When we were children, my friend said that she plucks the legs off spiders and watches them try to dance. Even now when I see a spider, I imagine it with a lack of legs, too small to even bleed, bouncing around like a flea.
I think when I was younger somebody twisted off the crown of my head, sank their fangs into my frontal lobe, and screwed it back on crooked.
In my rattled and infected mind all earthly love is fragile as the spiders’ connective joints. I feel like the spider; eight legs plucked off one by one with each facial contortion sensed during eye contact. Although I’m not bleeding, my skin is bloodstained from each splattered life sentence my phantom limbs struggled to swat away.
My eyes sting and my hearing is muffled as if I dunked myself under salt water in an attempt to cleanse the poison. The salt water stung my eyes and blurred their faces, making it easier for me to make up a story about what they thought.
As if I was shedding my exoskeleton, my face hardened into a dull expression independent from my being, giving me a layer of protection from their eyes.
Each vibration penetrates my soft tissue like the beak of a mosquito; I tear at the surface and consider hacking off my hair, which I let down to hide behind, but was corroding my neck.
Chiseling themselves into my skull, my ruminations scared off all other inhabitants and made my head ache with their offensive hammering of my motor cortex.
Now bedridden as the spider who wasn’t designed to function without limbs, I wish to spin myself into a cocoon of silk as to enable those capable of reaching verdict to overlook me.
It can’t be coincidence that when one snaps the tweezers and leaves me unbalanced, the others are anxious for their opportunity. I am pulled from eight different angles.
(Unfinished)