Songs for The Lost

Dying Days of Treasure Spiders Everywhere

DYING DAYS OF TREASURE SPIDERS EVERYWHEREThe projects burned before them: children hung like listless simians from the rusted skeleton of the decrepit jungle gym; the black and w*********h tenants of the townhouses haunted their porches languorously, drinking bottled beer and smoking cigarettes while watching the street with despondent eyes; the occasional car rattled past trailing exhaust and adding a chemical stink to the already pungent reek of late-staying June bugs that stippled the house fronts and streets and sidewalks.

The familiar scene filled the boy’s chest with a thick kind of anxiety. He inhaled the awful air hungrily but felt as if something blocked its passage inside him.

His grandfather’s voice was husky, as if from disuse, but the boy knew that this was only the natural sound of his old-man voice, the sound of sand granules crunching deep down in the moist darkness of his throat.“How is your collection of spiders these torrid days of August, my boy? They’re well, I imagine? They’re used to the sultry weather, I’d say.” His grandfather always sounded as if he were reciting poetry from books, which always calmed the boy when he was upset about something in the same way that reading books made him feel better, too.

Now, though, the boy only nodded mechanically. Eager to obey his grandfather’s wishes, though feeling physically depleted and as though any movement was beyond his capabilities just then, he leaned from the porch overlooking the dirt garden abutting the left side of the cement. He retrieved the large, sun-warmed glass marmalade jar embedded in the soil and held it aloft between his small hands for the old man to see.

Squinting into the sun-flashing jar, his grandfather examined the creatures within. “Oh my, what colourful friends you keep, my boy. Vivid!

Bright as flowers! What is his name?” and he c****d a trembling crooked finger towards the immense yellow banana spider owning the upper portion of the jar, its prodigious leg-span covering completely the breadth of the lid’s underside.

“Sunny,” the boy answered. “Like the sun sunny.”

“Ah,” and his grandfather was nodding, the hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “A fitting name, surely. He is a splendid specimen, that’s clear. Just look at him! The size of him! His grace hanging in his jar sky! His pride, evident in how he overlooks his glass kingdom.” And, turning to his grandson, he added, “You, my boy, are a daring child, to brave such a king and transplant him to this kingdom of your own making. I can’t imagine where you found friends such as these, in what high tree-places you had to climb, and into what dense green brambles and bushes you had to crawl and search.”

The boy, with some effort, succeeded in smiling for his grandfather. The old man, seated beside him with a glass of lemonade in his liver-spotted hand, saw clearly the strained nature suffusing the gesture, as well as his grandson’s overall discomfiture. He sipped from his lemonade, savouring the tang of its aftertaste on his lips, and murmured, “Remember this lesson, son, and for your sake remember it well: there will never be days like these again, no matter their good or bad ingredients. Live them like there’s no tomorrow and you’ll be making the most of what you have.”

Of course, the boy, despite trying hard to take his grandfather’s wisdoms to heart (as he sought to take all of his advices to heart) was unable for his huge grief and only stood nodding his head falsely where he stood before him like a quietly respectful knight before his king. The porch was coloured with sunset’s burnt orange fire, though a murky tinge hung in the air, too, as if heralding the arrival of inclement weather. The boy toed the concrete at the foot of his grandfather’s tattered lawn chair, making sure to avoid crushing the lone ant winding its way across the burning concrete square.

“I know, I know, my boy,” the old man murmured, wincing in the glare and scrutinizing the boy. “It’s a harsh lesson, in its way, and disheartening. But take heart in this, son: know that the lesson is also filled with huge joy, once you’ve grown to fully appreciate it, that is.”

The boy cradled the jar in his arms. He examined each of his spiders carefully. The two small specimens skittering among the loose grass blades along the glass bottom like revellers among fallen confetti; a larger arachnid perched on the tip of the narrow oak branch, his body black with bright emerald markings; its twin hiding among the grass beneath, its design the same but its colour scheme one of black paired with blood-red; and of course the massive banana spider suspended over the rest like a ruler overseeing his subjects.

After a time, the boy, frowning, said, “They must be too hot in there. I put holes in the lid but still I bet it’s too hot in there for them.”

The old man said nothing, only continued watching his grandson carefully.

The boy removed the jar’s lid and placed the container delicately on its side in the stubby lawn grass. He and the old man watched as the spiders within made their collective way cautiously to the jar’s rim, and convened briefly on the grass before its mouth as if jointly plotting their next move before making off in all directions, the sun finding their brilliant skins like reflections from a collection of marbles dropped into the grass.

“The day thanks you, my boy,” the boy’s grandfather said, a proud glimmer in his eyes. “You’ve enriched its fabric plentifully.”

A moment passed in silence between them. The old man sipped his lemonade, offered his glass to the boy who only shook his head and stared into the street or sky while pacing the small expanse of the concrete patio. Eventually, he sat down upon the brick stoop protruding beneath the front door, not so much relishing (as he usually relished) the sun scalding his bare arms and legs but bearing its relentless touch. He wanted to shun this too-bright smoggy world and retreat indoors, to the safe blue shadows of his curtained bedroom, where he might immerse himself in comic books and the colourful tales they held. But he remained with his grandfather, because this is what they did each night after supper while the boy’s parents cleaned up inside, and to abandon the old man felt wrong, and in a world where incredibly wrongful things happened too often the thought of committing another such deed made the boy feel sick. So he shared the hot silence with his grandfather, following the determined progress of red and black ants wending their ways across the cement or among the grass, laden with leaf bits like backpackers on the march. He sent flashes of lambent sunlight reflecting from the glass watch-face around his wrist out across the street, to dance erratic patterns along the siding of the townhouses there. He picked at the scabs owning each of his knees with a cautious hand, relishing the stinging pain he awoke with his probing fingers. Finally, he sought interesting and wondrous pictures among the cumulus, but clouds were few and far between in the pure blue sky, and those that did float there were wispy and small and difficult to imagine with, which only left the boy with his own troubled reflections. The sun hung relentlessly overhead but its light seemed dimmed to the boy’s eyes, a waning circle, as if partially obscured by clouds or swallowed by an eclipse; or else simply sinking in the near-dusk hour towards its temporary death beneath the horizon.

The boy and his grandfather sat and sat in the baking silence.

A nearly imperceptible cracking disturbed the gargantuan stillness. The distant song of cicadas buzzing from the trees ceased, as if grown hushed at the small but great noise, too. The jungle gym children ceased their chattering in the hazy distance, possibly likewise awed by the startling, somehow unearthly disturbance. The boy and his grandfather, startled from their pensive somnolence, followed the direction of the noise, looking to the concrete floor of the porch. Directly between them, a small fissure had appeared, and peeking forth from the aperture was a narrow green stalk, as of a flower. Peering closer they saw its bulbous tip, where fragile petals grew upwards and came together into a tear drop-shaped bud holding ensconced within its embrace some hidden beauty – its flower, of course – with the potential to brighten the milky-aired, dusking day.

“Perhaps the world of old is at last come to reclaim itself from us,” said the old man, sounding especially wise to the boy. “Perhaps our little green friend is repayment for your gift to the day.” And here he nodded out towards the lawn before them, with its hidden arachnid jewels, and concluded, “Perhaps there’s a lesson in this, too.”

The boy looked to his grandfather, awed, and again to the fragilelooking but mighty green stalk. He stared at it for a minute, imagining or actually perceiving its subtle perfume of peaches on the muggy air.

He returned his gaze to his grandfather when the old man grew suddenly rigid in his chair. He’d left the lemonade glass lifted midway towards his waiting mouth, his eyes straining into the distance. A moment passed and he lowered the glass to his bony knee and exhaled deeply, sounding to the boy’s ears as if he’d just returned from a very long and wearying journey. Then, his voice hushed, “Look, son. Over there and up there. In the trees in the park, past the projects shimmering in the haze of the east. There’s something there. Something strange and special. I can sense it but I can no longer see it. That’s your special gift, while you have your good and young age, and eyes less clouded than mine. For now, for these lucky days of your huge fortune, you’re able to see it among those sun-fired branches, while some of us can only feel it. Look, look.”

The boy looked. He stood from the stoop and drifted to the edge of the patio, the tips of his grass-stained sneakers hanging past its concrete lip and making him feel distantly as if he was a sailor, a captain of a ship and standing in its prow while searching the water horizon stretching endlessly before him. He c****d his head one side to another, squinting in the burnt air. He sought to conjure something wondrous and happy among the sun-limned trees but saw only his grandmother as he’d last seen her: heaped like a collection of bones in the hospital bed underneath the stark sterile lights, more a skeleton than the plump woman she’d been, the roses vanished from her cheeks, gaunt and deflated from their former roundness like shrivelled apples gone bad; her bald head gleaming alarmingly through her remaining wisps of snowy hair; cloudy yellow eyes staring at the ceiling, utterly vacant of the person once living there; while the transparent plastic nebuliser mask suctioned to her mouth and nose added a fantastically horrific aspect to the scene, as if she were the unwitting subject in some mad surgeon’s experiment gone terribly, terribly awry. It had been weeks since that haunting and endless morning in the cemetery – the sad look of everyone dressed in black, making their faces appear more pale than he knew them to be; the charged air, as if the day itself was in mourning like

everyone gathered among the headstones beneath the milky sky; the dull, hollow clamour of dirt clods being shovelled overtop the casket embedded inside the gaping earth following him into his dreams that night and most subsequent nights, too, a terrible percussion that awakened him with heart thundering and breathing ragged and tears never very far behind the well of his wakening eyes.

“I know, son,” the grandfather said, crumpling further into his raggedy chair and soothing the boy a little merely with his reliable ability to read his murky thoughts. “I know it, too: it’s hard. A very hard thing, to truly, truly bury those things passed away from us.”

And he wept, long agonized sobs that made the boy fidget and scan the house fronts on the opposite side of the streets with increased determination, as if he were seeking some very particular thing among the blank tarnished facades; only to find dejected-looking project denizens like himself, unmoving in the meagre shade of their porches, sleepy from the heat or weary from the strange, indefinable darkness hidden among the deceiving bright air.

The old man stabbed the sky with his quivering finger. “I feel it now, son, more than ever. Oh, it’s a strong feeling, and one worth investigating for a boy with the eyes for it.” Following the gesture, heart thumping, the boy looked from the house fronts and with renewed determination to the trees of the park abutting the nearby parking lot.

Something took form from the oven air. A vague shape coalesced among the emerald leaves and tiny crab apples like sapphires decorating the trees like a holiday celebration of the summer. He watched it materialize, details embellishing themselves and growing more pronounced with each passing second that he held it within his steadfast gaze.

The boy smiled. He laughed a moment later, laughter free and hearty, the laughter his grandfather had once owned before he’d grown old and confined to creaking thrones unfit to bear his bent but regal frame.

The boy looked avidly now among the leaves of the trees. He turned his attention then with an earnest enthusiasm into the air over the trees. He looked where the dropping sun – bright and blazing now and freed suddenly from its stifling eclipse – limned the crumbling projects in fire.

And he saw.

He saw.

“Do you see?” his grandfather asked the boy, eagerness infusing his voice, desperate and brimming with a hopeful joy. “Do you see her? You do, don’t you? You do.”

The boy nodded. His grandfather smiled, and wiped at the tears suddenly returned in his eyes. “Good, my boy,” he murmured. “Very, very good. The young colt hasn’t grown into a new skin and run away on me just yet.” And his large weathered hand patted a gentle melody of camaraderie and thanks on his grandson’s back.

From the lawn before them a jewel flashed, and then another and then another: brilliant yellow and emerald lights reflecting the sun’s final moments of that day as it sank and sank beyond the houses, freed monarchs reclaiming their kingdom among the grass and trees. In the distance, laughter sounded, free and joyous and drifting like a song on the humid air. A car horn barked somewhere like a cry of celebration or fanfare documenting the scene.

The boy continued nodding, seeing all of these things, examining the world as he knew it – faltering, tenuous, yet filled with the potential for secret worlds gathering their strength beneath the streets and of familiar floating faces among the summer leaves – through his stinging, clearing eyes.

The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of His indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the Beast and His image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of His name.

- Revelation 14:10-11