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The blue four-door whined to an earsplitting stop as Alicia pulled up to the curb. From the car, the house looked completely dark. Based on first impressions, she couldn't tell if her new housemate was the sort to be in bed by 8:34 PM. The yellow and pink remainder of a contract signed in triplicate lay in the passenger seat beside her. That was her name by the X. I am really doing this. She killed the headlights, grabbed the document, and stepped out into night.
Alicia shut the door nearly a full second before remembering the flashlight was still in the car. "Dang it," Alicia soft-swore out loud in frustration.
She opened the door, leaned in, and grabbed the bright yellow safety flashlight Zack had bought for the camping trip they never took. One of the fancy ones that charged by shaking it up and down. The kind available exclusively at Ranger's Camping and Guns and Ammo. While the minutes of vigorous shaking required to charge the thing made it a terrible light source, owning one had on occasion made sitting in darkness seem more appealing. They called it My "Handy" Flashlight, with the "Handy" in quotation marks to make it clear the name wasn't chosen on accident. Real mature.
Alicia sighed in advance and flipped the switch to "on," already knowing what would happen--or rather, what wouldn't. With the door closed and the interior lights off, there was enough charge left for a momentary flicker. She tossed the useless thing back in the car and turned toward the house, tripping on the gopher hole by the sidewalk - the usual spot. Somehow she found it whenever it was dark, which turned out to be almost all the time.
From where she stood beside the car, the pair of streetlamps at either end of the block provided barely enough light to see the next step in front of her. She shuffled tentatively along a crumbling sidewalk as she approached the rented basement she called home. No way would she see a spiderweb before she felt it. Alicia learned that lesson the first time she didn't see one. The second time, she remembered it. The second one being a lot bigger certainly helped.
Keeping a hand out about 12 inches in front of her face, palm sideways, she stepped tentatively along the dimly lit concrete. "Not tonight, guys," Alicia bargained as she shuffled along the well-worn path, watching in front of her for hazards. "Please?" The door on her side of the duplex stood at the end of a sarcastically long stretch of sidewalk from the road, through the trees, between the spider condominiums, and down a pitch-black staircase. She was close enough to the dense foliage engulfing the basement entrance that silhouettes of bushes, leaves, and branches were distinguishable. "Aren't you too tired for this? I am," Alicia pleaded with the arachnid condo board.
The pale glow from the street disappeared as the mass of unkempt shrubbery shrank the final 10 feet of the path into a smothering tunnel of foliage and shadow. She strained her eyes searching for a way through that touched the fewest branches, not that the nearly imperceptible glow from the street offered that good a look. Alicia turned her body sideways and tucked in her shoulders, crouching low as she stepped into the oppressive overgrowth and tried to scamper through as untouched as her robust frame would allow. Once she got inside, she intenspiderspiderspiderspiderspiderSPIDER
Alicia halted in place and immediately backpedaled out of the tunnel of leaves and branches. A long strand of spider silk brushed the outside of her wrist as she yanked her arm back. The web came along for the ride. Alicia backed up on the pavement to buy herself some space until she realized she had one less step of runway than she thought.
Leafy fingers grasped at her back and shoulders, beckoning her in. Sharp wooden tendrils gouged into her back, sides, neck, and right ear as she tried to find her balance. Judging by what felt like a thousand tiny needles in her calves, the thistle was coming in nicely.
Her frantic, grasping hands ripped away leaves and pencil-thin branches in search of any available locus of balance. From her lips came a sound at the midpoint between a donkey laughing and a seal coming home to find its entire family murdered. Was that a twig or a spider? Twig or a spider? Nevermind that. Is it still on me? Alicia lunged to safety, flailing her arms needlessly as she freed herself from her deciduous captor.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Alicia mused. "AAAAAA!! AAAAA!" Ducking as low as possible, she fled down six concrete steps to the freshly painted basement door that looked nicer than any other part of the house she had seen so far. She felt a tickle on her wrist. No. She looked down. Please no.
The rising racing tingletingletingleTINGLE the sensation crawled—no, scampered—up her arm. Alicia panicked and flailed, trying to use her arms to wipe down her torso while using her torso to wipe down her arms. She whipped her body around 180 degrees, stopped, and then did it again. It seemed better than not doing it. Was that an itch or a tingle? Itch or a tingle? An itch caused by a tingle?
Where was it? She felt something and lifted her arm, twisted her wrist, and examined the area from every angle. In the barely-there light of a pair of dim bulbs "illuminating" the entryway flashed a thread of silver. It was still on her wrist. Just the web? She roughly wiped the unclean arm down with her hand, jammed it into her purse, snatched out her keys, and plunged the square one into the lock while depressing the button on the handle with her thumb. Four spastic attempts later, she twisted the deadbolt all the way unlocked and nearly deposited herself bodily on the entryway floor.
Instead, a tangle of arms, carbon paper, and purse straps helicoptered into the entryway as the door smacked against a wall in need of a good cleaning. There was a bang and the sound of a spring vibrating back to stasis as Alicia regained her balance. She slapped and swiped at herself top to bottom, desperate for some sort of proof she wasn't carrying passengers.
After nearly two minutes, she was prepared to certify her immediate person as 100% spider-free with an unknown margin of error. Alicia vowed not to come home again without hedge clippers. Tomorrow, the neighbors would meet the new HOA.
She slipped off her work flats and flung her keys into the Jennetti the Yeti mug on the end table by the door. Then she turned on a lamp. So began the homecoming ritual of The Light Situation. Before renting her space in the duplex, Alicia and Zack had always visited the house early in the day. In this neck of the literal woods, where twilight only fell a short distance, it didn't take long to realize the problem: lights were sold separately. She and Zack searched every hallway, room, closet, and ceiling; other than the bathroom, there wasn't a single light source or even light switch anywhere on her end of the house. $226 was a lot of money out of Zack's moving abroad budget to spend on lamps. It was a lesson gift wrapped in a headache.
As a prospective renter, the "eccentric" layout of the home seemed charming and quirky. As a tenant, it felt cramped and isolated. About five feet directly in front of where she stood in the basement "foyer,” the hallway forked. On the left, a long set of scuffed hardwood stairs led up to a landing. To the right of the staircase ran a parallel hallway ending in doors to the linen closet and her bedroom.
Then she turned on a lamp. Up the steps at a jog. Then she turned on a lamp. On the landing, a couple feet to her left, was the door to the kitchen and the attached laundry room/closet/spider preserve--the one common area of the house. Privacy was maintained by a sliding chain lock that the owner had installed by drilling into the molding on both doors that led to the kitchen. It was a crude, practical, and, above all, cheap way to divide the house in half. She turned right and continued along the landing. Then she turned on a lamp. On the west walls were large windows and a heavy wooden door to a backyard that nature had almost entirely reclaimed. What passed for a "lawn" amounted to an eight-or-so-foot-wide strip of ankle-deep grass marking where domesticity broke like a wave against the tree line.
At the end of the hall was the carpeted bathroom–not just the only bathroom, but the only carpeted room on her side of the duplex. It felt like a joke the architect somehow played specifically on her. The room barely fit a sink, toilet, and standing shower. A marble basin with separate hot and cold taps protruded from the cracked tile wall. Alicia preferred to use the one labeled "cold" since it was at least honest. She rubbed her soapy hands together for as long as she could tolerate the frigid water. Back to the kitchen to eat.
She slid the incongruously shiny chain out of the lock, turned the doorknob, and stepped onto the beige linoleum. What looked like a torn-off scrap of printer paper hung from the refrigerator door by a piece of scotch tape. Probably a message from Robert. It could wait. Alicia opened the freezer and was momentarily startled by the presence of unfamiliar groceries: instant egg rolls, frozen pizza, Fudgy Pops. Right. Robert.
Alicia helped herself to packets of pre-cooked chicken, beans, and rice she had sealed in plastic wrap and frozen over the weekend. She opened the refrigerator door to examine this new biome. Imitation ham 'n cheese flavored Lunchkey Kid meals seemed like a favorite. Pudd'n Shooters, Is This Milk? soy beverage, Granny's Li'l Secret cookie dough, Orange Buster, Captain Rickett's Coconut Rum. No insulin, somehow. He keeps bread in here? That's it, I'm calling the cops.
Alicia finished preparing her meal, grabbed Robert's note off the fridge, and sat in the dining room, which was the aspirational title she had given the folding chair and card table in the middle of the kitchen. She shoveled in a spoonful of rice and took a moment to admire the handwriting. Immaculate. Elegant, controlled strokes. Every letter uniform. His teachers must've loved him.
Alisha,
I bartend at The Evidence Locker, so I'll be gone most nights. If you ever want to drop by, feel free. PS: I still don't like loud music! -R
It felt like good news. Not bad news, at least. Working at different times meant being at home at different times. Hopefully, that meant there wouldn't be much noise. She tossed the note aside and took a bite of chicken. Alicia reached for the contract. "Now what have I gotten myself into?"
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