The Excuse for Not Writing (Number 6)

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

The Excuse for Not Writing (Number 6)

By Plot Roach

Here is my excuse for not writing today:

I had a creative writing prompt picked out and ready to go. The story was really going to be something awesome, outlandish and just a little bit heartwarming.

And the I got mummified in spider silk.

I can explain, really.

You see, I have this friend (Mary) who is a neat freak when she’s stressed, but is a slob when she is not. And as it turns out, today was one of her ‘stress’ days. And this comes on the tail end of one of her spending sprees (she’s a shopaholic too, poor dear). Now this might not seem like much, but her idea of cleaning is to throw everything that she isn’t nailed down out into the nearest dumpster. If I’m there when it happens, then I get the first pick of clothing, books, DVDs, electronics and food. I’m not picky, if it’s free, it’s mine. And if I can’t use it, I’ve got plenty of humble neighbors around me. Heck, in this economy, I can use all the help I can get. Or at least all the help that Mary can send my way.

She when I knew that she had just dropped a paycheck worth of clothing out of her front door, I was there in a flash. After years of being friends, we had developed almost the same figure. She has bigger boobs by far, but I have the better butt. So I had plans for those designer jeans, short skirts and slacks.

I got to her apartment before she could do much damage, brining a handful of chocolate bars, a six pack of diet Coke (under the theory that if you drink diet sodas, you can eat more candy), and a roll full of garbage bags. I had made sure to empty out the back of the car before coming over since I knew that this would be a massive purge. She had just been dumped by her boyfriend for the fourth (yes fourth) time. I don’t know why she keeps going back to the idiot, except that maybe she’s got this death wish for her self esteem…
In any case, she was already throwing out handfuls of stuff onto her front lawn, with some jogger and her dog just standing there, on the sidewalk, watching her like she’s the latest contestant on American Idol.

“Get outta here, you idiot.” I said as I stalked past them. I hate it when people just stop and stare at you when you are in the middle of falling apart. Makes me feel like I can’t have a breakdown in public anymore. So I got inside Mary’s apartment and she’s too busy yelling at something in her closet to notice me walk in. I cleared my throat with a little cough and she jumped for the ceiling.

“You could have told me that you were here!” She screamed.

“That’s why I cleared my throat.” I said.

“Well, now that you’re here. You can get this thing in the back of the closet for me.” she said, before turning away and making a beeline for the kitchen.

“Don’t throw the stuff out in the yard.” I called out. “Just put it in bags and set it in the living room. I’ll get it from there!”

“I know you will.” she said back, her head already deep in the refrigerator.

I started to rummage through the back of the closet, one hand o the thing she was talking about, the other pawing through fallen bathrobes, bags of suits still covered in plastic from the drycleaner, and various bits I can’t quite identify in the half dark of the room. “What the hell is this thing, anyway?” I ask.

“It’s something Steve brought over. He said it was important to him and that he wanted to hide it here from his family, but I want it gone.”

“Won’t he miss it?” I ask.

“I don’t really care, I want it out of my apartment.”

“And what do you mean ‘he hid it from his family’?” I asked, still trying to lug the thing out of the closet.

“He’s married with a baby.”

“What?!”

“Yeah, he didn’t bother to tell me because he thought that it would ‘upset our relationship.’”

“Married? And with a kid? When in the hell did this happen?” I asked.

“Something in the last year, when we were broken up. He rebounded with a showgirl from Las Vegas and they conceived on the first night.”

I sighed, and backed away from the thing in the closet to get a handle on the situation, both the bundle I was trying to extricate from my friend’s apartment and the mental bombshell she just dropped on me. She had been trying to get pregnant with Steve’s kid off and on for the last six years of their hot and cold relationship, thinking that it would finally cement their bond. But she had been told last year that she was barren. That was part of the reason why he dumped her the last time. The rest of the reason was that he was a selfish jerk.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mary.”

“I’m not. I hope he’s happy with the whore and her brat. All I want now is for him and his things to be out of my life forever. -including the thing in the closet.”

“I’m working on it.” I said, throwing myself back into my task at hand. I managed to nudge it closer to the door way, almost throwing my back out I the process. I worked an old belt around it, closing it with the buckle and using it as a carry strap. I felt something inside it shift as I got it out into the light. It was a big bundle wrapped in a type of raw silk that I had never seen before.

“You should get together with his other ex-girlfriend and have an ‘I hate Steve’ party.”

“I haven’t heard from her since before Steve moved in.” Mary called out. From the heavy ‘thunk-thunk-thunk’ sounds, I knew that she was now working on the contents of the pantry.

I pulled the silk bundle outside, laying it down on some empty plastic bags as I prepared to cut it open to view its contents. “So what’s inside of it?” Mary asked from the doorway.

“I don’t know yet.” I said. “But I would like to find out.” I pulled the pocketknife out of my purse and began sawing through the fabric. I had been hoping to save some of it for a crafting project at a later date, but it kept coming away in chunks and strings, sticking to my clothes an flesh like it was made of adhesive. After ten minutes of this, we could finally see Steve’s treasure. And immediately wished we hadn’t.

We found Steve’s ex, along with several other unfortunate souls. All of the looked as if they had been thrown into a food dehydrator, paper like flash on yellowed bones. Mary threw up while I wiped off the stick strings from my hands enough to dial 9-1-1.

Moments later the cops came, bagged the evidence and questioned us both. They brought in an entomologist who said that the sticky stuff was spider silk, some hybrid of a wolf spider and a black widow with something he had never seen before. Both corpses had been entirely drained of their blood, and the DNA that had been left behind was a cross between a spider and a human.

If you ask me, Mary was lucky to get out of her relationship with Steven when she had. I’m afraid to think of what the Las Vegas showgirl and her offspring are going through right now…

I spent the rest of the afternoon filling up my car and holding Mary’s hand. I got some good food, a bunch of new clothes and an image of desiccated bodies that I will never get out of my head for as long as I live. And to top it all off, I wasted all my time in this little fiasco. So now I can’t write on my creative writing prompt.

Sigh.