The following is a story from our upcoming release I’ll Tell You a Love Story by Couri Johnson, due out April 14th, and originally appeared in Penultimate Peanut. We hope you enjoy, and if you’d like to purchase a copy of the book, just hit the button at the end of the story.
THERE WAS A WOMAN WHO THE SPIDERS FELL IN LOVE WITH. You knew her in high school, but you weren’t friends. She was plainish. She still is.
But that didn’t matter to the spiders. They thought she was beautiful. It was something about her hair. It’s long. She’s never cut it, and it’s very blonde. A spider saw her waiting for the bus one day, and it fell in love just as it was laying its eggs. When its young hatched and ate their mother’s corpse, they also ate that love.
They lived in her house under her bed. When she slept, they would slink out from underneath and do small things to let her know how much they loved her. No, they didn’t write messages in webs. This is not a children’s story. They didn’t lay eggs in her skin, either, so don’t ask.
They kissed her. With their little pincers, they nipped her skin inch after inch. She woke up itching every morning, covered in small angry welts. Her skin was always speckled with tight black scabs from where she scratched the bites open with her nails. Whenthe scabs fell off the spiders collected them. They tied them up intheir silk ropes, and hung them like chandeliers from the underside of her bed. They went on biting, and she went on scratching. The spiders weren’t poisonous enough to kill her, but each night she got a little more numb, until she could hardly feel anything at all.
One day she called the exterminator, and the house was filledwith gas. The spiders all died. She swept the remains out from under her bed, along with the small altars they had built from her skin. After that, no one ever loved her like the spiders did. In fact, no one ever loved her at all. She went on not feeling, and the spi- ders went on not living.
That’s just the way it is with love sometimes, I guess.
NEW book release
I’ll Tell You a Love Story by Couri Johnson. Order the book of which Tim Jeffries said, “Surprising in their originality, filled with broken wisdom, and with a refreshing use of language and imagery, these are stories to savour and mull over one at a time but which add up to a satisfying whole.”
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