The Muse, Dear Reader, is not entirely mythological. Something of it exists, to be sure, but how much of that something…Who’s to say? It surely is not the fairy goddess of love songs nor the sultry maiden of oil paintings. Rather, I believe, the Muse is something of a pesky spider. Left unbothered or ignored, it may crawl past you. It may waltz all eight of its legs right across your breast while you sleep. Cultured, however, and given two thin sticks to spin a web between, it might just do that. It might provide you with a silk strand of inspiration–or it might just trap you.
Dear Reader, the Muse is like a spider in another, most crucial way: if you search for it, be it to trap it beneath a jar or swat it into the trees outside your window, it will run. It will scurry and flee, hurry and leave, burrow into its hole and be ever the more wary the next time its legs call for a stretch.
You have to catch it, yes, I thought. Let it come, let it linger. Thinking the words, though, didn’t summon the spider. My pen hadn’t lain still in weeks; neither had it written. Like me, it was restless and jaded. Anything that it wrote today would be no better than the goopy mud I’d step in if I left the house. Unfortunately (or fortunately), leaving the house would be the night’s only option. Scribbling my initials ad nauseam across the border of my empty pages was as wasteful as it was creatively deflating. There would be no productive writing tonight, just as there had been none for weeks. Weeks.
The road was empty, masked by a sheet of fog thick enough to trap in a plastic bag. Above the white lines, streetlights that looked rather like orbs hung, seemingly suspended, completely free from their posts. In front of me, a lone car hugged the shoulder with its hazards on. As my car crawled closer, I saw the two-tone panels of decades past: beige and brown. The windows were untinted, but no interior lights shone and all I could see was a panel of black as dense as the fog outside. One after another, the floating orbs floated past. Enough, I thought. No one was in the oncoming lane so I drove into it, meaning to angrily swerve around this station wagon. As I did, I looked to my right and saw a glimpse of a head of long, black hair.
I only thought one word: jackass.
And now, Dear Reader, what choice is there on a night so drab, dreary and drizzly as this one? What choice, but to search for the spider in the swill of a draining silver keg? If I had my way, and if I could withstand my wallet’s protests, the keg would be as empty as the bar by the time I left. The spider could be hiding anywhere, after all. The faux-solitude of the bar (the drunkard hoarding a bartop to himself, feeling alone in spite of the recognizable face pouring his drinks) was first fractured by the sound of a heavy car crunching across the parking lot’s gravel, then shattered completely as the gold bell above the red door obnoxiously jingled.
The stranger chose a seat, thankfully, as far away from my own as they could without having to stand outside of the bar’s brick walls. They kept their head hung low, eyes never leaving a pair of pale hands. They rubbed, did these hands, not with the mad fury of a person warming up their palms but with the sensuality of one thinning out a too-large dollop of lotion.
It was rather amazing how reliable the keg of silver was at sweetening my sour mood. Some twenty dollars later, I could hardly remember what catastrophic ailment brought me to the drinking well in the first place. In fact, I found myself quite suddenly with the most dire of cravings for a conversation.
And who, Dear Reader, to talk to?
The haggard man (I could see that it was a man as I clumsily slid my pint glass across the bartop towards his seat) was adorned only by an empty snifter. He did not so much breathe a breath of air in my direction as I sauntered over. Selfishly, I hoped the spider might crawl from this man’s pasty hand, maybe down from the creases of his flannel shirt. We spoke, so we did. We traded names and occupations. Between jobs, he was. I told him I was something of the same sort, perhaps not cut from the same cloth but similar garments. He and I could both tell we fell from entirely different fabrics. He was not standoffish, but he bordered on disinterest. The air in my glass slowly began to overtake what liquid remained and by then I was in full ramble mode. Without thinking, or maybe speaking only with my subconscious, I admitted to the stranger that I was a writer, and that I was looking for the month’s story.
The clearest words he’d pronounced all night: “Looking for a story, are ya? You should’ve said so, good man. Share a smoke with me?” And I was all too happy to oblige. I didn’t smoke, but a story. ‘Weeks,’ I said to myself again. It could all be over tonight. I watched as, from the breast pocket of his flannel, the stranger pulled a white bag. He procured next a thin rolling paper and sprinkled brown tobacco inside.
When he lit the cigarette, the smoke wafted into my eye. I blinked and shook my head. As I did this, I looked out into the parking lot and saw the two-tone car, hazards still flashing, parked diagonally across two different spots. I looked back at the man and saw the long, black hair I hadn’t recognized. Underneath the outside lights, in the fog, it looked wet to the point of greasy. “For your story,” he said with a growl…
I heard a squelch and felt a brightly deep pain in my chest. I looked down at a rose of blossoming crimson. I thought of holding my hands up, of grasping my heart, thinking I could manually push the blood back in. Instead, I fell to the ground. As my vision closed around the edges, I looked up at the red brick wall… and saw a spider. // JACKSON RUIZ
