BACKPACKING SPIDERS AND MONKEYS OF NOTE
Word Count: 315
It’s growing. Now I can feel it, spider-leg fingers melting the skin on my shoulders. Hot, it is. Hot streaks that will blister.
I search with my back to the mirror. It is invisible. I know that it’s there by its weight pressing my spine and its wet hiss in my ear.
One day I was three playing hide and seek in a closet. In the quiet and dark I lay on a thick woolen shawl that smelled of my mother’s perfume. I soon was asleep and when I woke up, a monkey sat grinning in the slit of light from the door. We played jacks and sang songs for a while.
No one found me. I don’t think anyone looked. I waited and waited then opened the door and peeked out. Naked and tall, my clothes shred to ribbons, I stepped into a room that had moved on without me. Hand-in-hand, the monkey and I settled in.
He and I traveled the world in a book. Pages billowing out like sails caught the winds that brought us from the verdant depths of South American jungles to the rickety skyline of China. We walked west for a time then took a right turn up to Russia but didn’t stay long.
Now we’re back, so many years later, and the monkey is grumpy and old. I’m tired of his stories, I’m sick of the past and I think to myself that I should have left him in Taiwan where he seemed to be happy.
He knows I want to be rid of him. He tightens his grip. The pain courses down through my bones. There’s nothing else to be done. With my father’s old razor I cut at the fingers and they shrivel like spider-legs falling away.
In the mirror, I still see nothing except that I’m standing up naked and tall.
Thanks for the link. But really, really nice. I love “I should have left him in Taiwan where he seemed happy./He knows I want to be rid of him.”
Susan, I was honestly left open-mouthed and speechless by your piece. I was hesitant to even attempt to expand on it yet it filled my mind to the inclusion of any other story concept until it got written.