Rough draft
“It happened again Carla.”
Sylvia clutched at her glass of warm milk and stared at the clock. It was really late, or really early, depending on your point of view.
“Yes ma’am. That not good.” Carla was as sophisticated as they came, least, that’s what Dan had said when he brought her home which was just another way of his saying that she’d been very expensive. He’d thought Sylvia would appreciate a real Franken 3000-Series, a deluxe model with a lifetime warranty to boot. She’d been annoyed by the design from the beginning, the heavily accented English, the obvious ethnic stereotyping. Sylvia felt her old liberal college self cringing at the the notion of a Mexican android housekeeper.
“If I try to do anything Carla, if anything should happen, you have to stop me.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I mean it. Do whatever you have to.”
“Si ma’am. I will. Whatever I have to.”
Dan was up and gone before the sunrise, off to the firm to get started on a busy week of mergers and acquisitions. They’d agreed that Friday night would b the night they’d finally sit dow and settle things, once and for all. He’d taken it well, Sylvia thought, the petition for divorce. She woke and streched and spoke into the wireless intercom, “Carla, eggs and toast please. The usual.” The intercom would wirelessly transmit the message to wherever Carla was in the house.
Sylvia hit the button on the intercom a second time. “Computer, shower. Sylvia’s setting.”
The house responded, getting the shower ready, turning on the bathroom fan and setting the lights just so. Meanwhile, downstairs, Carla was busy putting breakfast together and would have it ready and perfect in time for her mistresses’ arrival.
Sylvia ate in silence as Carla headed off to do her programmed rounds. She checked her email, her stocks and the latest news on her Compad while she ate. A fly buzzing around the room, zipping back and forth between it and the kitchen caught her attention. Purposefully, she balanced a small piece of scrambled egg on her for and shook it off onto the table a little ahead of her to her right. She waited, knowing the fly would notice it sooner or later.
The fly raced back and forth between the two rooms, zipping here, zipping there. Sylvia focused on her toast and her feelings about last night. She knew she had to deal with them, face things head on. It felt good at the time, natural, just like it had last time, last week. Dan was many things but bad in bad was surely not one of them. She’d allowed herself too much wine. She’d let him give her that first kiss and pull her closer like that. She’d stubbornly held on the the notion of sharing the same bed, instead of sleeping elsewhere. One thing lead to another. He was rough. Sylvia liked it rough. He pressed her down, using his weight to pin her on the bed like a butterfly in a bug collection. He thrust himself up into her, hard. He stared down at her taunting as she lie there, digging her fingernails deep into his back.
“My bitch,” he whispered, “you’ll always be my bitch.”
She felt wave upon wave of pleasure roll over her. She touched herself, there at the kitchen table, as she closed her eyes and remembered the night before. The fly suddenly landed on the table, ahead of her, to the right, landing on the small piece of scrambled egg.
Sylvia turned her head and opened her mouth just the slightest bit. A quick sudden blast of white spittle flew out, neat, clean, compact, shooting across the table and landing atop both the fly and the piece of egg. The fly tried to move but it was trapped in a neat wet wet blob of spider’s silk. The more it struggled to get free, the more it seemed to entangle itself. Sylvia used her finger to scoop the silk encased fly and piece of egg on to her fork. She smiled as she felt the squirming fly twist about and try to buzz in her mouth. She pressed it hard to the top of her palate with her tongue and felt it pop.
The first time it happened, the week before, she caught herself awake, staring at Dan as he slept. She was awake, she knew that instinctively, but at the same time, she was dreaming. She’d bitten him already, his eyes had come open from the sudden pain of her fangs piercing his neck. His muscle’s tensed and he he jerked but the suddenly froze up and was unable to move. Swiftly she was atop him, coughing up chunks of silk and using her long thin black legs to spin his body around, wrapping him tighter and tighter into a cocoon. She’d feed on him later she thought. Her long skinny black legs, all eight of them reached out and caught hold of the strands of web that covered the room. The light reflecting on the silk made all the webbing look like so many lace curtains, hung oddly about, stretching from the ceiling down to the floor.
A voice in her head pointed out, “We’re already naked. The change would be easy now.” It was then that she snapped to, a cold feeling of dread washing over her. She got out of bed quickly and headed downstairs. She’d talk to Carla about it, as if she’d understand. She would, wouldn’t she? She was supposed to be that sophisticated, after all. She seemed to understand, nodding her head as Sylvia recited her dream. Or, maybe that was just what she was pre-programmed to do, seem to understand.
“I don’t hate him.” Sylvia downed another shot of vodka. “I just don’t love him anymore. Not like I used to. I need something, I don’t know what. Something else. Something not him.”
Carla nodded as if she too knew the meaning of needing something else, whatever that might be.
“Find yourself. Do what you want to do. Do whatever makes you happy.”
Sylvia could remember Dan kissing her on the forehead afterwards. He’d gotten a promotion to senior partner at his firm. There was no need for Sylvia to work anymore, if she didn’t want to. He would take care of them. She could do whatever she needed to for her own happiness. She was free.
She’d taken to painting, to blogging, to taking classes at the local community college. She joined a book club. She kept busy with a personal trainer three days a week. she did hot yoga on her off days.
While Carla did her rounds, working on her chores Sylvia would often walk around the house and take it all in. Dan had bought the house. It was his. He paid all the bills. She was free. If she was so free, she often asked herself, why did she feel so trapped?
It was while looking for something in his study that she realized that Dan had lied to her. As she moved things around on his desk she found the paperwork on Carla. She was no Franken 3000-Series. She was a knock-off. Carla looked over the paperwork. It was clear from what she read that it wasn’t even a good knock-off.
“You lied to me.”
Dan was checking messages on his phone with one hand, drinking a glass of wine from another.
“What hun?”
“You lied to me. About Carla. She’s no Franken.”
“Huh? No Franken? I never said she was a Franken.”
Sylvia stared at him and felt something change inside her. He had paperwork, from his lawyer, it was all legalese to her but from what she could understand, it implied that in case of divorce she’d be getting next to nothing. She didn’t remember the pre-nuptial agreement he had a copy of. She wondered if it was real or not. He was, after all a lawyer. Perhaps he’d simply paid to get one made.
She sat in the living room, with all the lights turned off long after he’d gone to bed. He said he was being gracious, giving her two weeks notice to find a new place to live.
“My lawyer said I don’t have to even do that much but I wanted to be fair.”
In the dark she could hear the house, the heater coming on. Carla was in the laundry room, on her charger, enjoying her two-hour recharge, there was a humming that was just loud enough to hear. Sylvia began to undo her blouse. She unsnapped the top button on her slacks and let them fall to the floor. First one then a second, a third, then a fourth, long black leg cam out of her back. Sylvias arms and the two legs she was standing on began to change now too as she leaned over, within seconds it was all done where Sylvia had been standing was now a large black spider, roughly the size of a German Shepard. It raised one leg after another, as if testing them and then climbed up over the couch and out of the living room, headed towards the stairs.
Silently it crept along the floor reaching the foot of the stairs. Quickly it took the first few steps before climbing onto the wall and continuing up that way. It headed up to the upstairs, along the wall, Walking over family portraits and pictures along its way. There was the official wedding portrait from eight years earlier, there was the honeymoon photo of the two of them in Aruba. There was the masquerade ball, the mayor’s ball, for charity. He went as a pirate, she as a witch. The spider continued its crawl and went up to the ceiling, following it towards the master bedroom.
Dan lay curled up in the covers, in the center of the bed, fast asleep. Quietly a large black form crawled along the ceiling coming to a stop above him. Laying down a base of silk to secure it to the ceiling it reared backwards and used its front-most legs to reach down to the bed and sleeping figure down below.
Copyright 2012, M.R. McCaffery. All rights reserved.
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