scared of the storm

The thunder is punishing.

Stuffy evening heat pushed you out of your airless home, and then a cloudburst chased you into the shadow of an oak tree. Lightning flashed with vindictive regularity even when the rain let up.

Now, petrichor, the smell of earth after rain, leaps up from the earth in this small park. Suddenly the air is fresh and clear. Even though the lightning still strobes through the clouds you feel peaceful. Your heart is free of the malaise that is never far from the edges of your thoughts.

Damp but not sodden, still sated on a recent meal of young family blood and offspring, the world and your stomach demands nothing of you.

You practically skip under the lamps that light the path. From every tree, dripping water outlines how empty this place is. No one to observe you, no one to challenge, no one to project their desires or try to control you.

You spin with your arms stretched wide and head thrown back, breathing deep the delicious sense of freedom.

Did you think of me, then? There is no doubt I was thinking of you.

The lightning eventually breaks the sky’s uneasy truce with the earth. A sheet of water hits the ground like Thor’s hammer. You shriek and run for the safety of another tree.

This one doesn’t pass quickly. It doubles and redoubles. You grin to see the hysterical torrent rage on, but cannot deny that you are now soaked to the bone. The river running down the tarmac path is drier than you. Black band T-shirt and leggings are not a great look when the weather becomes “vertical sea”. Even your hair is unusually tame, running like streaks of oil down your shoulders and forehead. Worse, you’re growing cold. So little fat to warm you, no matter how tightly you hug your ribs or stamp your feet.

Perhaps you’ll have to walk home in this. You surely couldn’t get wetter. But it feels strangely like a defeat; like you were chased from the throne of your freedom. And you are done being removed from your thrones.

You see the walker before he sees you. His tartan umbrella carves a pocket of dryness out of the heavy air so his rain coat is mostly dry. He hurries forward at a pace along the path-cum-stream.

Unsure on your plans, you nevertheless want him to know you’re there. This is your kingdom, he should acknowledge its queen.

He looks up and stares at you a while. Did your will manifest in fact? You didn’t extend any power you are aware of, you think.

At length, and after a little deliberation, he steps off the path and makes his way up the gentle hill toward you. A path light he passes illuminates a cautious but concerned expression on sensitive features, and then backlights him into a figure climbing over puddles to get to you.

“Hello! Are you okay out here?”

You consider the question as you study his face, his tall and narrow frame.

“Wet, and a little hungry.”

He steps closer, holding out the canopy of his umbrella. The rain collects and combines in the oak tree, hitting the fabric in irregular but much louder reports. “You shouldn’t be out in this. Would you like my umbrella?”

You smile faintly, watching this fly do all the work in approaching the spider. “Maybe we can share for a moment?”

A brief hesitation ends in him stepping close. Now you’re in the rain shadow you realise you’re shivering. You hug yourself and smile thinly. “Thanks.”

“What are you doing out here?”

“Enjoying some freedom. What are you doing here?”

“Seeing after friends. Old man I know is scared of storms, so I’m going to check in on him.”

You detect no motion in this stranger’s stance so decide to test the force that keeps him here. “You should go then, check on your friend.”

“In a moment. I’m worried about you. You look freezing.”

“I am,” you admit with a shuddering laugh. “But I’m not sure how you can help.”

“Neither am I,” he says with a brief grin. “Do you have somewhere to go?”

“Nowhere as free as this right now.” You open out your arms to indicate the entirety of the park. “You wouldn’t want me to lose that, would you?”

“Um… no.” Seeing you shiver, he comes to some decision. The umbrella wobbles as he unzips his raincoat and shrugs a shoulder to work one arm off.

You prevent him by stepping close and threading your arms around his waist, beneath the waterproof layer. Despite it being thin, beneath he is cooking. Your skin tingles as it begins to suck up his heat.

A few raindrops hit your hair as his umbrella flaps wildly. Then he regains his balance, settling into a hug that sees freezing moisture from your skin and clothes seep into his own.

You continue to speak. “You don’t seem free. You’re out in weather like this for someone else.”

“I’m not free, really.” His voice modulates up and down in shock as a big patch of your cold soaks into the small of his back. “Girlfriend, daughter, parents. Friends. Charity. Colleagues. Alf, who’s scared of storms.”

“Sounds exhausting.” You rest your head against his shoulder.

His free hand awkwardly comes to rest on your own shoulder. “Sometimes. I wouldn’t change it for the world, though.” He’s leaning back a little to make polite space. Doesn’t mean your boobs don’t squish into his chest. “People give you life.”

“Mmh, couldn’t agree more.”

A swift and unvindictive bite into the jugular locks him rigidly in place. Your arms curl tighter around him as you take your first swallow of the whole of his essence.

Over and above the salt and brass flavour of his heart’s blood he is rich. Mouthwatering. Many layers combine in a hot, meaty swell that breaks on your tongue. You can’t help but pick apart those flavours, break him down as you drink him down. With the heat scouring the chill lining of your throat and pooling in your tummy he is enormously satisfying.

Even before he is mortally wounded your saliva trickles into his system and begins severing the myriad connections with the body. His eyes shine and stare into space as he feels your cold spirit engulfing him like a snake does a paralysed rat. You drink slowly: each heartbeat serves to push his blood into your gullet and his soul deeper into the pit yawning open for it.

Mortal hearts are traitors for you.

You’re no longer shivering. His hot blood is now a small sun in your middle, and his loved and loving spirit fills you with warmth. You sense a hundred powerful connections, glowing lines of force linking him with the world. All of them lengthen and strain as they chase him down your throat, playing upon your tongue and running tenuously across your sharp teeth…

You do not bite. Even after his body is empty and you drop him with a jaw-cracking belch to the sky. Even after his living blood is transmuted by your caustic stomach juices into a thin gruel to run through your plumbing. Even after the excess liquid has been absorbed into your bloodstream and, via kidneys and bladder, been pissed out steaming against the faithful oak tree. Even then, you do not sever him from those who love him. And so his friends worry for reasons they can’t articulate, his family call his phone fruitlessly, and his daughter spontaneously fits, screaming that she is drowning in a spider’s belly. Alf looks out the window and knows the reason he fears storms has come to pass.

Those connections drop as you mash the spirit relentlessly inside you. All but the daughter, flesh of his cooling flesh, blood of his digested blood. Heedless of the cold, nestled in his warm, dry clothes, you sit for hours carefully nurturing the strand, feeding it power, giving respite to the father from whose soul you have scraped everything except the will to see his daughter again.

The connection tingles on your tongue like popping candy.

Somewhere out there, a young child is whisked away to A&E.

Your tongue plays on the connection, finding frequencies of love and loss and madness.

You are so, so patient in your web.

Something fatal happens and the tension drops.

She appears in your vision, a figure in mercury barely fighting the tug until she looks up and sees the spider.

Smoothly she finds the embrace of your pedipalps. Only then do you permit the last vestige of her father to melt inside your abdomen.

She is hot, like her father. She kicks and screams and struggles as you swallow her whole.