"Spiders on the Brain"

 

[Doodle courtesy of Wesley Wong]

"You've been drawing spiders a lot lately," he said to her.

She shrugged and swept her pen across the sheet of paper, creating a web of thin lines and broken angles. "I don't know. They've just been on my mind."

In bed that night, he woke and found her turned away from him. The lamp on her nightstand was on and dimly glowing. He peeked over the crest of her shoulder and saw that she had a notebook open and a pencil in her hand. Another spider menaced him from the corner of the page.

"Hey," he whispered, "drawing again?" Her hand kept moving, creating lines on the paper. He glanced at her face and saw that her eyes were closed. And then he saw the first of the spiders crawl out of her ear.

"Let's Be Friends Instead"

Disclaimer: These aren't really called red-spider flowers, nor do they "behave" the way the flowers in this piece do, nor were spiders even the first thing I thought of when I saw them the other day.

Every spring, the red-spider flowers climbed over each other for the privilege of falling. It was an honor to be the one to initiate that sense of wonder in people by falling down first or, failing that, to later catch someone's eye by falling down alone, poetically. The red-spider flowers were always quite vicious to each other, trying to crowd one another out even as buds, except for a day one April when two blossoms growing next to each other in a cluster decided that enough was enough; life was too short, especially for something as beautiful as a flower. And so, unnoticed among the red petal rain falling in the park that day, two flowers tangled their stems together and took a plunge in the name of friendship.