Wind shivers through the gauzy drapes then collides with a nail. For a slothlike moment, the man—a Gen X welder living off workers’ comp—peers through the gaps in his floor, the buckteeth of century-old hardwood.
He squints, imagining a kingdom of spiders below. Little tiny gallows for the sacrificial class. Taxes and “holidays” and unrelenting propaganda. Spider Congress, full of shifty and complicated tarantulas, the embodiment of raw power. Spider judges with little tiny gavels and wigs made of floating cottonwood.
But spiders are too smart for these rituals of corruption. Among the Araneae, it’s the social spider who is the outsider. The man, limping with his charred leg, could get behind that arrangement: a world of upright loners.
And if you can believe it, the very next moment, a wolf spider clobbers across the oak floorboard. The man instinctively smacks it. By the time he recoils—“Why did I do that? Can I still decide not to? Is it too late?”—the tiny creature is dead, its inner goo mashed into a pancake of cephalothorax.
“Welcome to this world,” the man mutters, shoving his fingers into strands of his hair, tiny webs, a growing wreath of fur: Fuzzy like wolf spiders.
A breeze yanks him out of this nonsense.
He stares through an open window at the lake. On the opposing shore, two girls dawdle beneath prop umbrellas — high schoolers en route to Prom, stopping at the floral cove for a photoshoot, with gowns that complement their waving tresses.
“Like butterflies,” the man says, almost shouting. “Puddling, roosting, gathering at the edge of water.”
One of the girls is wearing elbow-high silk gloves. The verdant glow writhes with fingers, twinning notes, an outlay of breeze: every event belongs to someone.
Which is why the girls are anxious: They seem to have lost their Prom dates and their ride and now they’re stranded by the town lake. Every peach-dark glint of sunset electrifies their nervous laughter, echoing along the water.
Eventually, they lull into a sigh, then into the slowness of relief: They don’t have to go to Prom. They could walk around the lake instead.
They’re probably both thinking: “I mean, we could go pretty much anywhere we want.”
They don’t talk, only gesture. They know each other well enough to have established a crude sign language as shorthand: Like how the gloved Prom-goer crab-pinches her fingers to say, “All of this is too much hassle.”
The other girl nods. They tiptoe into the water, as if floating.
Call it an act of defiance against New Paganism, which defines happiness as the indulgence of anything you desire and the destruction of laws and social limitations.
The girls’ anxious lollygagging has become an opportunity to arrive at a more stable contentment. Besides, it sure feels nice to be so dolled-up by the lakeshore.
Before the girls can wordlessly philosophize further, they start shrieking — in a singsong kind of way — as their limousine screeches into a lousy slide-brake while “Baba O’Reilly” shakes the windows:
Prom regains its appeal.
Good art does this—it makes a person feel cool, which is to say young.
The girls squeeze up through a giant moonroof beside six other teenagers in gowns and tuxedos, howling insults at the treeline and the fishermen and the neighboring town with its “Mr. Pibb-ass” mascot.
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