Angel Spider Sees

     While he injected himself into me like a microchip beneath my skin I thought maybe I wasn't myself at all. Maybe I was the angel in the farthest corner of the darkest crevice in the bathroom. I was floating there watching with eight large eyes surrounded by rings. If I wanted to I could have crawled down and bit him right in the eye so he could see things from my point of view but, the water turned cold and my piss turned red and the angel turned into a spider. Small, weak, and riddled with large black eyes that seemed to stare directly into my soul. They stared like they had never seen anything so gruesome in their life but I didn't scream. I am still afraid of spiders but not of old weaselly men who reek of Marlboro's maybe I didn't learn the lesson that God was trying so desperately to teach me. The lesson of lifeless eyes and "ultraviolence".

    As I floated in that cramped, grimy space, the shadows twisted and swayed, weaving grotesque patterns that danced along the stained tiles. My skin prickled as he leaned closer, his breath a sickly blend of smoke and decay, dripping with stories I never asked to hear. I could almost taste the bitterness in the air, like spoiled fruit rotting in the sun. I watched, suspended in that bathroom’s darkness, my body a ghostly remnant of something once vibrant and whole. But what was whole? Was it the girl who giggled under the stars or the specter of regret lurking behind my dilated pupils?

    The spider—the angel turned traitor—scuttled across the floor, each leg a reminder of how small I felt. I imagined it whispering my secrets, my fears, broadcasting them to the weaselly man, who now grinned with yellowed teeth. “You think you’re safe?” he croaked, his voice grating against the fragile walls of my mind. I wanted to deny him, to scream that safety was a mirage, an illusion spun by hopeful hearts and naïve dreams. But the words tangled in my throat, choking me with the weight of my own silence. Instead, I was the mute observer, reduced to nothing more than a spectator in a theater of horrors.

    Behind the grimy mirror, my reflection flickered—a twisted version of myself, eyes wide with terror, the irises swallowed by darkness. It seemed to beckon me, to drag me back into its liquid depths. Perhaps that was where I truly belonged, submerged in a void where pain and joy coalesced into a murky haze. I wanted to plunge in, to dissolve and float away, far from the man with his sickening laughter and the suffocating stench of despair. But the spider crawled ever closer, its multitude of eyes reflecting my own flickering spirit, urging me to confront the beast that had wrapped its claws around my heart.

    I felt the walls closing in, the bathroom morphing into a prison, each tile a reminder of my confinement. I wanted to shatter the mirror, to unleash the fragments of myself trapped behind glass, to let them scatter into a million pieces. But all I could do was watch, paralyzed, as the weaselly man leaned back, his grotesque smile stretching wider, the lines on his face deepening like scars etched by a cruel artist. He whispered promises of ecstasy laced with agony, and for a moment, I wondered if he spoke the truth. Was it ecstasy to drown in darkness? Was it freedom to yield to the monster that lurked just beneath the surface, waiting to swallow me whole?

    I closed my eyes, summoning the memory of light, of warmth—the feeling of sun-drenched skin and laughter that didn’t taste like ashes. But the spider persisted, weaving webs of doubt and despair, its dark little heart beating like a metronome, reminding me that time was slipping away. The cold water wrapped around my ankles, and the red stained the white, a watercolor masterpiece of anguish. And as the weaselly man reached for me, the last shred of angelic defiance flickered in my chest.