The Number of Spiders You Eat in Your Sleep Is the Number of Times You Call Home

I am unemployed, and on my blanket is a spider the size of my palm. We make a silent pact. I will let it live under my bed if it can live up to what it symbolizes: abundance (mothers too, but oh, god, not now). I will be filthy. Lure it flies and gnats and then it can bring me coins. Cash. Birthday checks. I leave out mugs of cold coffee and crumbs of midnight brownies and bottles of root beer. The spider does its job. I pick up lucky pennies and luckier nickels and a twenty in the storm drain. Then I don’t wash for a week. My hair sticks to my forehead with a sheen called depression, but I don’t find any money. I look under the bed and the spider is upside down curled into overwhelmed fingers.

*

My anxiety is a blister. To pop it, I date one woman who is a psychologist, then another. I am searching for self, maybe for closure. I have attachment issues—this is obvious. I cannot bear to be left. It is only a little easier if I’m the one to walk away. My relationships overlap, a wave after another, crashing. Are you the one? Are you? I am sand. Look, write on me. I cling, I stick. Walk over me and you’ll find me in your house for weeks. The psychologists each tell me to find a therapist, one who isn’t for kissing. What a shame I didn’t see one as a child. All I hear is shame.

*

Am I thirteen? Fourteen. My hands bleed from different angles. On the backs because I wash and wash and wash. On the wrists because I can’t wash deep enough.

*

I am ten and the sky is a painful autumn blue and the oak leaves are coming down down as I twirl through them. A darker shape falls, and I stretch out my arms, net my fingers. The squealing velvet is a baby bat. How my mother yells rabies and Did it bite you? You could die. But I didn’t catch it, I say. My hands did.

Washwashwash.

*

There is a spider in the corner of the bathroom. Why don’t we call them mommy long-legs? There is usually a spider in the corner. There is usually a mother’s voice in my head.

*

I run away when I am twelve. I’m so angry that I run into the November night wearing only a t-shirt and jeans. At the public garden down the street, I hide within the shadows of a rhododendron. My parents only find me because I am too cold to outlast them. My mother says I didn’t bring a coat because I didn’t really want to leave.

*

I hide in the shower. Forty-five minutes. An hour. Who knows what my parents think I’m doing in there. It’s dark and hot pressing into my neck and back. I curl up in the tub and rock. Drive my knees into my throat until it’s difficult to breathe. Become small and bounded again.

*

I have a dream and there is red brick like the aqueducts, but these arch only as high as a high ceiling. My body isn’t there, but every color is so deep and pristine I can feel them. Mossed walls. Ivy light. The air is fresh and filled with the ring of dripping water. In the middle is a perfect teal pool lapping at the walls. Floating over it, I understand that it is bottomless, but that isn’t what’s terrifying. This place? It fits inside me.

*

In college, I wake up with a horrible taste and something crunching in my teeth. I don’t go home for Thanksgiving. We talk on the phone, a strange weight tugging down our words. It’s been a while since we last spoke. I was the one to call. I always am.

Kathryn McMahon is a queer American writer living abroad with her British wife and dog. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, Jellyfish Review, Split Lip, FLAPPERHOUSE, Atticus Review, and others. Her work has received nominations for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart, and has been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She was recently a finalist for the first-ever SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. On Twitter, she is @katoscope. Find more of her writing at darkandsparklystories.com.