Backlash

They listen to her clucks and clicks, eyes stumbling sideways as she rustles from one end of the room to the other. When there are nights to claim she gathers the runts around her like this. Candle lights at pre-dinner, an empty table that hasn't seen service since the previous hibernation.

She canters slowly now, evidently synchronizing the creaks under her shoes to make them sound as if they were one. Four, six, eight thuds at a time; four, six, eight messy foot prints in contrast to the regular position of the marble tiles. A few feet away, there are dust particles on the spinning wheel that look like they will fly and fill the room with mist if she takes another step. If one of them so much as breathes, he risks inhaling the very molecules that measure age.

So she hisses. What they hear are not molars grinding but two fang-like materials fencing at one another. There seems to be smile in the sound too, a gritty impatient smile that has seen a thousand lives end without changing its form. She hisses again in some effort to huddle them closer to one another, so that if she claws at one of the them she claws at the rest of them.

But even spiders run out of tales to tell. There will be a time when her elements will fail her, when, even the very thread she walks on will come to a tangle and strangle her at last. Her poison will know its final home there on the base of her throat, where tragedy and nature itself will force it down.

For now, though, we indulge her in her fancies if only to color the world for one tenths of a second.