Arachne

I don’t remember a time before I wove. I grew up in the fields, alongside my father and sheep.  There was never a mother around to birth me, nor was there any explanation given. My father had only the wool of his sheep to keep his bed warm at night.  He was known far and wide as the man with the purple flock, but this was a myth.  The truth was much stranger. 

Our sheep were the same muddied grey as the neighbors’.  The difference in the wool came from my father.  Alone at night, he would sit over the wool, refining and spinning it.  With his hands on the spinning wheel, tears would begin to fall, as if summoned by the whirring of the wheel.  As his feet pressed down, my father cried amethysts: tiny, shimmering mulberry tears which landed perfectly every time onto the rough yarn, turning it the color of violets and royalty, of pomegranates and jewels.  It was a color nature couldn’t keep and man wanted to grasp.

It was in this house that I learned to weave.  It seems I must have learned and yet… My father does not touch the loom.  He avoids it with a deathly fear.  I sometimes wonder if in playing with it as a toddler, I intuited how to use it.  Maybe it’s a skill deep in my blood that I inherited from my absent mother. Perhaps it’s older than that.

My days were always the same growing up, and yet they were never boring.  In the mornings, I would wake my father and we would tend to our dingy-cloud sheep, me, frolicking with the animals and him napping under trees.  He would cook us dinner and put me to bed and then begin his nightly ritual.  He would sob purple until piles and piles of luxuriant yarn lay in our kitchen.

It’s no wonder that he raised a daughter with amaranthine hair and orchid eyes.  It’s as if I were woven from the amethyst yarn.  And I always thought of myself that way, not born of a mortal, but as if I wove myself from magical tear-stained wool of my father.  Related to him, but not his.

It wasn’t long before I was using his salty, brilliant strands to weave intricate textiles. Each tapestry was a story I’d never heard, the detailed faces of goddesses and men looking out from it, caught in action.  More than just patterns or fractals, my weaving created whole worlds.  And being the daughter of a shepherd whose wool was already the talk of the town, it did not go unnoticed.  Merchants came to marvel. Princes came to purchase. Even nymphs took notice.  I will admit, with my father’s tinted tears and my nimble fingers, I felt that I was a god.

So I was not surprised when She showed up.  She came with a motherly demeanor and a proposal of competition.  I was stunned by Her, taken with Her owl eyes and glowing hair.  Though I knew it could not be true, I felt drawn to Her, as if She were the mother I’d been missing.  I saw myself in the creases of Her fingers and protrusion of Her chin.

“You’ve grown haughty, my child,” and I knew it was true.  But I wanted to show Her what I could do.  I wanted to make Her swell with pride at the fabric I spun.

She had brought Her own loom, and it sat immaculate in our sooty shepherd’s shack.  It seemed to shine and quiver, like everything She touched.  I yearned to tremble and sparkle in that way.  She sat and plucked at the strings, as if playing an instrument. She nodded at me to take my place behind my own loom and follow in suit. I started on my tapestry.  I could hear the strands under Her fingers sing as She strummed them wildly.   I dared not look up.  My eight fingers crawled over the loom, savagely spinning stories.  I worked faster and harder than ever before, until sweat dripped from my face, tiny black diamonds falling from my forehead into the pupils of characters I did not know, bringing them to life.  I could hear Her beside me, making Her loom cry out in a frenzied chant.  The narratives I wove became more detailed, more real, worlds within themselves.  Each thread held the vibrations of a universe and I could feel them all beneath my fingers, until I could no longer take the sensations: the sounds, the sights, the reverberations.  As I pushed the last strand into place, everything stopped.

I awoke to Her anger.  She stood over me, not with the concern of a mother, but with the fury of a god.

“The insolence…” She began, and my gaze followed Her golden finger to the two tapestries hanging side by side on the wall.  One, gleaming and golden, showed the glory of the pantheon.  Zeus threw thunder.  Poseidon’s trident created the very oceans.  Athena Herself inspired civilizations.  Mortals came from far and wide to leave gifts for the gods.  The other tapestry was beautifully dark with the gems of my sweat.  Zeus was a horny swan.   Dionysus could barely stand up.  And Athena aged a lonely virgin.  Along the edges, mortals glowed with eyes that were alive, that held the promise of death and passionate urgency of life.  They looked stunning and ephemeral and heavenly next to the gods.

I could feel Her boiling next to me and She flew at my tapestry, ripping it to shreds.  It was gone in an instant, tatters flying around the room as if it snowed tiny snippets of the stories I had spun.  Just as quickly, I felt a slap across my face and She was gone.  I was too shocked to cry.

I might have sat there for days, staring at Her weaving and at the tiny scraps of mine.  My father never came back.  I did not feel remorse, or hurt, or sadness.  I felt nothing, and that is why I did what I did.

It was She who found me, swinging from my father’s purple yarn, neck snapped and breathless.  Had She come back for Her masterpiece?  Had She felt remorse? Was She looking for me?  She took me down and cradled me in Her arms, holding me to Her chest, as if I were a babe sleeping.  I suspect She may have even cried.

She laid my limp body on the floor and held Her hands over me. “You’ll spin forever,” She chanted, again and again.  My chest raised up and my body became full and round. My eight spinning fingers grew long, longer than my body, longer than legs.  She kept chanting.  My eyes bulged, doubled and doubled, into iridescent black diamonds.

Now I am the mother I never had.  I call my children to me, black widows and wolves, funnel-webs and jumpers.  They gather round me and keep me company and I teach them to weave.

“You’ll spin forever.”  It was all I’d ever done, what I was born to do.

This post is the first in a series I am working on.

Creative Commons love to shelley1968 from flickr for the awesome photo.