on a shelf, in the back of the barn, were a case of mixed jelly jars. I needed something shallow and small, something I could manage quickly. I grabbed the perfect one and set it beside the larger jar and set to work. It took me nearly twenty minutes to load the smaller glass container. Two of the spiders escaped into a wood crevasse and disappeared. But when I finished I had a cluster of close to 20 Brown Recluse spiders. I held them up to the light. They crawled over each other in agitation. With everything done, I hid the jawbreaker jaw, chemical gloves and tweezers in the loft under an old tarp and headed back up to the house.

  Standing outside the Good Shepherd’s door, I could hear his deep snores rattling the walls, as they did every night. This is it. You can do it, I whispered in my head. Take a deep breath.

  Tears filled my eyes with fear. I twisted the handle and stepped into the room. From where I stood, I was less than four feet from his face. I eased the door back. There was something ugly and bloated about the shape of him under the covers. I took one step and the bed groaned. My eyes turned up wide. The blood in my heart convulsed. He turned on his side in the bed, and I was an arm’s length from his head, knees wavering on threads that would break any second. I backed away into the shadows of a corner and stood still in my bare feet until he lay motionless again.

  I slipped past the end of the bed trying to still my breath. Wait on him, I told myself. Take your time. With my free hand I gripped the sheets at the foot of the mattress and tugged them away with very little noise. When I lifted them back, I sunk onto my knees and squared my hands over the lid. Without making a sound, I unscrewed the top until it lay loose above the rim. Next, I carefully laid the jelly jar in his bed on its side, gripped the end of the glass and tipped it empty. Spiders poured out onto the sheets like a spreading pool of black rain. Working quickly, I slipped the cover and quilt back into place. From the point he twisted over, the Good Shepherd never moved again. I finished by hiding the empty jar under the kitchen sink and climbed the stairs to my bed. The silence of my room no longer felt like the current of an undertow. Its grasp had strangely weakened around it, settled into something faint and shallow and fallen away. Beneath that, there existed a belief I was free.

  In the morning, the stillness of the house broke with a heavy scream. Already awake, I lay there listening for it again. Each time the sound of it made its way to my door I smiled. Later on, I found out that our stepbrother, Marcus, drove the Good Shepherd straight to Dr. Peterson’s office. He’d taken fifteen bites between both of his feet, hands, thigh and stomach. Dr. Peterson said he’d never seen anything like it. And it didn’t take long for the bites to set in. Fever followed in a couple of hours. The wounds turned red with puss and began to sag open like dying purple flowers. He hobbled around the house on two swollen feet; his fingers festered into balloons of raw meat. It looked like something had started to eat him alive. Two places broke apart on his stomach, deepening with each passing week, until they overtook one another, and merged as a black seeping canyon underneath the swell of his ribs. Unable to bathe, he smelled terrible. The first of several fingers and a thumb came off after seven weeks. Eventually, they took the big toe on his left foot and shortly after that, all of his right. He continued to scream out in the night for half a year.

  “Can he come up the stairs anymore?” Darla asked me one evening, her eyes trembling the way a baby dolls would. “I still dream he’s in my room.”

  “Oh, no,” I said with a smile. “Climbing those became a thing of the past when that happened.”

  She dug into my arms with fear, eyes forged like razors they were so sharp with pain, and I thought she was going to cry. “Then he won’t be able to…?”

  “No, honey. He’ll never visit you again.”

  Of what I remember, the Good Shepherd spent most of his days alone, behind a closed study door. I assumed he was wrapping the stumps the surgeon left him with. Trash cans stood along the wall outside, filled with mucus coated bandages. They acted as a reminder of what I’d done. The smell swelled out of the hall, like a gaseous balloon we never went near.

  Once, I caught sight of the holes in his stomach. It was an early morning in the kitchen. He was irrigating the flesh. It looked like a watery grave in the ground; a deep, dark hole capable of swallowing me whole. Painfully black. Enflamed and red at the outer ridge of it. I went back to my room and cried. During the day, I could still hear him from time to time through the walls, mumbling threats meant for no one. And if I listened close enough from my bed I could make out the faint peaceful sound of him crying at night. There was a rhythm to that. A cadence. Something that said no more. Sometimes I drifted out to those soft murmurs coming from the floor. About that point, I learned to sleep again. Really sleep.

  5

  Seagulls hovered on the Atlantic under the breaking sun. Out on the deck, I drank coffee and enjoyed the warming rays as they lifted their veil over the face of racing waves. A gathering of shells revea
led themselves in the rich hues of morning light, their humps a glow in rippled reflections. And like a trail of fiery lanyards in the sand, they captured a broken heart, and in their quiet whispers, told me I had followed the right path home. The one we called Rabbit’s Hole as children.

  Sounds of the ocean rushed inside me on a crest of wind, bringing with it the flavors of a Carolina coastal island. The deep, lumbering sounds bathed my ears with the familiar roar of waves. And for an instant I could taste raw oysters in my mouth, the pungently fragrant nectar I grew to love as a boy.

  I wasn’t a child anymore, but a father myself, and for reasons of my own, both explainable and not, I’d missed more than a decade of stirring the architecture of its shores. When I stepped off the deck landing I already held my shirt in hand. The deeper, more hidden elements of the island whispered in sounds and touch. They formed in the delicate exchange of salt spray and skin, of the backwash of waves, or in the complexity of sand. And because no age limit came with those secrets, I pleaded to share in their charms, to open up and listen, to allow it to take me by the hand.