Rootlessness

For a long while I have believed that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that in sum, the phenomenon may be as "natural" a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anit-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

- Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet -

Don Sinatra and the Mango Tree

The old man’s snores echo about the maloca. He is seated in the dirt, leaned back against a support beam in the corner of the enormous hut. A doomed mosquito wanders into the cave of his mouth. A fire smolders next to him, exhaling a thin line of smoke that snakes its way up the thatched roof and out an airway a hundred feet up.

A voice trembles through the still air: “Hello?”

A white parrot, high in the rafters, cocks its head. “Hello?” it calls back.

Still asleep, the old man mutters: “Hello.”

“Hello!” cries the parrot, encouraged.

“Hello,” mumbles the sleeping man.

“Hello!”

“Uh, hi,” says the first voice.

The old man’s eyes spring open. He clamps his jaw and crunches the mosquito. He blinks. “‘S that you, Cucumber?”

(The parrot’s name is Cucumber.) “Hello!” says Cucumber.

“Uh, hello,” repeats the first voice. “Mr --?” It is the voice of a child. “Don Sinatra?”

“Yes!” The old man’s up now but still half-asleep; his reply comes out, accidentally, as a bellow that ricochets around the maloca, building until a dozen “Yes!”s stampede out the front door like a herd of startled cows.

Five silent seconds waddle by. “May we come in?”

The Don peers down at the red adidas shorts tied below his gut. “One minute.” From a hook on the beam he plucks a long string tied with woven palm fronds dyed black and white. He wraps the garment about his waist as a kilt. He stalks towards the door, out of sight; just as he is about to leap into the doorway, he realizes he forgot his jaguar mask. He creeps back, retrieves it, fumbles to undo the string. When the inside of the mask touches the skin of his nose, it begins to transform. The sides grope towards his ears, find purchase just behind them in his scalp and suck the rest of the mask to his visage. The features squirm about a bit and then settle. The sleek nose sniffs the stale air; the flattened ears twitch; the jaguar eyes, slitted and green, slide open. The Don works his jaw side to side, licks his teeth with a rough tongue.

“Hello?” The voice repeats and Don Sinatra turns.

The Wise and Wondrous Don Sinatra leaps into the doorway.

A few feet away are two children. The boy jumps back, eyes wide; the girl, having found an interesting ant, hardly glances up.

“Hello, children,” the old man says. A grin contorts his bespeckled jaguar face. He quite likes children, and a fair few seem to end up on his doorstep. It’s that damned Franco.

“Are you the shaman Don Sinatra?” the boy asks. He’s obviously shaken by the reception, but looks boldly up at the snarling jaguar. Perhaps four years old, he is the younger and smaller of the two, with short brown hair and large brown eyes. His left arm trails behind him, holding the hand of the girl, who looks about seven or eight.

“Yes, yes,” the old man says, sighs, and grabs his nose. The jaguar mask comes off with a grand slurping sound. “I used to be. Sometimes I still am. Come on in, then.”

As they enter, the girl peers up and about, taking in the maloca without expression. The boy is too excited and nervous to notice anything. He watches the Don closely as they are led across the room to the fire. Don Sinatra carefully hangs the jaguar mask, thinks for a moment, then disrobes back into his red adidas shorts. He tosses a couple fronds and then a log on the fire. The Don motions for them to sit.

“Welcome.”

“Thanks,” says the boy.

“Hmm… what to do with you?” the Don muses. “Ah! Would you like a Mango?”

“What? Fruit? No. Thank you. We’ve come for business.” There is a weary stubbornness in the boy’s voice.

“Of course you have,” agrees the Don gravely.

“I want you to heal my sister.”

“Ah!” Don Sinatra nods sagely. He steeples his fingers, frowns, winks. “A Mango, my darling boy, is just the thing.”

“No thank you.”

Don Sinatra sighs. “Then that makes this whole thing rather more complicated, you know.”

The boy is pacing back and forth and seems not to have heard; his little brow crinkles in thought.

“What are your names?” Don Sinatra asks.

“I’m Arthur,” says the boy, “and this is Sara.”

“Does she not speak?”

Sara had glanced up briefly at her name.

“Not much,” admits Arthur. His hands are clasped in front of him. “Not anymore, that is. That’s part of the issue, you see -- in fact, that displays the issue quite well indeed. My little sister barely talks now, never laughs, hardly eats, and won’t smile. About a year ago, I found her apartment in Vancouver a wreck and so I took her to live with me down in California. ‘The sun’ll help,’ I told her. But it didn’t help an ounce. She was just so… morose. It started to infect my wife, my kids. I didn’t know what to do. I took her to a number of doctors, psychiatrists mainly, but some of those naturos, too; that didn’t do any good. Some seemed to motivate her: she’d come home with a brusqueness (but not her old gaiety) and begin ‘getting her life in order’ and ‘starting afresh’ and whatnot but that simmered out like an untended fire. So it’d been two years, at that point, and I ask myself, ‘Arthur, what else can you try? Be creative!’ and I remembered going on this boat trip up the Amazon River a few years back -- I got a package deal with my resort in Cartagena -- and our guide Franco telling us about you. I didn’t believe him at the time, obviously, but, well… I was desperate, and so I called him up and he arranged everything: We stayed with him out in the forest and fasted for three days, after visiting this maloca in reality an’ all to get permission from your family. Then Franco prepared the… concoction and we drank it and sat beside the river and waited to see the reflection of a god.”

“And did you?” the Don asks.

“Oh yes, it was Sara who spotted him --”

“-- her,” interjects Sara. “She was laughing.”

“... who spotted her,” continues Arthur, “and somehow she got bigger and bigger -- Franco shooed us towards her and then we… entered into her mouth and were walking along the bottom of the river.”

“Did you drown?”

“No, we were fine. We walked back up to the shore and everything was very similar to how it was before but so much… louder, fiercer. I experienced the forest like…. Anyway, Franco was gone but he’d said to just go ahead and follow the path to your maloca. And now we’re here.” For a long moment little Arthur looks completely lost; his brown eyes gaze in a stupor. They focus on Don Sinatra. “So,” he continues, regaining some of his composure, “can you heal her?”

The Don is silent for a long time. He looks from one child to the other. “You’re not really children, are you?” he asks.

“Of course not,” replies Arthur. “This whole child-body business is a bit strange and inexplicable for the both of us, I’m afraid. We weren’t told this would happen. We didn’t even notice it until we stood outside there, but I think it happened when we entered the mouth of the god.”

“Goddess,” corrects Sara.

“Did you enjoy your expanded experience of the forest, children?”

“Yes,” says Sara without hesitation.

“I don’t know,” says Arthur.

“Well then. Reflect on that for a moment, my darlings, that journey. Now, let’s look back further, to the root.” The Don leans forward earnestly and stares into Sara’s eyes. She looks away. “Don’t retreat, child. I want you to reflect on your time in wherever it is you were. What were you feeling?”

Arthur speaks with a crispness of tongue; Sara, on the other hand, drawls her words out slowly, as though dragging them with tremendous effort from mud. She says: “I felt... miserable.”

“I see. Go on.”

She stares back at him, looks down; small tears well up in her eyes. “Lonely.”

“Ah,” says the Don sadly. “Ah, yes, I see. Disconnected, my darling?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s a clear enough prognosis: Your spirit is starving.”

“Starving?” says Arthur.

“My spirit?” asks Sara.

“Indeed. Your spirit craves succulent life juices! You’d better come with me, then, and have a Mango of Spiritual Sustenance.” The Don leads them out the back door into the forest, where it is complete darkness.

“What happened to the daylight?” Arthur asks.

“It got bored and cavorted off,” explains the Don. “Now, children, this is the Garden of Life.”

Arthur reaches out and takes Sara’s hand.

“I can’t see a thing!” he whispers.

“All for the best, darling,” the Don says. “Trust your feet and just listen.”

~

Pale light breaks the foliage before them and suddenly they’re at the top of a hill. Sara gazes at the full moon and the million stars around it, wondering what seems so odd about them. After a moment she realizes that they’re moving, very slowly, and not in a streak across the sky, things in the sky usually move, but in lazy circles, figure-eights, or perhaps they’re floating about randomly. She shakes her head and looks about. Long grasses wave at her; to their left is a large tree with thin green leaves and fat yellow fruit sagging in the branches. A thin river snakes in the distance.

“It looks so small from here,” says Arthur.

Sara shakes her head. “Don’t you know where we are?”

“We’re in the Amazon,” Arthur says defensively. “That’s the River, that’s the Rainfor..  wait…” He gazes around at the dancing fields. “Where’d the forest go?”

“We’re back home,” whispers Sara.

“Oh.”

Don Sinatra lets them have another moment to themselves, then points at the tree. “And this, my darlings, is the Mango Tree of Spiritual Sustenance.”

He leers happily down at them. “Pick a Mango, children.”

Arthur looks at Sara; she shrugs.

“Oh, I see!” the Don says when Arthur picks his, and “ahhh…” when Sara hers.

“What?” Arthur asks.

“That is very significant, little Arthur. You see the slight yellowing on the rotund side of your mango? Yes, yes, quite indicative.”

“Indicative of what?”

Don Sinatra winks, and then sighs. Sara has noticed he does this quite often and still has no idea what either means. “It’s just not quite ripe enough, you see. Never will be, no matter how hard it tries -- and oh it shall -- for now you’ve plucked it, of course. The matter shall settle slowly.”

Arthur sits in the grass, frowning.

“What about mine?” Sara asks.

“Yours,” replies the Don, inspecting it, “has several tell-tale implications of the most profound sort regarding the temperance of your underlying nature. So it does.”

“What’s my underlying nature?”

“Why,” continues the Don with a soft cry of surprise, “don’t you know it, child? Can’t you feel it in the Mango? The softness! The colour! A gorgeous specimen, indeed, very fine to look at and containing oodles of lovely juices -- but,” he takes a great sniff of the fruit, then holds it out for Sara to do the same, “the smell is a bit off. We’ll find that it’s got some rotten bits it’s hid ever so well.” Sara frowns down at the mango cradled in her grasp. “But now, as with your brother, it is plucked and its fate is set. You may as well eat it, or else toss it to the ants. But, as you both well know, seeing as you’ve made the very long journey from wherever it may be that you’re from and from whatever bodies you may jig about in out in what you so innocently dub reality into these dainty little ones, the choice is yours to make. Will you eat the fruit you’ve plucked, my darlings?”

“Sure, I guess so,” Arthur says. “Do you have a knife? Here, Sara, I’ll cut out the rotten bits for you.”

“Okay,” says Sara.

The Don intones, with the finality of an epitaph: “No.”

“But you said hers is rotten. What if we trade? Or -- I can pick you a new one, Sara.”

“No, how absurd. You only get one Mango of Spiritual Sustenance, you know.”

“But now I don’t really want mine either, not if it’s unripe.”

The Don ignores him. “Children, children. Before we eat the sacred Mangoes, I must tell you that they are, in fact and in deed, sacred. So I shall: they are sacred. Fruit is one of the purest essences of life we can ingest. And these, being magical sacred dream fruit, grown with the greatest care from this existence, such as it is, and the greatest love from my own self, such as it is, are even more so infused with the unripe and rotten juices of life! Plus, you picked them yourself.” The Don’s smile stretches his face to such unnaturally taught degrees that his eyes are lost behind a jam of wrinkles. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” replies Arthur.

“No, it doesn’t!” the Don barks, amused. “It’s all nonsensical, of course, that’s the fun.”

Arthur sets his mango in his lap with great deliberation, and turns a cold and steady eye upon the Don. “When are you going to make my sister better?”

“I’m not.”

Arthur takes a deep breath and anger flashes in his four-year-old’s eyes. “I was told you could.”

“Oh, you silly boy. That was a lie. I can’t do squat for her that I haven’t already done.”

“But you haven’t done anything.”

The Don glares at Arthur, who glares fiercely back at him. “Are you blind, child? I offered her a mango.” He looks to Sara. “How are you feeling, my darling?”

“Excellent,” she replies. Arthur blinks in confusion at the sight of her smile. “Very… peaceful.”

“And yet you haven’t even eaten your Mango!” the Don cries.

“It’s ever since we entered the forest, Arthur. Something inside me shifted. All the thoughts and worries and anxieties that were bouncing around my head -- I became so aware of them, and then… they just sort of settled.”

“Yes, you’re one of those. I could tell the moment I saw you. You know, you can have that peace anytime you like -- and anywhere, though some places are more challenging than others. But! that’s where the healers are most needed. Don’t you want to be a healer, my darling?”

“Yes,” says Sara.

The Don looks back to Arthur. “Look -- there is one thing you can do for your sister; one thing and one thing only and you’ve gone through ever so much just to do it, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have. Tell me what it is!”

Don Sinatra sighs gravely. Shadows chase each other across his face. “I shall tell you,” he says.

“Well… what?”

The old man leans forward, the children lean forward; when he speaks his voice is a hoarse whisper. “Eat your own damn Mango!” He lies back in the grass and winks at Sara.

Sara nods. “Please, Arty.”

“And you too, sweetie,” the Don urges. “Even the rotten bits -- especially the rotten bits! After that, we watch the stars dance.” He yawns as they bite into their mangoes. “Then we take a nap and you go back to your silly reality.”

“What then?” asks Sara. “What if I go back to the way I was?”

“Well of course you will. Your old habits will return, and your loneliness along with them. For such as you, loneliness with always trail you a mangy old dog. It’s your choice how to treat it -- so far you’ve been terrified of it and been obsessed with pretending it doesn’t exist. Stop that. It’s but a shadow of yourself, dear girl, your deepest, darkest shadow. So love it, dear girl, give it all the compassion you can. Let it be and live your life, even if it’s whining at you: go out into the world and listen and talk and dance and laugh and sing and eat and read and sleep and keep an eye out for other people’s mangy dogs so you can scratch them behind the ears. And if you ever need me, Sara, you know where to find me. I’m but a dream away.”

They are all silent for a while. “Thank you,” says Sara finally. She’s feeling quite sleepy, having eaten her mango down to the pit and then licked her fingers. “Goodnight, Don Sinatra.”

“Goodnight,” mumbles Arthur.

“Goodnight, children.”

~

They awoke hand-in-hand beside the river. Arthur guiltily removed his hand from hers and then made a show of scratching his moustache. “Well, that was strange,” he said.

“What happened?” asked Franco.

“He invited us in,” began Arthur.

“And he took us to our old home.”

“And he fed us mangoes.”

“Good, very good. Sara. How’d yours taste?”

“A bit nasty,” she said with a grin, “but I kinda liked it.”

The Legend of Bastet

The Plum Room had a deep and furry purple carpet, milky purple walls, an ominous purple closet with a few token purple childrens' pajamas, purple... to keep it simple: the number of things in the room that were purple was in the neighbourhood of all of them. There were precisely two things in the room that were not purple. The frame of the seven-foot-tall painting on the east wall was light brown, thankfully; however, its only occupant was a plum the size of a smartcar on a field of purple grass under a purple sunset. It was most likely that the muse of this endeavour had been a wily purple river gurgling from the mouth of wine bottles, lingering in the fertile mind of the painter, flowing through his blood and cascading out his brush. Noemi adored the painting. The other entity in the Plum Room that was not purple – and every bit as unshakeable a fixture as the grossly mesmerizing painting – was a cat, which was calico, and thereby slightly purplish when it was nighttime and no lights were turned on and it was sleeping in the middle the cavernous purple bed as it was when Noemi arrived the night before.

Noemi had known that it would be there, had dreaded it, in fact. Bastet – the creature's name was Bastet, in honour and irony of the Egyptian goddess – bordered on the gargantuan. When Bastet had appeared in the cabin many years before as if from the bowels of some other god who had had a bit too much to drink and far too much to eat during a feast of some sort the previous evening, her grandfather Teague had told Noemi, then nine-years-old, and her younger brother Malakai the story of beast's journey to the Plum Room (after speculating aloud over and dismissing the god's-bowels theory). Bastet, Gran-Tea claimed, was in fact a stunted mountain lion that had, by a lucky turn of fate he had explained in superfluous detail, been locked in an elementary school. Lucky? Kai asked; Yes, was the answer, lucky for her. Gran-Tea had continued in diligent precision to relay the consequences, with the reaction from his grandchildren transforming from wondrous impatience to traumatized horror.

 The agile, bony fourth graders and their more succulent teacher hadn't given the feline goddess much resistance, but once the word spread Bastet, crazed by her lust for human blood, had quite the time breaking down the door of the next classroom, the third graders having barricaded it with little chairs and desks. However – their grandfather winked cheerily at them – the mountain lion prevailed by circling their finger-painting-bedecked fortress and climbing through an open window the third grade teacher was smoking out of. They had all played a big game of tag – you're eaten. At this point young Kai began to sob in deep, quiet torrents and Noemi had held him close, staring at their grandfather in terror. If Tea felt any guilt, it culminated only in his trailing off somewhat. He took a tea break and left Noemi and Kai alone in the Plum Room with Bastet's undulating, purring bulk for a very long five minutes.

When he returned he dove back in immediately, fresh with a second wind: half a dozen teachers mounted a valiant but doomed counter-assault, an unsuspecting janitor listening to Bob Dylan on his headphones lost a leg and the plump, lovable nurse – whom he insisted must be as lifelike as possible to save the effort of Noemi's and Kai's imagination and so plied Noemi for details, including the name, of their own school nurse, Miss Judy – lost her sanity and embarked upon her own short-lived, needle-wielding rampage. Every good story, Gran-Tea said, needed a light side story, just to relieve the pressure. At the cusp of the climax, he had again paused to insist that his story contained the two most crucial ingredients: a happy ending and a moral. The happy ending was that Noemi's cousin Michel had tamed the child-devouring monster by a great feat of courage and wit and brought it back to live in their family cabin because Noemi's uncle Joel (pronounced like Noel, their grandmother insisted) had some ridiculous mountain cat hair allergy.

With her brother in his arms, Noemi mustered for the first time what would become a dangerous and comforting weapon of her future: reason. How, she asked, had this occurred in her school without her knowing? Tea explained very patiently about humanity's flawed grasp of the space-time continuum and how time, like a plum, was circular; this, coupled with each individual's separate yet intertwining realities, made it possible for Bastet to have made it to their home after eating dozens of their classmates without it actually having happened in their realities as of yet. Just wait, he said, winking once more.

With that, Tea left his two grandchildren to grapple with the secret moral of the story, asserting this to be the only work of the listener of stories – inherently lazy souls, listeners, he never stooped to such a level. He was wrong about that, of course, as exemplified by how this story would belabour Kai's imagination for years to come (including inducing an ill-fated trip to see the presumed-soon-to-be-late Miss Judy after breaking out in tears several months later on his first day of the third grade after he caught a whiff of tobacco from his teacher's jacket). Malakai learned quite a lot from the story: for instance, Michel became his new hero. Tea began calling a bewildered but unperturbed Michel the Cat Whisperer, and the name, following a bit of molding, stuck: he became Mitch the Cat. The pseudo-moral Kai invented stuck as well, long beyond his agonizing fourth grade year in which his anxiety grew into the monster his imagination prophecied. He grew convinced that some catastrophe awaited those around him. Noemi had never figured out what encompassing world truth the story held for her, but it had provided her with one useful and lasting lesson:

 Don't – mess – with Bastet!
And she didn't.

The Widow's Story

Once upon a time I made the most wondrous White Webs, oh osprey. They gleamed in the sunlight and in them I drank the finest life juices. I was the colour of no colour, oh osprey, I was pure. This colour of your feather, here, the black widow rested on a white tip. I loved my husband, though he was foolish and fat. We had many children. I was happy, oh osprey. I was happy.

Once upon a time, oh osprey, we spiders lived together. We made webs together and joked together and ate together. My community lived in a glade in a glen far to the east of here. There was a mountain to the south and hills to the north. The mountain was peaked with the colour of no colour, oh osprey. I have seen many since, ones larger and grander, yet that mountain I loved. The winds that came through the glen were soft and regular, and food was abundant. I was beautiful, oh osprey, I was known as the Queen.

She resumed her work and her story after a long moment's pause, threading layer after layer. But a few of my fellows grew jealous of me, oh opsrey. The Golden Orb-Weaver wanted to have the highest webs, the largest, the most dazzling. She plotted with the most dangerous and cruelest of us, who was called the Wolf or the Webless. He is sly and had many burrows in our land. His eyes are sharp, like yours, oh osprey, and every day he saw me high above him as he hunted.

She paused again, a thread hanging limp from my plumage. Have you ever spied the nest of a golden eagle, oh osprey, and coveted its shelter, the young it holds?

Yes.

Have you ever driven another eagle from her nest?

Yes.

So you know how it is, then. She busied herself once more. I do not resent the Webless or the Weaver, not anymore; I no longer hate them. I now understand that the Wolf is very lonely, and lonely beings do regrettable things. The Orb-Weaver is obsessed with beauty and therefore stupid. I pity them both.

The Webless one day spoke to my husband. He told him of a kill he'd made and dragged into his burrow. It is up the mountain, he said, hidden in a secret spot behind a copse, teeming with life. They would feast and then later they would hunt together. My husband agreed and the Wolf leaped away and waited for my husband, leaped away and waited, again and again. By the time they got to the copse, for there was a copse that hid a healthy spot to hunt, my poor husband was exhausted. Come, called the Wolf, soon we shall feast. He led him into his lair, where in the middle lay a very fat horsefly. Eat! he cried, and as my husband gorged his silly self the Wolf pounced upon him and sank his fangs into my husband's back and the Golden Orb-Weaver came out from where she had been hiding and wrapped him in a golden tomb. The Wolf then hitched him onto his back and carried him down the mountain to our glade. He called all of the other spiders to him. 'Here I have a present for our queen!' he called, and they all agreed it was a very fine capture, large and rich in smell. They dragged it up one of the tall pines from which hung my web and gifted it to me. A sac of gold, they said, a tribute fit for a Queen.

The Widow left her spinning and retreated into the nape of my neck. She curled up there and sat silent for a long time.

My husband was delicious, oh osprey. His was the sweetest life juice I have ever tasted. From that day on I was cursed with the hunger for my mate's blood. When I was done I asked who had prepared such a feast for me, and the others told me it was the Webless and the Weaver. How extraordinary, I thought, for those two I thought had little to offer. I was proud and I had eaten of my husband and so taken his foolishness into me. I asked the others to bring those two to me, so I could thank them. They were slow in coming, perhaps fearing a trap themselves. I sat in my center for two days, content, as the winds tore holes in my web. I did not wonder after my husband. Finally, the two tricksters came to me. They were very nervous, the Weaver winding along my web delicately, the Webless bumbling and getting stuck. I thanked them and then I begged for more. They agreed, slowly, and the next day brought me a fresh golden gift.

It was my son. I know all of this because the Webless told me, one night, as we sheltered from a storm together long after I he had fed me half my children. He had watched me, with malevalent and pointless delight, grow fat and lazy on the blood of my kin. My White Web fell into disrepair, and one day it broke altogether and I tumbled from it and lay in the leaves, too engorged to move or make another. No more presents came for me. I watched the Orb-Weaver thread a lustrous Golden Web where mine had been. I dragged my weight to a burrow of the Wolf and he, knowing I was too weak to fight, told me what he had done. Remorse did not drive him to explanation; he was a desultory being. I spent a year in grief for my husband and my children, living underground in old gopher holes and feeding off whatever I could chew. At some point I began weaving again, and made webs thick and labyrinthine. I caught ants and tunneling bugs; I learned how to live a new life, and I grew terrible and ferocious. I had entered into the dark and so darkness I became. When I reemerged into the daylight after many winters had passed, the Wolf did not recognize me. I pretended to be a stranger, and we spoke at length and I realized something else had shifted. He spoke to me very differently; I was alluring to him in my blackness, where before I was repugnant in my purity. I decided to use this as a weapon. It was only the second time he had told the story, again to me. I asked him where the children were of this Queen. Had they known? Yes, he replied, they had known, and they had fled his venom and none had cared to warn the mother. He also admitted to finding a taste for their blood and continuing to capture them for his own meals. I thanked him, and then spoke with other spiders, and told them the story. They came together and exiled the Wolf. Ever since, he has never had a home for long, and is now also known as the Wanderer.

That was the last day the spiders worked together; the story had seeped into their nerves. They had been there and watched their Queen be dethroned; they no longer trusted one another. They fought and squabbled and broke apart. The Orb-Weaver was queen of nothing – but I was not done with her.

I had found one of my lost children, who had heard the Wolf was gone and had returned to the glade. He was grown now, and much resembled his father. I pinned him, told him who I was and what had become of me, and as he shrieked I raped him and then I ate him. I grew pregnant with many children and on a moonless night, just before dawn, spewed my spiderlings into a drewdrop. As they kicked and drowned I drank the drop. That evening I gave birth a second time to a cluster of small spiders I called Dewdrops. I nursed them and fed them and told them stories of revenge; I made them sly like the Wolf and the Weaver. When they were old enough, I led them in the night up the tall pine the Wolf had dragged my husband up so long before. We found the tendril of the Golden Web and at dawn they invaded and the Weaver fled. Ever since, Drewdrop spiders have invaded the webs of Golden Orb-Weavers.

I was not finished, oh osprey, I was still filled with hate. I searched the hills for each of my children of the colour of no colour. The males I seduced and I gave birth to many new children, colourless and black. The ones the colour of no colour I ate. All colourless spiders I ate, until there were none left, only my black self and my black children. Some of the kinblood I consumed spread from my stomach through my organs and to my skin. There it marked me. There was a pause as she considered herself. I think it looks like a web with four attachments and one struggler in the middle. She emerged from my feathers and displayed her abdomen. What do you think, oh osprey?

It looks like an angel, I answered, without thinking.

What is an angel?

I don't know. And I didn't; I was as ignorant as she.

Anyway, my venom had grown strong. I taught my children to build thick webs in corners; I had lost the craft and taste for glittering White Webs. We multiplied across the lands and were feared.

That is how I became known as the Widow, oh osprey, and now I live with you here by the sea.