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Dimorphism

Jessi Ann York

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Laura pours milk across her skin the first night the wolf spiders begin to bother her. It turns her bath water cloudy and congeals around the edges of her drain. She won’t dry herself before getting under the bedsheets, but she will check her email twice. It’s three-thirty in the morning. Her phone screen is the only light in the studio apartment. The wolf spiders’ eyes glow white in their stacked cages along the corner of the room.

For the most part, the wolf spiders don’t move, aside from the occasional shuffling of their three clawed toes as they groom their gray legs. Sometimes they turn restlessly in circles, laying down a nest of urticating hairs in their webs. Sometimes they flick their hairs at nothing. It’s these invisible barbs that irritate Laura’s skin whenever she opens their cage doors and stirs the air to feed them crickets and mealworms.

They never try to bite her.

They never try to escape.

They have no need to.

Laura imagines they know she’s keeping them safe while Oliver, her fiancé, is finishing up his visiting lecturer position at Newman University.

Out of the twelve wolf spiders, there is only one that takes any interest in Laura. All summer long he taps at the plexiglass, like a hand knocks on a door.

She wants him to stop.

She wishes Oliver would come home.

---

“Did you look up the definition of a psychopath?”

Laura is surprised when her therapist opens their session with this question. The past month it’s always Oliver and his wolf spiders. She knows her therapist doesn’t like that she’s been left alone for a year to babysit them.

“I looked it up.” Laura lies.

She didn’t. She remembers the definition of a psychopath from Psychology 101 her freshman year of college almost twenty years ago, and how it made her throat lock up.

“Did the definition fit you?” The therapist strums her fingers across a piece of paper face down across her lap.

Her name is Lizzie. The room she uses for her therapy sessions is ripe green, like her eyes. The entirety of her house has Brazilian cherry flooring, red like the constellation of freckles on her palms. There are no photos of family or kids on her walls, just impressionistic oil paintings of figs or flowers. In the open kitchen beyond Lizzie’s living room, leftover shells of escargot dapple a lone dish alongside an empty wine glass. Laura assumes she is much younger than her, probably late twenties.

“I mean, not at first glance, but what if—“ Laura crosses her legs and fights the urge to scratch at the hives concealed underneath her jeans. She doesn’t want Lizzie to know about her reaction to the wolf spiders’ gray hairs. She gets so embarrassed around the younger woman for some reason.

“Your anxiety is telling you you’re a psychopath,” Lizzie says.

“Or, I’m just pretending to have anxiety so people don’t think I’m a psychopath.” Laura bites her lip.

“Psychopaths don’t worry about being psychopaths.” Lizzie pinches down the far left corner of the paper in her lap. “But that line of paranoid thinking is exactly something a person with an anxiety disorder would have.”

“It is?” Laura’s eyes retreat to the window. Her heart is in her throat, and she can’t tell if it’s from the hives or Lizzie validating her.

“Laura, did someone ever call you a psychopath?” Lizzie narrows her eyes as she leans forward. “Someone close to you?”

“It wasn’t Oliver, if that’s who you’re thinking.” Laura squeezes down on her engagement ring.

“You sure are quick to defend him, regardless.” Lizzie’s lips purse as she unfolds the corner of her paper. “Why is that? You always jump to protect—”

“It was a friend. In grade school. A girl.” Laura is quick to keep the conversation from switching to her fiancé.

He’s the part of their sessions she doesn’t like. Why can’t they stay focused on her problems? She’s tired of explaining Oliver’s research over and over again to people. She’d rather talk about the email she’s been waiting for.

“I want to know why you get so angry whenever I bring up Oliver,” Lizzie says.

“But I’m not angry.” Laura’s eyes fall away from the window hurt. “Do I look angry?”

---

The first time Laura realized people were afraid of her was in preschool. Her family lived on a farm twenty-five minutes from Shelbyville, Tennessee. Parents scheduled playdates with Laura, so their kids could see the animals.

They had chickens. Lots of chickens. Laura’s family sold the chicks at fairs and farmer’s markets. It got to the point where the fowl were so popular, her parents kept buying more to breed back-to-back, until the birds were packed against the walls of the coop, wings battering and scraping against the walls.

Laura would notice trampled shells when she fed the chickens. The blood-tinged yolk oozed an amber as sickly as the birds’ glossy eyes. It didn’t take long before some of the hens got curious enough to taste their own nectar.

Laura knew they were just hungry. She didn’t think much of it the first time she saw a hen finishing off an already broken egg. Afterall, Laura liked her eggs scrambled too. She told herself the bird was just making sure the leftovers didn’t go to waste. What she didn’t know was once a hen learns she can eat her own yolk, she’ll cannibalize even the healthy eggs—and the other chickens will watch.

The last day any playdates were scheduled at the farm, Laura led a group of children to the coop. The cracking and clucking from inside made a few of the kids’ eyes water even before Laura opened the door. Dirt, shit, and blood steamed in the acrid air.

All the hens were penetrating their own eggs. Scarlet chunks of chick dribbled from their beaks. The yolk congealed around their talons and fried in the hot summer air, like a yellow fungus.

Everyone ran away, except for Laura who stayed to try and understand what was happening.

No kids at the preschool would talk to her after that.

There were whispers about how she just stood there staring.

How she was poisoned by a family of animal abusers.

---

When Laura gets home from therapy, the email she’s been waiting for arrives. She turns on every light in the studio apartment and dances. The wolf spiders inch closer inside their plexiglass cages, intrigued by the vibrations of her bare feet. Laura has not moved like this since Oliver left. The spiders chitter their front legs together in response, but Laura doesn’t hear the purr-like noise. She doesn’t feel their hairs in her skin anymore either. The assistant humanities professor job offer at the community college near her hometown is the only thing consuming her mind now.

She is about to call her fiancé, the corner of her eyes blurring with hot excitement.

Until he texts her first.

“Thanks for always believing in me. Next visiting lecturer offer came in. Going to Notre Dame next. Will work out details together soon. Love you. – Olly”

The lights go out.

Stillness crawls back over the apartment.

Laura douses herself in another milk bath.

A sour smell tinges her hot skin as the bone-white water practically curdles around her. The welts from the wolf spider hairs have begun to turn the inside of her pores a purplish-gray. She rakes her nails across them, and is surprised when she doesn’t draw blood. She’s surprised even more that she wants to.

All the while the wolf spiders continue to strum their legs together in the next room, as if pleading with her to start moving again. The purring makes Laura feel as if the hairs are digging deeper into her skin.

She forces herself to take a deep breath and be happy for her fiancé as she sinks into the sheets. Only then, as she turns over toward the wolf spider cages in the corner of the room, does she notice one of the plexiglass cage doors is wide open.

It’s the one that belongs to the male wolf spider who’s been tapping at her all summer.

For the rest of the night, she holds her breath and waits for the strumming of his toes to return.

---

“And he hasn’t bothered to call you, yet?” Lizzie no longer has her folded paper in her lap. Only clenched fists.

Laura is stunned by her therapist showing more rage than her—and yet at the same time relieved. It’s validating. All week long she’s been beating herself up for not feeling excited for her fiancé.

“I’m sure Olly’s just scared to confront me.” Laura takes a deep breath. “He didn’t tell me that he’d applied for another visiting lecturer position in the first place. The plan was always for me to travel for my dream job next.”

“What are you going to do about this?” Lizzie raises a fiery, red brow.

The therapist has her dinner for after the session simmering in the background. The bubbling water is steaming almost as much as her.

“I don’t know.” Laura’s voice trails off.

She can’t take her eyes off the pot staring back at her in Lizzie’s open kitchen. It looks and smells like frog legs. Mouth watering, Laura leans forward to get a better look.

Then she winces.

The welts on her legs have turned her pores solid black. She can feel something hard and rotten pushing up inside them. She can’t wear her engagement ring anymore, her fingers are so swollen. She’s also starving from all the built stress over the last couple of days. She can’t bring herself to eat.

“What do you want?” Lizzie is still so angry for her client, she hasn’t noticed Laura scratching and drooling all over herself.

“Huh?” Laura blinks.

“Forget about Olly. Pretend he’s not in the picture.” Lizzie’s eyes are as ripe as her fig-covered walls. “What do you want?”

Laura can’t answer. She’s too scared of the dark words that could come spewing out, like the rot sizzling in the seeds of her pores. Her heart lurches up into her clotted throat. Her stomach feels so empty.

The Brazilian cherry floor boards creak under the weight of the silence.

The flowers on the wallpaper practically clench.

As the two women wait for Laura to relieve herself of the growing bile inside her chest, a house spider scampers across the therapist’s table. Its thread-thin toes fight to grip the glass with the weight of the women’s hollow stares.

Lizzie jumps up without thinking and smashes the spider with her shoe.

The arachnid pops apart at the abdomen, its legs shriveling on top of each other. Laura’s eyes dilate at the sight of the liquid spurting from the flattened creature, the corners of her mouth twitching with desire.

“What do you want, Laura?” The therapist asks again.

---

The first time Laura realized she was afraid of herself was when she brought the praying mantes to grade school. She found them in her backyard the morning before show-and-tell. The bugs’ green bodies were stacked one on top of the other, like chain links.

“They’re in love.” Laura explained to the class. “They’re having a baby.”

“They’re actually having babies. Probably around three hundred per egg sac.” The teacher said, “Do your parents know you have these, Laura?”

The teacher’s concern was outweighed by the rest of the class ooing and awing. The mantes were still very much attached to each other, the male riding the back of his larger female partner. It was the most explicit thing anyone had brought to a show-and-tell ever. Sex behind a net cage.

For the rest of the day, it was all the class could talk about. They collectively named the female mantis Blaze, for the amberish spot on her wings. And the male, Lucky. The class got to see just how lucky he was, when they came back from recess and Blaze had chewed his right eye off. The male mantis twitched and flailed, as the female braced him against her chest and sucked the green juice running down his throat.

“I don’t understand,” Laura said. “I thought they were in love.”

“They are in love.” The teacher had to raise their voice over the crying, traumatized children in the background. “Lucky is just showing his affection by letting Blaze eat his body for nutrition. For the babies.”

Laura couldn’t look away as Blaze went for Lucky’s left eye next.

She wanted to see if it would splatter like a grape or crack in splinters like a crystal.

---

The male wolf spider has been missing for a full week now.

She calls Oliver once a day, but he won’t answer his phone. He says he’s too busy calculating final grades and packing for Indiana, but he’ll call back as soon as he can. Texting is just easier right now.

“Can we at least call to talk about where I should look for the wolf spider?” Laura’s bare feet pound against the floor so hard, her engagement ring rattles on the nightstand next to her as she texts her fiancé. “I don’t want to touch it. Its stray hairs are already giving me an awful reaction. Did you see the pictures I sent you?”

“Try the closets, windows, and around doors. And keep pouring milk on your skin.” Oliver texts back.

“I’m tired of taking milk baths, Olly. And I don’t want to touch that spider when I find it.” Laura’s nails peck at the phone screen the same way the hens’ punctured the eggshells all those years ago.

He doesn’t respond after that, and she screams.

The wolf spiders twitch from the shrill vibrations in the air. Laura shudders in front of their cages, mouth frothing wet with anger.

That’s when she hears it.

The tapping.

There’s something tapping in her bathroom.

Laura stalks toward the room, her fists threatening to pull out her hair as it gets louder.

“What do you want?” Lizzie’s voice echoes inside Laura’s head over and over again. “What do you want?”

“I want it to stop.” Laura screeches as she throws open the bathroom door.

The male wolf spider isn’t trying to hide himself anymore. He’s in the corner of the alcove bathtub, where the wall meets the grout, as he’s always been, rubbing his gray hairs against the place Laura exposes herself the most.

Something about Laura’s screams have finally enticed him out.

His toes thrum against the tub, like an impatient human hand.

---

Laura fell in love with Oliver’s research first. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota was focused on preventing sexual cannibalism in endangered insect, arachnid, and amphipods species. It was groundbreaking work that could help zoologists preserve viable male specimens for additional breeding opportunities.

“I wanted to ask him why the female eats the male in the first place.” Laura confided in Lizzie during her first therapy session. “Everyone on campus talked about his work—even in my humanities department. I would catch him carrying his wolf spiders in the plexiglass cages across campus almost every day. So one day I stopped him and asked to get coffee.”

“And did he tell you what he did to these female wolf spiders to keep them from following their instincts?” The constellation of freckles on Lizzie’s palms burned as she brought her hands together.

A jar of chapulin salsa and garlic chips were spread out across the therapist’s table from lunch. They rattled as Laura nervously stretched and bumped her shin against the glass top.

“It’s actually only the males Olly experiments with.” Laura cleared her throat embarrassed. “Wolf spiders don’t have urticating hairs, but he specialty bred males that do, so they can defend themselves from hungry females.”

“Urticating hairs?” Lizzie echoed.

“They’re barbed and can be used to sting the girl,” Laura said.

“And he’s left you all alone with these nasty hairs floating around in your apartment while he’s lecturing at Newman?” Lizzie scowled. “Are they affecting you?”

“I think it’s for a good cause.” Laura purposely avoided that second question. “I’ve seen cannibalism happen many times in animals. It’s sad.”

“And did he tell you why?” Lizzie said.

“Why cannibalism happens?” Laura still remembers being confused by her therapist’s vivid distaste. They were always so stoic in the movies.

“No,” Lizzie said. “Did Oliver tell you why he thought he should stop mother nature from happening?”

---

The last time Laura trusted herself was when she had to bury the puppies in high school.

Her family had an old herding dog named Jeanie they thought was fixed. When Jeanie gave birth unexpectedly, the puppies weren’t breathing. Apparently the father was an escaped chihuahua that belonged to the retired couple down the road.

So Jeanie did what dogs do, and ate the dead puppies. Laura’s parents had to call the vet, not believing the Google articles they found explaining this was a common thing. If the mother dog knows her young aren’t viable, she cannibalizes them. Otherwise the protein just goes to waste.

No one in Laura’s household could bring themselves to separate Jeanie from the puppies. They couldn’t get past the chomping and slurping in the next room.

But Laura could. She came home from school, heard the news about the chihuahua that must have forced itself on Jeanie, then went to console her favorite dog.

The one thing Laura remembers the most is the panting. Not the blood mixed with the sweet smell of Jeanie’s broken water. Not the remaining skulls that were too hard for Jeanie to break apart and swallow whole. But Jeanie’s anxious, non-stop panting.

The old dog had been locked up in the guest bathroom all day, and didn’t understand why no one wanted to see her. Shit and piss covered the tiled floor. As soon as Laura entered the room, Jeanie whimpered and nuzzled into the girl’s arms, her fur damp with the stench.

“I don’t understand how Jeanie could do that to her own babies,” Laura overheard her dad whispering outside. “Does the dog just not have any motherly instincts? What’s wrong with her?”

No one would pet Jeanie after that, except Laura.

The girl buried what was left of the puppies and moved on. The rest of her family still whispers about how eerily calm Laura was about it.

“Must’ve carried over from taking care of those chickens when she was little,” her dad would say. “Her and Jeanie are both a little messed up I guess.”

Those words festered inside Laura, until a day after a big storm when the neighbor’s chihuahua escaped a second time. She found the pathetic creature struggling to crawl out of the creek in the backyard behind Jeanie’s kennel. The scrawny thing must have smelled Jeanie coming into heat again, then got stuck trying to reach her. It looked like a white maggot wriggling in the thick mud.

Laura blinked at the small dog’s shrill yapping once, then walked away.

She had nothing to say when the neighbors knocked on their door looking for it later.

Her skin still crawls at night thinking about it.

She’s scared to ask why her immediate instinct was to do nothing.

---

Back in the studio apartment, Laura moans as she pops the wolf spider’s abdomen in between her teeth. Her tongue twitches from the urticating hairs, as if her taste buds dance over an open flame.

She can’t stop.

It feels too good.

After she swallows the first male over her bathtub, moving on to the others trapped inside their plexiglass cages just makes sense. They all wait for her, their little front toes battering against her hot skin in greeting as she extends her open palm to them. Each lovingly strums their legs along the inside of her mouth, before Laura squishes their juices down her throat.

The next morning all the welts covering her body have burst. She wakes on the floor covered in gray bile and sweat. She takes one final milk bath, and watches as the mucus lined with urticating hairs gurgles down the drain.

Then, still naked, she opens her email and accepts the job offer that’s been waiting for her.

---

“They stung the roof of my mouth like pineapple.” Laura shivers at her emergency therapy session.

Lizzie didn’t hesitate to schedule a meetup after Laura called her sobbing that same morning.

“Do you like pineapple?” Lizzie lines her glass table with floral placemats as they talk.

“Yes, but—”

“Then what’s the problem?” Lizzie turns away toward her kitchen. “Several cultures in the world enjoy eating spider meat. You just have a sophisticated palate. Here—”

The therapist leaves the room and comes back with a charcuterie board of raw spoon worms, pan-seared boa constrictors, and deep-fried tarantulas. Cherries, raspberries, figs, and pomegranate all cradle the sides of the three different meats.

“Each of these are considered a delicacy.” Lizzie pats her client on the shoulder before sitting down across her glass table. “Don’t ever feel strange for enjoying them—I don’t.”

At first, Laura is speechless as she watches her therapist crunch down on one of the tarantulas like its fried chicken. But then her stomach growls, and she realizes how much her tired body aches for more food.

Texting Olly the video of her engagement ring and what was left of the wolf spiders’ popped off legs spinning down her bathtub drain took all her energy. She will never hear from him again—but she will start her new job at Motlow community college near her hometown in two weeks. She’ll also have an uncanny tolerance to any kind of bug sting or venom for the rest of her life.

“These animals are tinier in person than I thought they would be,” Laura says as she brings the first deep-fried tarantula to her lips.

“That’s because they’re all male.” Lizzie reaches for the charcuterie board. “The females are the large ones in these species. Isn’t that funny?”

The therapist then leans back in her seat and swallows a raw spoon worm whole.

---

Host Commentary

‘The first time Laura realised she was afraid of herself…’ 

 

That’s a line that drew me up very short, very fast for a very personal reason. I’m 6’2 and physically large. If I’d been born in the US I would have been a linebacker. Being born in the UK meant I was a prop, one of the four large guys who didn’t run away fast enough and as a result have entire rugby scrums on their shoulders. I’m very tall, very wide and very strong and for a lot of people, I am perceived as an instant physical threat.

 

So I dealt with that. For a long time my posture was stooped, partially due to abuse and trauma partially due to physical choice. My voice tends to be quiet, and warm, and rounded. I make a conscious effort to not stand between people and doorways. Especially if they’re people who aren’t my gender or people I don’t know.. It doesn’t matter that this is the tiniest inconvenience for me. It doesn’t matter that I’m more Benjamin Clawhauser than Bruce Banner. What matters is how other people feel.

 

It took me a long time to realise the one downside of this was that I was afraid of myself. I was a brain in a meatsuit. I remember when I was a teenager, and one of the few times my dad said something deeply unfair to my face. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember him saying ‘Does that make you angry?’ and me, red-faced and seething, growling ‘NO.’ and leaving the room.

 

I am large enough that if I ever get angry, and physical, I will hurt someone. That isn’t a threat and it isn’t a good thing. It’s a physical fact. I escaped that horror and ran directly into another one, by repressing basically everything. I let years of psychological and emotional abuse from multiple axes of my life break me into the shape that was easiest for other people. It hurt. It made me angry. I did it anyway because that’s all I felt like I deserved.

 

That is no longer the case. I’m always cautious about oversharing in these host spots, which I know seems a little weird after those four paragraphs, but my circumstances changed drastically about 15(!) years ago and I changed with them. I stand straighter now. I’ve done work on connecting physically with the body I used to view as a car I could barely drive. I’ve accepted it’s okay to feel angry sometimes. I’m no longer afraid of myself.

 

Neither is Lizzy, and the way York steps her out from an environment breaking her into a shape she doesn’t want into the literal top of the food chain has two razor sharp edges. Or perhaps, fangs.

 

The most obvious is the breakdown of her reality we see in the final pages, and the casual way she approaches predation, a learned response from the way she was treated and one she learned very well. But the other is it’s taken this long and it’s hit this hard. She’s never just a victim but now she’s unbound, let free to sprint across her life with the wind in her hair and someone else’s blood in her teeth. How you feel about that is, in the end, up to you. Her actions are monstrous but are grounded in a monstrous context she had no choice but to respond to. Her new reality is terrifying and broken, but liberated and free. No longer victimized, not yet a monster. I wish her luck and make sure I’m not standing between her and the door. Fantastic work, thanks to all.

PseudoPod wants you to remember you can’t hide. Run with the dogs tonight, in suburbia