Trap Spider Chapter 2

I’ve always been infatuated with other lives. I’d watch people, carefully studying every move they made. On the bus, I'd note every hidden tattoo. In markets I remember who has an itch where. It doesn't matter who you are. You can be a young, gorgeous, woman. Or an old feeble man, with liver spots. I don't care; I'm watching. How real they were. You wouldn’t believe the things people do when they don’t realize some one is watching. Not that I eaves drop on anything perverted. I live to see the scratch behind the ear, the stretching that exposes sweat stains, spitting in the bushes, and so fourth. Not that it completely consumed my time, only my thoughts. “How do other people live?” I’d ask myself, not that it really mattered.  1

The obvious downside to this, is that my own life was left untended. So now it just lies there, a shapeless shrub. Frigid leaves, pale and unambitious. And this morning, it is also sickly. My stomach is shrink-wrapped around its self. My throat is empty and tattered. Like the bark of a tree, layered and dry and splitting. Upon clutching at my chest for jagged air, I seem to have left myself a note. “Feeling Sick? –The Cure”. What is that supposed to mean? Is this how other people feel when they are sick? Not that it matters.  2

My eyes are on fire, and this bed feels sweaty. I can deduce that it is my bed, though nothing in “my” apartment has felt like my own. It is still this beige little square on the 11th floor. “Plaza Square” or “Square Plaza” I forget which. I still have to look in four different cabinets before locating the correct dish. And this damned illness is making that alienating feeling worse. Now more than ever I am waiting for the real owner of this apartment, this persona, to burst through the door “Okay, I’m back, thanks for keeping an eye on things. You can go now”. Maybe it’s a hang over. Though I can’t even remember if I drank lastnight. Must be a hang over.3

The only thing that reassures me that this is my apartment is the irony that I have a crazy person staring in my window 24/7. Mother Mary, what a pervert. That statue pasted on the front of the church right across from my building. Hollow eyes, she has. 4

I wonder why this complex is so close to that church, and why I happened to get the only apartment in which the holy virgin stares. I suppose residential development had to compromise with the strongly established Catholic community within the St.Louis city limits. Hence the twenty feet between my building and the church.  It’s sunset? How long did I sleep? Not that it matters, because I feel like I havn’t slept in days. Drown me in sweaty sheets of sickness.5

"The Cure".. I know the place. Blue-acid trip club. Rick loved it. But right now just thinking about that place make me go all shiver and cold. My head is burning, I should go take something. My skull is full of hot thumbtaks and cotton balls. "Feeling Sick?-The Cure"...thats not my handwriting. I should probably find out who wrote it.6

How often do you really hear teeth chattering? It's so theatrically cartoony. But the cold kitchen tile (beige-ish gray) is not helping my body temperature. The little green numbers on the microwave say 9:00 pm, which means 8. Did I really sleep that much? Not that it matters.7

These drawers all full of pills for everything imaginable. But they do nothing for me, other than cast jagged boulders down my tattered throat, splitting my drying insides like shedding off my winter bark... I need to find The Cure.8

Not too long of a line, though the clubs around here don't get busy untill 11:00 on saturdays. I can't stop sweating, and the street lights seem to bounce of every brick in the road and shine right into my eyes, attacking my brain. What am I doing here? What do I expect to find? Do I just miss him, and too drunk with fever to realize I'm going to his club.9

"Feeling sick?". What a voice, he has. Like a Trombone echoing in a cave. And it fit him. No wonder he was a bouncer. His skin was almost silver, it was so dark. If he were not a human, he would have been an Ape.10

I tried to reply through my increasingly sore throat, but found it too difficult, especially with the task of supporting my body with these steamed towel legs. The juggernaut bouncer saw the note in my hand. It must have meant something.11

"This way." He entered the partially filled club, as I followed. Everything was blue, like suffocating blue. Felt like some strange ice-cavern, except a couple of hundred degress temperature. The skrewdriver of the techno music threw a pile of vomit in my stomache. No one was dancing to it, which made it all the more nauseating. But it was soon over when Big Ape Bouncer pointed me to a small door, in a shadowed, uninhabited corner.12

I slowly twisted the knob, curious as to what lay behind the door, and if I really cared anyway. Are other people certain of what they care about? Do other people come to strange clubs, due to the expert advice of an anonymous note, simply for some kind of medicine which may or may not exist? Not that it mattered. Because there I was. And she was there, in this circular room. The only colors permitted were blute, white, and black. Only large enough for the table booth at which she was sitting. The blue light abover her absorbed her black hair. Her skin was almost invisable, it was so white. I only saw glimpses of her. A pale knee sticking from what I can assume is a black dress, or does she dress entirely in shadow? Her eye's were, anyway. All I saw was her cheekbones. She was still, entirely still. And for a moment, I thought she was a scarecrow, or doll. Silent, and haunting, like a nightmare that means nothing. But then she looks at me, her lips fragile and dark, ripe with potentional words.13

"You look like hell."14

This is Malia.      15