another fine way to be bitten by spiders

Keith's head seemed to be swelling, rapidly and painfully. Then it popped and he woke up and his head still seemed to be swelling, not rapidly but with a more certain pain. He was on his back and he was looking a few inches to the left of the sun. The dream he had been having had already trickled away. He tried to remember by closing his eyes, but the pain coming from his head and face had replaced it all, except for a blurring woman's face. And a thicket of some kind. And a small animal of some kind, maybe a bird. And a conical object. An ice cream cone? he thought. No, a torch. Yeah, a wooden torch. God damn I want an ice cream cone, he thought. And so it was that the last strands of the dream faded and were replaced by the information of the morning.

It wasn't the amnesia or the headache that was bothering him. He was used to the amnesia and the headache because he drank a lot. He thought of the amount of alcohol he drank as "a lot". A bystander would probably marvel at how skilled Keith had become at walking the thin line between drunk and dead, but Keith had developed this skill without noticing. He didn't realize that if he somehow managed to stretch his blackout across the rim of one more pint of beer or shot of whiskey one night, his liver would give up trying to purify him and he would piss blood in his sleep until his blood was all gone. His subconcious managed to pull the switch and shut him off and save him every night. But conciously he just thought of it as "a lot".

Keith's right hand was on something hard and rough and he thought that he was in the gutter for a moment until he realized that it was warm, too, and then he recognized the feeling of stubble on a woman's calf. He reached his other hand up toward his temples with the thought of maybe rubbing away enough of the pain to sit up and examine his conquest but before it got there it was blocked by a pile of something sticky. He brushed it aside and it plopped off the side of the mattress. Since Keith took vomit as a fact of life, he didn't think anything like "great, another bar floozy threw up on me in her sleep". But he might have; it wasn't a unique occurence.

In fact nothing about this morning was unique until Keith had rubbed his eyes and temples a little bit and sat up and groaned out a dry 'wuuuuhh'. In doing so, his hand automatically moved toward his left jean pocket where he kept his cigarettes and patted his thigh there. The resulting jolt of pain was enough to make his eyes fly open and send his sodden brain into adrenalin overdrive, which for Keith was a mode of functioning roughly equivalent to normal. He quickly ascertained the situation in this order: 1) there is a giant and extremely painful swelling on my naked left thigh. 2) I am losing a lot of blood from a twin hole in its center. 3) My left hand is covered with tiny spiders and several hundred are crawling in all directions from the softball-sized egg-sac-thing that I thought was vomit. His brain took in all of this and considered it while his mouth opened and quivered and he made small gasping sounds and held his hand up in front of him. Then, like an egg timer, his brain had a course of action worked out for him and he let out a shriek.

This was enough to get the woman next to him to turn over, sit up, and look at him. She blinked twice and shrieked, too. By the time the next moment was over she had turned perpendicular to Keith and pedaled her feet, pushing the bedding away from her and sliding up to a standing position against the wall in one frantic motion. This motion was enough to send the sitting Keith slowly tipping back and over and off the mattress. He had stiffened and was stuck in the sitting position with his hand a foot in front of his face. As his left shoulder headed toward the ground, his eyes changed to a deeper focus and he considered the naked thighs, torso, and finally face of his guest before his vision moved quickly across the torn-open ceiling and finally landed on the pulpy, red egg sac and a view across the wooden floor of the room.

By this time, Linda had already rocketed over him and across the bedroom of the squat. She had a single thought on her mind and it was of shoes: finding some, putting them on, being safe from the seemingly endless flow of spiders that was spreading like a blanket over Keith's head. None of the spiders had made it across the bed to her, she saw. In four seconds, she was mostly dressed and sprinting down the stairs and outside. In five seconds she had quit drinking. She wasn't the kind of girl that went to roofless squats with guys like Keith. It had been a rough night.

Keith had a single thought on his mind, too: he was happy, because it seemed he had fucked Linda. Linda would occasionally appear at one of his regular places and though he hadn't spoken to her before last night, he had wanted to fuck her for a long time.