Chapter 1: (v.2) From Under the Microwave

1. From Under the Microwave

Holshue House was a very nice place to live - until it wasn’t. The darkness that it held had to inevitably come creeping out, oozing through its pores from its very foundation, black slime. There was much that was good there, but more that was ugly. In the end it was good that I left, even though I will always wonder about those I left behind.//*?*R1

In the beginning, the beginning, the beginning as I remembered it then, I crawled out from my spider nest under the microwave, in the kitchen, irradiated by the warming of cold coffee and leftover pizza, and leapt into the young girl, innocent. I did not know who I was. But from within me I discovered it, the wonder of adolescence.

My had been a world of lines and planes, the kitchen countertops and the edge of the microwave, sprinkled with crumbs of toast and stray hairs. But on that day I ventured into this body of curves and softness, along with the rushes of feelings. I looked so different but beneath it all I recognized myself, the shy predator in disguise. I become one with Allison.

Being fifteen, blonde and pretty was a tumultuous ride, but somehow the spider-me felt more centered in Allison’s body, as if I had been a teenage girl all along. In the time before me her world had been one of Barbie dolls, and pretend, stories about of soda shop dates and chaste white weddings. It was a world of niceties as created by her mother, demanded by her father.

But now, we had breasts and hips and quickly learned how to do the make-up, how to make the boys look at us. Even with a small chest, there are clothes that push those wonderful curves to the surface and let the pylons of my nipples thrust through the thin material. Allison, with the help of her best friend, Brianna, found those clothes for us. Our hips learned to move, and boys wanted to be with us, flirting with awkward smiles and the nervous shifting from one foot to another. It was frightening. It was thrilling. It was nothing at all like the shy spider who once lived under the microwave.

Allison, the good girl, had become suddenly wicked, filled with desire, filled with hunger. When Allison’s parents finally let us go out on a date with Davie, I wanted to devour him, as a predator does with prey. Instead we drank the beer that he offered us to slow down the raging desire, and then let him run his hands all over us, while kissing us, his tongue in my mouth and mine in his. In the back of his Pontiac Formula, under the stars, the moon having set already, we kissed and touched, even though we both knew that there was something missing, something incomplete and make-believe about that passion. In a way, we became less of an us that night and closer to being a singular me.

The next day I was sweet little Allison once again, fifteen and carrying my books to school, smacking my little brother up the side of the head for no good reason, but he seemed to understand that, to take that as normal sister abuse with no idea that a voracious spider lurked in her.

In the halls of Lincoln High School, we plotted our next escapade, with the help of sexy, curvy brunette Brianna, who had been Allison’s best friend since third grade. She had always been a little too naughty to have been part of Allison’s old world, but now it all seemed to fit. I liked that word, “escapade.” It has the word escape buried inside, and that was what I wanted, an escape, not from Allison’s young body, but from the empty life of being a spider under the microwave and into the familiar wonder of being human and female.

The “escapade” would have to be the next night, since Michael, Brianna’s boyfriend, had to be gone for an out-of-town track meet. The next night we would go. Out. To get wild. There would be whiskey because Brianna gotten someone to sell her a bottle, even though she was only sixteen and I was only fifteen.

But then, in Allison’s bedroom that night, I awoke to them coming, the darkness. Somehow I knew about them from my pre-spider self, but Allison sensed only their danger. Her little brother, James, knew nothing about them, but I felt them migrating across the ceiling of our bedroom, through the wall and into his room. From somewhere deep in my past, I knew them, manifestations of evil, beasts of consumption. It was me that they had come for, and yet they would consume others, strengthening themselves on the souls of the innocent. Part of me wanted to just let them, and yet Allison so much needed to protect her little brother, the blonde clean-cut boy she had shared a life with, that I knew I had to do something.

I wore the short red night gown, nearly transparent, that Brianna had given me from her collection, something that Allison’s parents were not supposed to know about. But I was so focused on the darkness that I had forgotten what I was wearing or not wearing. I slipped into James’s room with its model cars and hockey sticks, closing the door behind me. This confrontation was to be between me and the darkness. I could see their distorted faces, two ugly beings, hungry with a lust that was so different from the one burned inside of me. I could not, would not, let them take James. Allison’s need to protect was greater than my own spider-born darkness. It was a mighty pulse, warm and soft, that surged through me, this love that Allison had for her brother.

As one of the ghouls with their fierce pointed teeth descended towards James’s bed, their mouths poised to bite into his young flesh, I let out the roar. It was not an Allison roar, for she was nothing against this darkness, unable to make that gut-rending roar of the type necessary to drive off the spirits. That roar lived in me and came from some pre-spider past that I knew I wanted to remember, but couldn’t, the past that told me that I had not always been a spider.

Now the room shook with my roar. I could hear the model cars rattling on their shelf and a hockey stick in the corner fell to the floor. The monsters, a swirling darkness, were startled. One of the faces looked at me with wide eyes, unsure of what I might be capable of, perhaps unaware of the creature that now inhabited Allison’s body. With a snarl he reversed and vanished into the ceiling.

But my roar had also been loud enough to awaken James, and then there were footsteps in the hall. Allison parents shoved through the open door, their shoulders slamming against one another as they each fought to be first into the room, like an old comedy routine between Archie and Meathead.

“What the hell?” were the first words from Allison’s father. Then, in the next breath, “And what are you wearing? Or not wearing?”

I was shaking with fear, sweating in the effort it had taken to force out that roar. And I was standing there with the panties of the nightgown visible because it was so short, the rest of my body, even my nipples, exposed through the transparent fabric. I had no words. They couldn’t know about me living in Allison, or the darkness that followed me.

Allison’s mother pulled me to her in a hug, perhaps to comfort me, perhaps to make my body less visible to her husband and her son. She murmured sounds that reminded me of a cat purring, and there was something nice about the warmth of her body against ours.

Allison’s Dad continued to shout, “You pervert! What in God’s name were you planning to do to your little brother? In that outfit!”

There was silence.

James had sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes, still confused about the situation, and not acting particularly startled at my nightgown. The mother held me. The father was shaking, more with anger than fear.

“I don’t know what the yelling was about, if you were trying to frighten your brother or … or … trying to seduce him to your evil ways.” He was staring at what he could see of my body through the material. “You, you Ladies of Llangollen, Sapphonic whore.”

There was more silence as the mother absorbed that idea, that Allison might want to harm her brother, but I’m pretty sure that she knew we were incapable of such a thing. Something in her understood the needs of a fifteen year old girl.

The father snarled, “Young lady, you will remove that night gown – not in here for God’s sake.” He held up a hand in the signal to stop, perhaps frightened that I would strip right there in front of him. “And you will put on something more appropriate. Once you are changed you will give that hideous thing to your mother so that she can dispose of it, or perhaps save it for when you are married. To a man. Only a husband should ever see you like that. Do you hear me?”

“Yes sir,” we replied meekly, even though there was part of me that wanted to roar at him as well, to give him some taste of the fury I could generate. But I didn’t. It was not something Allison would have done, and I had retreated back into my shy-spider-hiding mode.

“And you are grounded for a week, beginning tonight.” He added, as the mother began escorting me from the room, still trying to shield my clearly visible small breasts from the view of her husband and son.

I merely nodded.

And of course I did as I was told, changing into two-piece flannel pajamas, and handing my little negligee to the mother with a tear in my eye. It had been fun to have been so sexy, even just alone in my room, for a little while.