“to disappear—yes, that sounds nice.”
chin up, chump. today’s worth it.
in second person, my vision sharpens.
adulthood, stop pretending so damn hard.
i still believe in this, y’know.
Mother, I have molted again.
In a twist of time, I am again a baby arachnid in its first moments of life: translucent, glowing in my soft exoskeleton, never having killed. I am a child with all my insides turned out, stretching my livid limbs so that I may harden into a dynamic creature.
I ride across your shoulders as we travel to the home of a man we do not know. You whisper through the ridges of your flat back, We are vivacious, viviparous, the many-toothed villains of fairy tales. The words flow into my belly, where I breathe them in. I did not know the word stigmata until I found these four openings in my abdomen, smooth and cold as the cover of a hotel Bible—free of water, clean of blood.
That is the story of soft creatures in a hard land, but we match the landscape as it was writ. I examine my stigmata: the air flows in; it flows out, and my humors simply pump from one end of my body to the next. We are great feats of geometry. We are machines of evolution, a scaly contour of the fossil record. I am dry as our desert burrow. But to the man, we are still signs of deep, ancient waters.
I imagine the man adrift at sea, the sails of his ship flapping in the wind. I imagine the darkness of the depths of his ocean, playing the part of a sea-creature, waiting in the wings of the waves. I could hold my breath for six days there, turning my insides into my outsides, following the shape of his boat, a stamp of a silhouette emblazoned onto the surface of the sea by the sun. He would not, could not, know my eyes. Humanity looks for something there, mama. It is something we will never know.
Now I am the color of sand and as soft as a starfish, as watery as the memories of your first kill. I am passive as a pawn on your back, yet I know where the script shall take us, when to look for my cue. It is cellular, automatic. Cold and Plutonian. That we should be descended from ice, and have moved through these waters, to emerge onto rock—I too question our position on this planet. My exoskeleton grows darker with the movement of the Earth around the sun as I cast off my casing, scuttling towards the man that lives by the sea. We have once again molted into an inhumane magnificence, and we spin on into the depths of this alien planet as we have for millennia.
wait, what are you waiting for?
