Fat & Bones (4 page)

And she knew she couldn't let the cleaver find Apple.

Esmeralda looked behind her. Jeremiah hid his face. Old Flossie had fainted dead away. The others watched with their mouths hanging open.

Pigs are not accustomed to sacrificing themselves for others. They are accustomed to being sacrificed to the dinner table, but they do not go out of their way to make each other's lives easier.

What Esmeralda did next went down in pig history.

She lunged forward and knocked down the weeping woman. Then, she placed her foot, her last foot, adorned so lovingly with daisies, upon the woman's chest.

The cleaver rose high and called out, “Blood blood blood, all I want is blood, fresh juicy piggy blood, blood blood blood!”

The bracelet of daisies fell to the mud. The woman crushed them with her thick boot when she stood up, Esmeralda's foot in her hand.

Lying immobile on the ground, Esmeralda looked to the railing. Her head had cleared. She tasted only sweetness now, for she had a first-rate view of Apple, dazzling in the sunset, taking her bow.

Leonard Grey III set down his pencil. He had been trying to compose a sonnet.

He sighed. He couldn't concentrate. Leonard mourned the dead man, who, in a fit of anger, had years ago thrown a pocket-sized book of sonnets, an unwanted gift, out the kitchen window.

It had taken Leonard days to hoist the book up to his hole in the tree, where he had read it every day since, finding solace in the beautiful language.

So what if he wasn't good at sneaking about like a good spider should? So what if his family mocked him for his clumsiness and his love of tea? So what if loneliness sat upon him like a rock? He had his poetry.

But that night, not even poetry could ease Leonard's loneliness.

Leonard sat in his doorway, staring at the blue-black sky beyond the heavy leaves of the tree.

Below, a spider hung strung up in the fairy's den. A cicada had warned Leonard earlier that tonight Fat was brewing a batch of Bluebell Blindness Inducer, which required a large quantity of spider blood, enough to drain a spider Leonard's size to an inch of his life. And Leonard was no mite; he stood nearly as tall as Fat himself.

Fat was holding another spider captive. Fat was going to drain that spider of its blood. And if Leonard could only learn to sneak, he intended to rescue that spider. Then maybe, just maybe, that spider would have a cup of tea with him.

“It's going to work,” Leonard said aloud, “I'm a spider, that's what I am, and sneaky is my middle name.” He leaned too far out as he spoke and slipped.

“Dagnabbit!” He scrambled back into his hole. He drew in a foot to cover his racing heart. “Breathe, Leonard, breathe.”

He went inside and put the kettle on.

He thought for a moment, deciding that before he attempted sneaking, he needed proper gear. He donned a stocking cap, boots, and sunglasses to conceal the glow of his eight eyes. Secrecy was vital.

“I can do this. I am a spider.” He said it in his deep poetry-reading voice, but he couldn't convince himself.

Even so, stubbornly, he set forth.

As he began a careful—
whoops!
He had forgotten about that bent piece of bark—descent toward Fat's hole, he wondered what he and his new friend would talk about. Philosophy, maybe? Politics? Perhaps his new friend was a traveler and would tell him stories about other places in the world!

Thunk.
He tripped and fell upon an obliging leaf some four feet below. If the fairy heard him coming, he'd stand no chance of executing the rescue mission.

His heart pounding, he raised and lowered his legs, settling each one back down on the bark. Though normally Leonard could see fine in the night, the sunglasses made everything blurry and dark. Leaves loomed all around him, rustling and settling in for the night.

He neared the fairy's hole. He flattened himself against the branch and took deep breaths. So far, he had not caused too much commotion, at least not enough to alert Fat of his approach.

He heard Fat inside the hole, moving vials of potions about. The fairy was muttering the recipe for Bluebell Blindness Inducer. “Six bluebell petals. Three rabbit droppings. One cat hair. One human toenail clipping; thank you, Bald, may you rest in peace. Eight drops of midnight dew. And finally, a generous quantity of fresh, warm spider blood.”

Leonard held his breath. Had he arrived too late? Had his new, yet-unknown friend already withered and died? Trusting his camouflage gear to conceal him, Leonard peeked into the hole.

To the left, the fairy stood at his worktable with his back to the room, humming a song as he measured and mixed. His wings were threadbare, but his arms showed his strength. He was old but no weakling. On the table, beside a large beaker of blue liquid, lay a large knife with an intricately carved wooden handle.

To Leonard's right, a spider hung in the corner, legs tied together. He was either unconscious or asleep or dead; Leonard couldn't determine which.

It seemed too easy. With the fairy engrossed in his work, his back to the room, all Leonard had to do was sneak in, set the captive free, and the two of them could hightail it out of there, back up the tree.

 

 

If Fat did turn around and see him, hopefully it would be after Leonard had set free the spider. Then the odds would be two against one. And Leonard had a feeling even Fat would hesitate to take on two spiders, even if one of them was a coward.

Settling his stocking cap a little lower on his head, Leonard almost fainted from panic before silently scolding himself to get moving.

He ran into the room before he could talk himself out of it.

After a few steps he tripped, performing something like a somersault as he pulled out of the fall. He was almost there!

And then, quick as lightning, he was thrown on his back, his boots waving in the air. His sunglasses fell off, and a foot landed upon them, a wrinkly foot that smelled like onions, squashing the dark lenses and twisting the rims.

“Hello, neighbor. Pray, tell me what your hairy, lumbering self is doing in my hole,” said Fat, the long knife in his hands.

Stunned, Leonard could only gurgle in response.

“You are a terrible excuse for a spider,” Fat said, rolling his eyes, “I heard you when you were halfway down the tree. You might as well have hired a blue jay to announce your arrival.” He twisted the knife in his fingers. “Pathetic.”

Leonard did indeed feel pathetic, splayed out on the ground, unsure of how he got there. The indignity was extreme.

A thin whistling sound came from outside.

He had forgotten the kettle!

Fat groaned. “Do you never tire of drinking tea?”

Leonard gurgled again and struggled to right himself, but Fat placed his foot upon Leonard and held him there.

“Well, I tire of hearing your kettle go off, that's for sure,” Fat said.

Fat placed the knife's tip at Leonard's abdomen. He clearly enjoyed toying with his second captive.

Leonard was at a loss.

With his feet wriggling in the air like some infant's, his terror grew so great that he couldn't swallow. Spit began to collect in the corners of his mouth.

He was not a normal spider, so why had he tried to be? His plan could only ever have ended badly. He should have known he would bungle a rescue attempt. He was a failure at spiderhood; he should have admitted as much. Furthermore, the spider in the corner had not roused. Leonard began to doubt whether the poor creature had any life left in him at all.

Leonard knew he would die today; he would die this moment.

And would that be so bad? He had nothing to lose. No one would mourn him. And that was sadder than actually dying. Leonard wanted to be missed.

I'm not ready to die, he decided. I need to find someone to love.

And once he figured that out, he got sort of brave.

Shaking, he pushed aside the knife.

“No,” he said.

“What?” said Fat, staring at the knife in surprise.

“No,” said Leonard. He thrust his feet upward in an attempt to right himself—not a graceful movement but an effective one. He stood facing the fairy.

“No?” said Fat.

“That's what I said.”

“No what?” said Fat.

“Just no,” said Leonard.

“You can't say, ‘just no,'” said Fat. “I have a knife.” He held the weapon up again.

Leonard sensed Fat's annoyance, his confusion, and homed in on them. He knew what he needed to do. He might have been a lousy spider, but he was an above average poet.

Fairy, you winged patutem, spangly voo,
Thy shredded heart, like vaporish splantshine
Does unto earth like the beast of the moo
The ungreen plate of your bonderoo dine
A cud and a cud and a cud and a cud.

Fat spat on the floor. “Are you trying to recite poetry? You're terrible! And there's no such word as
splantshine.”
He pursed his lips. “Though you do have a knack for rhyme.”

Leonard continued:

Fast like the wind on a sperry pink flate
Your dank blackened mubgaw stinks like the fud
You hate the stars, you hate the sun, you hate—
But hate—it won't win—for love came here first
To the splight ball of blue, spinning in space
This giant tiny thinker dink of thirst
On which we all spin at a vash-bash pace.
Here, know, that no skander-winged puck, shall live
Apart from the holy call to—

With stealth of a kind that Leonard could never match, the captive spider slid behind Fat, gazing at Leonard over Fat's shoulder with the most beautiful green eyes Leonard had ever seen. Here was not a male spider, as Leonard had supposed. No, here was an Aphrodite.

Leonard was tongue-tied.

Unaware that his former captive stood a breath behind him, Fat tapped his brow with the knife. “How about
convive?
No, that doesn't quite work, does it.” He scrunched his mouth and studied the ceiling. “Apart from the holy call to …
active?”

The other spider, whose name was Priscilla Mae, tapped Fat on the shoulder.

Fat spun around, but Priscilla Mae sidestepped behind him. She had snuck out the door, into the night, before Fat had time to register the empty corner of the room.