Hannah sat in her beanbag stroking Swizzle. The cat’s girth was growing in direct proportion to his unwillingness to go outside. Hannah liked his warmth on her lap. If she thought about nothing but the immediate task of scratching behind Swizzle’s ears and keeping the rumbly motor inside him purring, things were okay.
Her bottom hurt where her father had hit her for lying. Just thinking of how his face had been a twisted fist at once so angry and terrified made her want to start crying all over again.
She had been dragged up from the depths of ugly sleep by motion, sliding. She’d opened her eyes and looked right up into the pale, angry, scared face of her father. This morning her father took a moment to process the empty bed, the picture frame on the floor, his youngest daughter blinking sleepily on it, before whispering, “Where’s your sister?” The memory of the spiders tumbled back as heavily and hard as stones off a dump truck, and Hannah started to bawl. Her father asked her again and again until Hannah finally stuttered through sobs, “The spiders took her.”
Before she could explain that she’d had no choice, that if she’d let them in she’d be dead too, or if she’d screamed he and Mum would be, her father spanked her. Hard. And stalked out of the room.
Hannah hung around in a distant orbit as her parents set fire to the morning with raging phone calls, storming to the car and screeching away, storming back, standing at the door and yelling for Miriam. The fire died and became something quiet and tight-lipped. When Hannah heard her name mentioned, it was quickly snapped up by her father hissing about “ridiculous dreams.”
It was ridiculous that a black, silent army of spiders would come in the dead of night to steal one girl and, bested, would take her older sister. But it was true. So Hannah sat in the beanbag, petting Swizzle and nursing her still-stinging bum, trying not to think about what had happened to Miriam after the spiders got her. She was still in her beanbag when the police came. When the lady police officer came over and asked Hannah if she’d heard any funny noises in the night, Hannah knew she would be a fool to say anything but “No.”
Miriam was down in the woods. Hannah searched inside herself for the smallest feeling that disagreed, but found none. But if it hadn’t been Miriam, it would have been her. The fact that she was so relieved not to have been taken by the spiders and cocooned up alive and screaming, to be bitten and poisoned and sucked dry or whatever else spiders did made her feel guilty and even glummer. Something had tried to get her yesterday, leaving the horrible dead bird disguised as a crystal unicorn. It had failed, and instead had taken Miriam to the woods, taken her because Hannah had chosen to hide silently in her room instead of doing something.
As Hannah sat, her lap warmed by Swizzle and her buttocks by the hot sting of a hard slap, surrounded by a buzz of men and women in blue and her parents clenching each other’s hands, she realized what she had to do.
She’d do something now. She go down to the woods and try to save her sister.