Bad Charlotte

by Edd

Sherman Palmetto was used to ants and bees and wasps having it in for him. He was three weeks old when the first attack came, a kamikaze phalanx of ants from four nests converging on his crib. After three more pitched battles they moved from their beloved farm into the city. When he left home it was to move into the top floor of an apartment building, easier to defend with the panoply of sprays he kept to hand. He grew careless.

Thus it was the spiders caught him.

It was a Wednesday morning, his twenty-third birthday, and Sherman woke from dreams of drowning to find himself encased in webs. Pale early light filtered into the room, revealing more webs everywhere, and hundreds of spiders. One of them directly over his head descended on a silken strand, landing on his nose.

He screamed for a while. He thrashed; the nose-spider climbed a few inches away. For every thread that snapped a dozen spiders made daring leaps to reinforce his cocoon. Nobody came to check on him. Eventually he stopped, and lay panting.

Then he saw the woven message in one corner near the ceiling. “Hello, Sherman,” it said. “We mean you little harm.”

He read it out loud, putting little question marks after both sentences. Nose-spider inclined its head.

“You’re nodding? You understand?”

Another nod.

Sherman looked back at the message. “Don’t you mean ‘no harm’? That’s what they say in movies, ‘We mean you no harm.’.”

The spider spread its forelegs in midair. Sherman decided that was a shrug. “Okay, then, what do you want?” Finally! He was going to find out what they were after, besides his death.

Nose-spider pointed toward the ceiling, and Sherman looked up again. Spiders snipped a few of the strands at the corners of the previous message, and it floated down to reveal another one.

“We have a question.”

“A question?” said Sherman, trying to inhale enough to scream it. “You’ve got questions? What about my questions?”

Another shrug.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, fine. What’s your question?”

If a spider could be said to smile, Nose-spider did. It gestured upward again. Sherman read the question.

“Why are the ants and flying insects intent on your death?”

They didn’t know? “You don’t know?” They didn’t know! “What the hell are you asking me for? Don’t you insects ever talk to each other?!”

If a spider could be said to look mortally offended, Nose-spider did. It took the better part of an hour for it to weave its next message, but considerably less for Sherman to figure out what it would say.

“We’re not insects, you moron. We’re arachnids.”

To Each His Own Hell

by SaraG

Merridot sipped his absinthe and wondered if this was Hell. It certainly had that flavour to it, high on depravity, low on pleasure, high on desire, low on release… But it lacked a certain evilness about it and the eternal torment… well, sitting at a bar drinking couldn’t be called eternal damnation, now could it? The other option, that this was Heaven, was too silly to contemplate. Surely, Heaven wasn’t this seedy.

He had almost made it as a painter. Merridot was sure that if he had only lived long enough, he could have been more famous than Monet.

#

“Drivel away, drivel away,” the little devil muttered as he tried to force Merridot and his stinking art further down the Cosmic Drain. The little devil didn’t like his job. It embarrassed him that when relatives came to visit, they would always find him next to the sewer. A friend from college had once asked him why he didn’t quit and beg his way into Heaven, but evil was so much more seductive. The little devil would take an entry job in Evil over a senior position in Good, any day of the month. Good boys went to Heaven. Bad boys went everywhere (or at least down the drain).

#

“Say, if this is Hell, it ain’t quite so bad,” said the cabaret girl.

Merridot stared at her thighs and agreed with her. If this was hell, it wasn’t quite so bad at all. Only problem was that the Sewer Drift (the expansion of the universe that occurs in a diabolic sewer) kept pushing them apart. Merridot opined that if he could only grab the girl’s legs, he’d be in Heaven.

#

“No respect for Hell,” thought the little devil as he pushed Merridot further away from the girl. “What could you expect? Bad artists…” and here the devil shoved with a lot more might than he was paid for. “I’ll teach you, you little creep.”

Merridot watched the girl drift away. Of course, if he was going to be an artist, he couldn’t letwomen distract him. It was all for the better, he thought. He took another drink and kept scribbling.

From the void where Lucifer falls for all eternity, came a voice: “Idiot, people make their own hell!”

Merridot continued drawing. He was sure he’d imagined it.