SPIDER LOVE, Odin III ~ Silver Options

[Psyche]

SPIDER LOVE

This was Fernando's last post, the final blow to his self-esteem in a zigzag career full of perplexity. Why this bastard land? Why this dusty town gasping for life in the immensity of the chaqueño* plain? Close by was the notorious Triple Frontier, a sort of no-man's-land poised on the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, like some three-legged monster stomping on a can of worms. Although Fernando dwelt in a geography of the mind, caring little for the physical detail that distinguishes one place from another, he felt like he had lead in his pants. After a few months' residence in a zone where corruption equals wealth and power, the dread cloud of loneliness came on as never before.

Fernando seldom visited the plantations, the Indian settlements or even the awesome Iguazú Falls – he’d been instructed to avoid overexposure. Since he was followed by bodyguards everywhere, he'd long ago given up observing local custom down on the streets. His universe boiled down to a few necessities: mate** gourd and bombilla***; cigars and liquor; detective stories and PC; and, of course, his spider collection. He'd become indifferent to food. He knocked down whatever was put on his plate with red Mendocino wine. They might have served up the Chaco governor's head – pile of pig manure, same thing.

To countervail his black oath of solitude, Fernando had started a spider collection. He'd sworn off human company unless Cristina would join him wherever the Devil or his diplomatic career might take him. The staff, whom he avoided whenever possible, were funky creatures from towns outside normal time frames. Fernando oversaw consulate paperwork, signed documents indifferently and appeared at public events that seemed as harmless as a live scorpion.

He vaguely sensed that his post was some sort of cover-up for illegal activities carried out by his underlings - whom he never questioned, of course. After all, what unearthly reason would entice his government to set up a consulate in that slam-bang town by the nefarious Triple Frontier, other than the fantastic opportunities for arms deals, drug-trafficking, terrorist interchanges, contraband, white slavery, illegal child adoptions and all that scenario? At the very least, Fernando speculated, his superiors would want to be well connected with some local goon, if not actually monkeying around in the lucrative business. He knew he was just a paper pusher. His job consisted, apparently, in knowing nothing at all. Fernando excelled at that.

Besides spiders, his collection included scorpions, hawk moths and deathwatch beetles. Fernando discovered that if he concentrated on crawly creatures, the heat and dark forces of the plains withdrew from his sphere of consciousness.

Meanwhile, Cristina stung him with venomous letters at every lunation. A rumble of menace lurked in her sentences like basso-continuo, with a shrill upsurge here and there. Why classify eight-legged vermin, Fernando mused despairingly, when one can simply marry them? God's silence was meaningful.

The spiders had always journeyed by plane in aerated glass cases to remote points of the planet. A black Cuban male -his favourite dynast- and a host of furry courtesans would await him with impatience at every destination; or so it seemed to Fernando. He imagined a royal welcome with choreographic trimmings and light and sound effects. Only Melody, the world's pulpiest tarantula, never left his side. She was always in a sexy mood and travelled in his pants' pocket, close to his groin.

Fernando was an ardent arachnophile and he planned to expand his collection indefinitely. His method of classification was purely personal; his categories went from prime ministers, press magnates, royalty, popes, geeks, airheads, movie and rock stars, to call girls, gigolos, pin-jabbers, pimps and jockers. His own future seemed written large on the keen, hairy rostra - indecipherably.

One day, Fernando geared himself up and sent for Cristina. He knew from experience that hot weather unglued her. Where the barometer marks the unwritten law of the land, something snapped inside her. Of course, Cristina was by all accounts the reason why he was sent to the Devil's own outposts. Her freeloader past and zest for publicity raised eyebrows at the Embassy. She'd even been in a mental institution for a few months, although in the end an enlightened psychiatrist had declared her saner than most by any standards.

Some years back, Fernando used to goof at Cristina's lustrous skin and the Nordic plaits of hair that caressed her nipples in a teasing fashion. He'd dashed off some erotica when they'd begun to shack up together, uneasily aware that he was messing up his career. The Secretariat had eventually pencilled in an approval for him to marry Cristina, but his smart-ass attitude had spelt virtual exile for both of them. Not that Cristina noticed. She didn’t give a damn about her diplomatic wifely duties - she simply stayed away from wherever Fernando was stationed.

Unexpectedly, Cristina now sent an e-mail to say that she'd fly over, just to piss around for a while, as she phrased it. On that winner occasion, Fernando arrived at the airport carrying Melody in the top pocket of his linen sports coat, her fleshy belly close to his chest. He saw Cristina saunter off towards the VIP lounge, wrapped in imitation furs. She'd acquired a notion that furs kept out the heat. Didn’t pumas live on the hot savannah lands, and even monkeys and wildcats? Yet she was an ecologist at heart, and boycotted all the expensive fur coat shops on the planet.

A number of airport officials, some hungry-looking recruits with carbines at the ready and a cluster of chaqueños followed, unable to resist her long white legs generously exposed to where the furs barely concealed her round bum. Fernando caught up with her, bussed her on both cheeks, and immediately sensed Melody shiver and heave a gummy sigh inside his coat pocket.

When Cristina eventually settled into the back of the Mercedes with her designer hand luggage and her Free Shop purchases, she exposed her body to view carelessly. She favoured gauzy dresses and no lingerie. Fernando tried to concentrate on the potholed road instead of the rear-view mirror, but her unhindered boobs and fantastic thighs made him feel horny. Only the fear of a guerilla coup on the roadway saved him from stopping the car right there and leaping onto the back seat. He'd already broken the rules by dispensing with the chauffer and bodyguards, but Cristina lowered her silver eyelids and fell asleep, unmoved by petty concerns or big ones.

When they arrived, she swayed into the bullet-marked residence and immediately had a fire built in order to bitch around without risking a chill from the air-conditioning. She flung her coat on a settee and promenaded her half-nude body about the house to Fernando's distraction, and finally had a foam-bath, observed by insect eyes from behind a rafter. Later she tossed a painted wooden mask into the blazing fire, without so much as a glance at Fernando, who'd picked it up during his only visit to the town fair. The smoke left an unpleasant odour in the air.

Cristina slept through most of her stays at the Consulate; it occupied a half-block in the smarter part of town. From the top windows, she could enter a state of hypnosis by staring long enough at the chaqueño grasslands that began abruptly a few blocks away in every direction. Cristina unfailingly refused to share the high, iron double bed with Fernando. She went skinny-dipping in the pool at night and to her own frilled, white satiny four-poster in the daytime, lolling under the quilt in downy sensuality.


The residence pool was full of oily scum teeming with water creatures. Fernando never used it or had guests over. But Cristina, who coexisted with an indefinite number of universes -to her husband's amazement- seemed to enjoy the thick, greenish water. Then she'd spread out on a pile of cushions by the lighted poolside for hours on end, gazing at her navel in wonderment and stroking her belly lazily - under close observation from Melody. There was something supernatural about the whole thing, the grand self-absorbed performance. God was mesmerized as well.

That first night Fernando dined alone. His tolerance for criollo**** cooking got on Cristina's nerves. He finished early and wondered what to do next. To play solo chess on the computer seemed geeky just now. Was he an oddball, after all? he asked himself. When Cristina was away -which was most of the time- he'd navigate the Web from one erotic site to another, clutching his crotch. Then he’d get totally sewed up on the excellent Scotch that flowed over the Triple Frontier free of tax. Fernando viewed his behaviour as a purely hygienic ritual, never dreaming that he might be slightly out of whack.

Tonight, after bumming around for a while, he decided to limber up on the exercise mat. This was to be the night! – he said to himself, fiercely. He was going to have sex with his wife, the whole boiling lot of it, the works, the max. It was his husbandly right, wasn't it? - he shouted to an imaginary audience. With his right hand spread flat on his left pectorals for emphasis, he found his breast pocket empty! Melody wasn't there… he began to sweat. She was probably stationed head-down behind a rafter, spying on Cristina, while he threshed out his petty metaphysical doubts. Melody must be slagging off by now, her powers of observation growing dim, her arachnid glands crying out for him to fondle her.

Fernando barged into Cristina's bedroom to extricate Melody and found himself gaping at his wife's recumbent form. Her body gleamed in the half-light, tender and translucent like larvae. Some sort of elemental magnetism flowed from her. Fernando hesitated, and lost out. He tiptoed away guiltily and decided to recall Melody from duty by means of a dog-whistle that made no sound for human ears, like the whisper of dead men's dreams. But Melody didn’t show up, bringing Fernando's agony to danger point. He went hot and cold all over, imagining her irretrievably lost. Sweat made his face glisten mournfully in the shadows.

He inspected the spiders' quarters to no avail. They lived in semi-detached glass cubicles on a site where morning sunshine could reach them. They had a common room for business or social purposes, a dining room where flies and other insects were released at mealtime, several bedrooms and a pond for amphibians. He'd thrown in a secret escape hole for those who sought freedom hard enough. Fernando checked that Melody was neither mating nor eating, and noticed that the black Cuban strongman was also absent.

Deep down, he felt sure something was wrong. Someone had tampered with the spider colony, but that, of course, was impossible! Everybody at the Consulate shied away from his creatures. He felt that he was feverishly acting out spider-sized preoccupations to an indifferent world.

Cursing himself, he returned to Cristina's bedroom, but this time in a black, determined mood. No amount of ill luck was going to stop him now, not
even any romantic blah. Melody's disappearing act had turned Fernando's heart into the cold and angry one of a cuckolded husband. He burst into the moonlit room and advanced towards his target, grimly kicking female trappings out of the way and throwing off his clothes. Cristina awoke and sensed his vibes - and his loins - to be bordering on scarlet, but she showed no signs of fear.

Straying from his hands-off style of recent years, Fernando carried out a fierce assault on his wife's flickering body. He writhed like an incandescent worm in the almost palpable light from the garden. Only the pilous skin of his arms and legs took on an arachnoid’s look, poised high around Cristina's trapped form. Then, quite suddenly, he heaved a tremendous shout and his frenzied motion stopped, as though someone had shot him in the back. Something black and furry that was not human scurried over Cristina's pale belly and disappeared through the shimmering, silver sheets.

Cristina saw her chance to tear loose and fled into the labyrinthine servants’ quarters of the Consulate. Fernando's criollo dinner forced itself anti-gravitationally up his gullet and onto the bed sheets. He almost fainted, but managed to crawl out to the garden through the open glass door.

Dry summer scents flowed into his lungs as he lunged towards the swimming pool. He sat trembling on the diving board, aware of awful symptoms coming over him, unable to scream for help, paralysis setting in. He must have lost his balance, for in a moment his body slipped silently under the black night water.

The postmortem revealed that a deadly poison had invaded his bloodstream. Maybe from some insect bite - according to the local coroner, who wasn’t going to push the matter any further. He wasn’t a whistle blower, not he. He knew that the chaqueño police weren’t at all interested, being busy with some express kidnapping or other in which they were probably involved. Mud slinging was kept to a minimum around there, especially where the foreign consulates were concerned. Business as usual, no dirt tracking, just shelve it! That was the agreement.

So Cristina got off lightly at the inquest, but received a sucker-punch on her left breast, through her fine cotton blouse. It was Melody's farewell. Only Cristina knew that the hairy sly-boots had enlisted the Cuban strongman to help her to dispose of Fernando, since Melody was a tarantula and her bites weren’t lethal. Cristina never saw Melody again, and felt spaced out for a long time after. But she eventually recovered and travelled about for the rest of her life organizing the largest spider colony on earth, which she set up at phase zero somewhere on the chaqueño flatlands - you can find it if you make up your mind to, but it’s not where the action is.

Nowadays, nobody is more qualified than Cristina to comment on the politics of sex, muscling in and pay-off among spiders. Her skills haven't been put to good use or even recognized as yet. The Embassy is wary of wildcards. But then the whole world is just a blown-up scumbag, and anybody can plead the fifth, so what’s the big deal? This was just some snafu out there by the uncharted Triple Frontier, where you can be a goner in less time than it takes to skin a snake.

By Psyche



* chaqueño: from “Chaco”, name of a Northern Argentine province.
** mate: organic gourd (usually made from sun-dried courgettes).
*** bombilla: silver (or cane) tube to suck green Paraguayan tea from the gourd.
**** criollo: Argentine people of Spanish and Native South American
descent.




Copyright: Sylvia Maclagan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2006

[Cleo_Serapis]

Thank you for your entry into Odin's Opposition!  :troy:

Perhaps you’ll rise up, drink from the Well of Wisdom and be crowned the ‘bringer of victory’?

Best of luck in the battle!  :vic:

~Mosaic Musings Staff

[Cleo_Serapis]

Congratulations on your Silver placement!

You have risen up, drank from the Well of Wisdom and have been crowned the ‘bringer of victory’!

Well done!

[Guest_Jox_*]

Hi Sylvia -

Congratulations on your silver award in Odin's - Well done :)

J.

[Guest_Cathy_*]

Congratulations Sylvia! A very interesting and detailed story of politics and intrigue. (I hate that she got off so easily but that's the way it goes sometimes...) *smiles*

Well done!

Cathy

[Guest_Nina_*]

Hi Sylvia

Congratulations on your silver placing for this arachnid tale of relationships and revenge. Well done

Nina

[Morgan le Fay]

Congratulations on your Silver placement Sylvia!

I found this tale totally facinating and original. I was so captivated by your word choices and found myself laughing out loud at some of your descriptions. Like the way Fernando classified the players in his crawly collection. ie, " his categories went from prime ministers, press magnates, royalty, popes, geeks, airheads, movie and rock stars, to call girls, gigolos, pin-jabbers, pimps and jockers." How in the world did you come up with these? The're absolutly brilliant!

And Brilliant is the way I'd describe your whole unique tale. I thouroghly enjoyed every word. Thanks so much for providing such a wonderful read.

Love ya,
Chris

[Psyche]

Hi all !! I'm SO sorry for not answering you long ago, the truth is that this is my first "working" visit to the new MM and I only just found out that my Odin story had won a Silver Medal !!! I hadn't even enabled e.mail replies, shame on me. Gee... it's midnight here in Buenos Aires, I really have to go to bed, but thank you so much for your replies and I'll be back VERY SOON.
Hugs to all !!!
Sylvia

[JLY]

Sylvia:
Congratulations! This story was filled with great detail and vivid imagery; a pleasure to read and enjoy.
JLY

[Psyche]

[font=Arial]

Sylvia:
Congratulations! This story was filled with great detail and vivid imagery; a pleasure to read and enjoy.
JLY

Thank you, JLY !! I'm tickled pink...haha... just found out yesterday. Been away from MM for about a month.

Hope to catch up on reading other people's work asap.
Cheers, Sylvia

[Psyche]

Congratulations on your Silver placement Sylvia!

I found this tale totally facinating and original. I was so captivated by your word choices and found myself laughing out loud at some of your descriptions. Like the way Fernando classified the players in his crawly collection. ie, " his categories went from prime ministers, press magnates, royalty, popes, geeks, airheads, movie and rock stars, to call girls, gigolos, pin-jabbers, pimps and jockers." How in the world did you come up with these? The're absolutly brilliant!

And Brilliant is the way I'd describe your whole unique tale. I thouroghly enjoyed every word. Thanks so much for providing such a wonderful read.

Love ya,
Chris

Hi Chris !!
Well, yes, I took quite a while to classify the spiders !!! I had no trouble in thinking up "press magnates, royalty, popes, etc.", but then it occurred to me to pick up a dictionary of slang, and I went straight to the section on "Countercultural Slang" and another one on "The Drug Trade"...ughhh, sorry about that, but it seemed to fit in with the Triple Frontier scenario, so that was it !!
My husband has always collected dictionaries on the most diverse subjects, we have slang words in about a dozen languages !!!

Anyway, I certainly blush about the "brilliant" adjective you've used, but all the same I'm terribly glad you had some good laughs... I wrote this story several years ago, when I had far more time to write with some sort of leisure...

Thank you and hugs,
Sylvia

[Psyche]

Hi Cleo !!

I seem to be answering everybody in reverse order... I love your new forum, it's really turned out fantastic. I'm only sorry that I got so far behind in posting new stuff here. Apart from setting up my profile, I didn't enable anything and must get up-to-date on the activities... Haven't read other people's stories, either, quite shameful...

My excuse is that I've spent a month sorting out Carlos's library, at his consulting-rooms, and I'm even dreaming about books. His library is immense, no trashy stuff there, so the sorting has to be done carefully, deciding where each book will go.

Thank you, Cleo, for everything !! I'll be gradually checking out these new stomping grounds...

Hugs, Sylvia

[Psyche]

Hi Sylvia

Congratulations on your silver placing for this arachnid tale of relationships and revenge. Well done

Nina

Thank you, Nina, for your kind words. I apologise for not having read your story yet (or anybody else's), but life got complicated. Will do...

Congratulations on your Gold Medal, all the same, I look forward to a good read.
Hugs,
Sylvia

[Psyche]

Congratulations Sylvia! A very interesting and detailed story of politics and intrigue. (I hate that she got off so easily but that's the way it goes sometimes...) *smiles*

Well done!

Cathy

Hello Cathy !

Thank you !! Better late than never, right?! Thanks for reading my stuff, sorry about that woman getting off, but well, she did learn about spiders in the end...

Will be back to read your story and the other's, please forgive me.. and congrats to you !!!

Hugs, Sylvia

[Psyche]

Hi Jox !

Thank you for reading my stuff and for your kind words. I believe I've answered everybody in a haphazard fashion, but I guess I'll learn the ropes here soon...

There's so much to investigate, and I'm about a month behind !

Cheers, Sylvia