Story background - the fabulous group of metalsmiths and jewelers I'm a part of - EtsyMetal - had a group challenge based off Project Runway. One of the weekly challenges was to create a piece and a story to go with it. I was thrilled! For a long time I've had plans of writing short stories and creating pieces that may appear, or are blatantly written in to the story. Similar to a painting or drawing depicting a scene, but an actual object created. And the result was the beginning of this story, which I have been wanting to continue since it started and that was over a year ago... It also does not have a title yet - neither does the other story brewing. So for simplicity sake, I'm just going to distinguish them by the title character(s) names. Since this is an incredibly informal format, much of the writing will be something like a first draft and not necessarily properly divided in chapters. So that's my disclaimer and the background of how this story started and the image at the end. It was originally on my regular blog, here.
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Ara spread out her hands, stretching and contracting them. She’d been sitting at her computer too long and her hands were going numb. Out of the corner of her eye she saw it again, the web, but knew if she tried to look at it, it would be gone again. So instead she just looked past the screen out the window at the city lights. How something could be so dark and lit up at the same time she would never understand and didn’t want to. New Atlantean City. It was not her city and it never would be. She’d been here a year, living in the cubicle called an apartment (which thankfully had a nice view) and she still didn’t know her way around. She doubted she ever would.
The buildings made her sense of direction completely off, cut off more like it. Cut off from nature, the trees, the sky, the sun even.
But being in The City, that was the dream wasn’t it? Every 20-something wanting to make it big. She’d been writing free-lance for the past 6 months and as glamorous as she liked to make it sound, the $400 a month it earned her was barely a drop in the bucket.
This latest article was for the blog World Wide Weavers - Spiders of the Interwebs. Lynyphiidae - Sheetweb Weaver Spiders brought in a whopping $50. The sad thing was that she had spent the last 3 hours staring at the computer screen or out the window and hadn’t written more than four words. At this rate she calculated, she would probably be earning less than minimum wage by the time she finished it. She sat staring out the window so long that the screen went its hibernation blackness, maybe it was time for her to go to sleep as well. It was 2:00 am after all and she had to be up in three hours for her morning barista shift.
The wonderful comfy rolling chair made it easy to glide over to bed, fall sideways, and just ease right in to sleep, she was practically there anyway.
Almost as soon as her eyes closed they opened again. Staring up at the ceiling as the Spider twirled down from its web towards her face. She’d named it Charlotte for fun, it seemed more magical and less frightening, except there was no talking pig here.
Ara kept her eyes opened and watched as Charlotte climbed back up the thread and continued her construction. Or destruction as Ara knew it to be. Spiders were the first defenders of nature. A corner sat untouched for too long quickly becomes inhabited by a spider, especially a corner in her home. She tried vacuuming a couple times a week and it didn’t seem to do any good. The fact that she wasn’t sure which ones were real and which ones were imaginary didn’t help matters either. They were simply drawn to her. She was their queen.
The sound of her alarm soothed her awake, it was "jungle noises" this morning. A harsh contrast from the city noises. Even the early morning city noises of the concrete jungle were a far cry from soothing.
A quick shower and light make-up was all she needed. She left her clothes at work, Ara couldn’t stand the smell of coffee permeating her home as well. Her rumpled clothes she fell asleep in would do just fine for the quick subway ride to work. She figured she looked better than the average homeless person, so that was probably good enough. No need to look in the mirror. What she saw wasn’t what the rest of the world saw, so it seemed kind of pointless. Every once in awhile she still caught a glimpse. Her friends had thought it strange to not have a mirror in a bathroom, so she put up a small one. The hardened web that formed the crown on her head was the most striking and borderline silly aspect of her otherness. She was glad no one could see it. Finding a job was hard enough and she doubted it would earn any extra tips from the groggy caffeine deprived patrons.
And also glad that she couldn’t actually feel it. The last time she had was about 30 seconds after she had stepped through the Door. So much felt like a distant memory or a hallucination. She knew it was safer to just stay on this side.
til next time, xoxo
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