Neurotoxins

The beginning of a burning sky tapestry spread taut across my loom. I sat in my uncle's gray attic, the circle window riddled with London smokestacks. My fingers danced between the stationary warp threads, pulling a black weft thread, adding the colors, textures, and patterns of what I envisioned for the textile. I shifted the foot pedals without thinking, lifting and lowering the different shafts with the comforting groans and squeaks of my loom. Though I was consumed by perfecting the details, and hurrying in my work before I was inevitably interrupted, I leaned back to see the dark image emerging from the red fabric. The face of the gargoyle, who crouched on the corner of our church's stone roof, stared back at me like an ugly keyhole.

He looked for me every Sunday, coming into view between the crowded buildings before the rest of the church. In return for his watchful glare, I gave him a story from a book my uncle had forbidden me to read - about a devil who fell in love with a girl on her wedding day. He stole her right out of her bridal chamber.

As I now stared at the sewn line of my gargoyle's serious mouth, I remembered the childish hope I had once carried with me everywhere - that the gargoyle would come to life, swoop down and carry me away from my uncle's house and this city.

On days like today, there was still a part of me that wished he would.

“Patience Moffat! Come down here this instance!” my uncle bellowed from downstairs.

I closed my eyes and slammed the bar down on my loom with a crack. The tapestry needle clattered from my lap onto the floor.

In my buttoned-up boots with square heels, I clamored down my uncle's townhouse stairs, my ridiculous blonde ringlets bouncing around my face. I was old enough to be presented before Queen Victoria and put on the wedding market, but Uncle insisted Beatrice (who worked as both his maid and cook) set my hair in a babyish fashion. I was also very short of stature, but I was not a child to be pulled and pushed where others wanted me to go.

I slammed my boots louder and faster, hurling myself down the final stairwell. Floor after floor I descended, leaning from the banister, my bell-like muslin skirt twirling around the corners, my too-many petticoats rustling.

I arrived on the main floor so quickly I collided with my uncle who held a glass jar.

“God save the queen!” he cried, the jar slipping from hand to hand like a bar of soap. I reached for the jar too. My puffy sleeve caught in the gold chain across my uncle's vest. The metallic tang of gold always burned my nostrils.

The jar shattered, glass clusters sliding down the hall and beneath the french doors to his study.

A recluse spider, as long as my thumb, and with pale marble coloring, scurried away from the jar's remains, moving impossibly fast in its efforts to escape.

My hand involuntarily flew to the lace collar around my throat.

“You daft cow! Look what you did!” my uncle shouted at me. He ran after the spider, hunched over. His white shirt stretching beneath his black sleeve garters.

The spider ran across the hall and changed course, running straight for me.

Before I could think, I scrambled up the stairs.

“Catch it!” my uncle yelled.

I could only force myself down a single step.

The spider scurried for the front door. The city hummed like a hive on the other side. The spider reached the strip of winter light and freedom beneath the threshold. My uncle slammed a pewter vase down, trapping the spider inside.

I clutched the banister, feeling ill.

Uncle blew from his eyes the disheveled hair from his comb over.

“You descended the stairs like a mad racehorse, yet now you are too slow to assist me?”

“You called, Uncle.” There was enough sarcasm in my voice for him to hear it, but not enough for him to accuse me.

He glared at me, smoothing his hair over his perspiring head. He retrieved a letter from the silver tray on the entryway table and slid it beneath the vase. He stepped closer to the stairs where I stood, holding the vase with the spider inside.

Gooseflesh erupted over my body. Sometimes not seeing a spider was worse than seeing one, when you knew it was there.

My uncle shook his blotchy red face at me. “A woman's duty is to be helpful. Your parents would be ashamed to see your utter failure to become a profitable debutante.”

“Good thing they're dead.” I looked away, wanting to show my uncle I didn't care about his reaction to my remark, how he couldn't keep using the absence of my parents to hurt me. My father, my uncle's stepbrother, went looking for investment opportunities when I was a baby. When his ship never returned, he was declared legally dead. My mother and I came to live with my uncle. She escaped through that front door ten years ago, leaving me behind. She died like my father, buried in a far-away, unknown place.

I heard the slow drawing of my uncle's frustrated breath.

“Come,” he barked. “If you want to eat today, and not see your loom on the trash heap, you have work to do.”

Broken glass crunched beneath his Oxford shoes as he stalked inside his study. I followed him, stepping carefully.

His desk looked like a frozen fountain of messy papers, collapsed piles cascading down to the floor. Maps of Scotland and Northern England, covered with crossed-out red circles, hung over the windows, strangling the natural light. I covered my mouth. No matter how many times I had seen it, I stared at my uncle's collection, his curated cemetery, hanging on the walls.

Hundreds of insects were pinned inside boxes and against corkboards, from burying beetles with ruby red markings to stick insects as black and large as lobsters. But mostly my uncle, the doctor turned naturalist, collected spiders.

Texas tarantulas larger than squirrels, Castleback orb weavers, and a Goliath birdeater were mounted like hunting trophies over the fireplace. Uncle Moffat bragged he would collect every spider species in the world and gift it to the queen. I often heard him muttering to himself, “You may call me, Sir Doctor Richard Moffat, your majesty.”

My uncle turned the vase right side up on his messy desk, the letter covering the top. He grinned at me, tilting his head for me to take my place.

I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. He could call me whatever he wanted, but I wouldn't be cowed. I didn't hate spiders; I understood how harmless and useful they were. It still took all my strength to fight against the uncontrollable phobia of them my uncle had given me. It was I who had been forced to help him pin every spider in his collection.

I stepped up to his desk. A corkboard, pins, and a jar of chemically soaked cotton balls waited. My uncle dropped a cotton ball into the vase, muttering, “God save the queen,” and returned the letter.

The sounds of the city crushed me on every side. I stared out the window through the maps, longing to unlace my shoes and walk on bare feet through forest paths. I needed to drink in the sky and mountains instead of rooftops, replace the smell of the chemical cotton balls with the sound and taste of a cool-water spring. For a desperate moment, I thought about the gargoyle on our stone church. Like crushing a candle flame between my fingers, I snuffed once and for all my old wish that someone would come to life and take me away from this crowded city.

I had come to learn that governesses give up and leave, parents abandon you and die, and uncles try molding you to socially and economically advance themselves. There was no one in this world I could depend upon except myself. Trusting others was just inviting knots into a complicated pattern.

My uncle lifted the letter off the vase. I reached my hand inside, my fingers rigid like a claw. The spider, unphased by the chemicals, darted around my grasp like a hairy feather. I felt my eyes rolling back inside my head, my feet wanting to run. I locked my knees and caught the spider without crushing it.

I pulled my hand out, opening my fingers enough to grab one of the spider's legs near its bulbous body. Pain pierced my palm as if I had touched a lightning rod. I jolted, nearly dropping the spider that bit me.

“Other leg! Other leg!” My uncle shouted.

Pushing through the pain and dizziness, I grasped the spider with both hands, pulling two of its legs just enough to immobilize but not sever its limbs. I laid the wiggling spider against the corkboard. I looked away as my uncle, smiling with relish, took up the pins.

“Insects have no feelings. They do not feel pain,” he chanted, like a priest before a sacrificial altar.

My hand ached where I had been bitten, my brain pounding against my skull like the brass knocker on the front door.

Was someone knocking at the door?

Beatrice walked past the study door, a phantom in her white apron and cap. I felt woozy on my feet, dropping my gaze to the letter my uncle had used to trap the spider.

I recognized the handwriting. The letter was penned in the same hand as the notes I had kept at the bottom of my dowry chest, that I could never make myself burn.

The letter was from my mother.

I let go. The spider darted from the corkboard, disappearing just before my uncle stabbed the pin.

“Patience Moffat! You little wretch . . .”

“Patience?”

My uncle's outburst was interrupted by the soft voice from the doorway.

I turned, my head and vision swimming, my hand numb. I tried to focus on the woman standing in a traveling coat and hat, clutching a fur muff.

“Hello, Mother,” I said, before I collapsed down the fountain of papers onto the floor.