Spider-Blood (prose)

Sweat rolls down my body, I'm on fire but still blistering cold. All this sleepless night I've asked myself every question I know I don't want answered. Dawn's tentacles creep through the crystalline blades of grass sheathed in dew, up to my toes, all the way up to my face. The answers unresolved await me in this hypnotically repulsive light that has slithered across the landscape of my skin and forced its way into my eye sockets. My jaw slams open and the air in my lungs rushes out with a brazenly mute mutiny. I close my eyes in the hopes I won't see myself dying, as I drown lazily in the ruthless brilliance of the sun... I can't contain it.

I am a river when it won't stop raining, I am a wolf with a key to the cage, I am the chemical of love, I am calm for I am the storm of desire itself. From the clouds I stalk my corporeal dependency, whose skin begins to seep bright blue liquid. It looks like I'm sweating the ocean and though I know I should feel it, I don't, and these clouds cackle at me as if they can see what's coming. I'm bleeding a stream of enigmas through my pores, a puddle forms at my feet, my jaw snaps back into place and my teeth bare furiously. The lids of my eyes fly open to stare into themselves, their irises wreathed in scarlet and gold.

From the clouds up above I look down on myself and this time I feel it before I see it - this bright blue puddle gives me hope. It swirls around me to the beat of the drums from every song I've ever heard in a matter of seconds. I witness it but I don't understand. The liquid explodes outwards and vanishes into mist, but only for a moment.. In what seems to be the same instance, it flies back into a dishonestly lifeless puddle before bony and blue-bloodied hands grab my ankles and yank me intently through what I thought was the floor. The fire in my eyes is extinguished..

I feel your optimism and it puts me down in the same way the morning demands I rise. Well realism isn't quite realistic and pessimism is a close friend of loneliness, so what do you say when you find the truth? I look upwards and upside-down through a two-way mirror into the clouds above but below, at what I had thought was myself, and I wonder if hope is real and why I ever believed. I realize I don't think I'm dead, but how could I be alive with no air to breathe and eyes of ash?

I think... many things. None of which are true beyond what I love. What is made real is what happens when I choose, but only if I believe. Maybe some questions aren't supposed to have answers and maybe the liquid spiders tunneling into my veins chose to be blue because they could see through my pale green skin and knew the color of my blood when I did not. I need some oxygen, I need a sleepless night now and then.