The Spider's Web (Part II of The Escape).

Just a quick note. I don't think this is going to go on much longer than three parts, but we'll see. I'm sort of writing it as I go, and this is all rough draft of a story I'm still kind of making up in my head.  If you like it, let me know by leaving me a comment here or on Twitter, since that's where I pretty much live. Thanks for reading!

The bustle of the city was not one that I expected. I knew that the ghetto was crowded, but I did not expect that the city would be crowded as well.  I pushed through a few crowds, mumbling my apologies in Polish, smiling kindly when one gentleman or another tipped his hat at us as we wandered through the streets. I had the directions in my head, and had repeated them back to Mila several times before we left the ghetto, but my head was so full of fear that I would forget where I was going.

Three right turns, several left turns, and I find myself in a part of Warsaw that I had never heard of before and never seen.  This part of town was dark and the buildings were decaying.  Looking around at it, I was surprised that they had not made this part of the city, this beaten, old part of the city that looked as if was about to crumble into instant decay, the ghetto.  I almost forgot my errand as I looked at this old narrow architecture, the pathways barely large enough for two people to walk abreast of each other. Gustav whined a little bit, clutching on to my skirt and popping his thumb into his mouth the way that he did when he was nervous or scared.  I looked down at him, and his eyes were full of fright and worry.

"My darling, you have to trust me," I leaned down and smiled. "We are having an adventure.  Would I let any harm come to you?"

He shook his head and I smiled at him as his thumb made an audible pop when he removed it from his mouth. "But Mum.. there are spiders." His voice trembled and his eyes scanned the walls up and down the alley.  The dark walls did have a copious amount of spiderwebs on them, twisted among the masonry of the buildings and hanging in doorways and window frames like so much delicate lace placed there by a gentle hand.  

"Oh, those," I said, trying to sound reassuring. "Well, you know about spiders, don't you?"

Gustav's eyes lit up with curiosity, and the fear seemed to drain from his tiny body. "No," he said. "What do spiders do?"

"Well," I replied, trying to put on my best adult knowledge voice and not let the fear that I felt myself creep into my voice. "Well, you see... Spiders eat other bugs. They actually help out a lot because they will eat things like fleas, and baby creepy crawlies and flies and things like that.  They wrap them up in a big warm blanket of spiders web..." I stopped at this point, and checked the spider web in the one of the windows of a shop, making sure that there were no spiders on it before pulling it off carefully, and holding it out to Gustav. "See, they make these webs, and the webs catch the bugs in them, see how it's sticking to my fingers?"

Gustav experimentally pulled out his own finger and placed it in the spider's web and watched as it clung to the very tip of his finger.  He pulled it back a bit and giggled when a strand or two of webbing followed behind it.  His eyes widened in wonder as he began to wave the strands back and forth like a little flag. 

"So," I continued, "The spider wraps up the little bugs to protect them from the big bad world. They wrap them all up in soft bundles and hug them and squeeze them so that they can't get out and hurt humans. They take all the nasty bugs and protect us from them."

"Then why do they bite humans?"  The curiosity had overcome his fear.

"Remember what I told you about bees when we were in the country?" I asked him, thinking about the time that we had gone into the country and there were patches of flowers in a meadow, the bees buzzing warmly in the spring sunlight, fuzzy fat bodies collecting the nectar of the flowers. 

Gustav nodded.

"Well, bees don't sting humans if humans don't bother them.  If you leave them alone, they will go about their day and be a wonderful thing and make honey just for us."

"For our tea?"

"Yes, for our tea.  Well, the spiders don't bite us very often except for the same reason.  They bite us if they are scared or if we bother them."

"Is that what the red sheet means, with the spider on it?  That they are going to help protect us like the spiders protect the us from the other bugs?"

My throat closed up in fear and apprehension and I was uncertain how to answer him, so I merely stood, brushing the cobwebs off of the front of my dress and took his tiny hand in mine. "Yes.  They are here to protect people."

Just not us I thought as I took his hand in mine again and we continued our long journey.

Escape (Working Title)

This is the first part of a story that was written for Ego's (Amanda McCormick) blog challenge. The prompt was Write a story including the following three elements: A stolen ring, fear of spiders, and a sinister stranger.  My story has some of those things, and is not finished. More will follow..

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"But Maman, I don't want to go."  The small voice at my side was high and frightened, wanting something that I couldn't give it, telling me that there was something wrong in their world, and there was little that I could do to end that fearful voice. 

I gently pushed at his back, the cloth of his rough woolen jacket pressing against my fingers, and smiled at him as best as I could, trying to tell him that I was brave, that there was nothing to worry about.  My son looked up at me with a smile, with eyes that shined with trust and I smiled back at him, trying not to cry. "We will be fine, Gustav.  There is nothing to worry about.  We have nothing to worry about."

We walked through the ghetto, and I tried to avoid the eyes of everybody around me. I did not want to look into anybody's face, and I did not want to think about what we were about to do. All I did was clutch Gustav's tiny little hand in mine and keep going. I did not want to look like I was racing anywhere, I did not want to look like I was dawdling either, so I tried to keep my pace normal as I wandered down the streets.  The stones of the old roadways rose and fell and she was afraid of catching her boot on the edge, but they made it to the arches of the ghetto and paused. 

"What are we doing here, Maman?" Gustav asked. 

"We are going to see an old friend of mine," I said, as I watched the hordes of other jews walk in and out of the gateway in front of me. Greta had told me how to do this, but I still was scared, I still didn't know if I could do it.  I smiled down at Gustav, hoping that my smile was reassuring, or at least refreshing, since he hadn't seen it much in the last while, but he only looked up at me with the same looks on his face, a crease of concern on his brow and his little hand squeezing mine has tight has he could. He hadn't been this close to the gates of the ghetto in a while, and I tried to be reassuring, but it was as if he could sense the fear in my body. I smiled at him, and then turned towards the corner and slid the yellow armband off of my arm, quickly, so as not to be noticed.  Gustav's eyes widened a bit at this; he was too young to wear an armand successfully, so he did not have one on his arm, but he knew that there was a punishment for not wearing the star. Even at the young age of three, he had seen death in the streets of the ghetto.

I slipped the star into my pocket and watched the flow of the crowd, and joined the stream just behind a nice older couple, who smiled brightly and held hands as they walked out the gate.  I kept expecting the guards to jump out at me, to question me, to ask to see my star, to ask to see my papers, but the young men, who both wore shiny golden pins with the swastika in black on it. They smiled down at me, and Gustav, and I smiled back, but averted my eyes quickly.  I did not want them too see the blush on my cheek or the fear in my eyes.

I had memorized the directions to the dealer's house.  Someone on the inside had told me about him.  I was not sure that I could trust this man, a broker in lost items and a finder of hidden things. I had hoped that he could perhaps find what I was looking for, and had sent word to him before I chose to take this journey.  His answer was rolled tightly in a ball in the hem of my pocket. Just a single word printed in old script. "Come".  it was the best that I could do for myself and Gustav, and so here I was, skirting the walls of the Ghetto, furtively looking through the streets, avoiding each face as much as I could while still making sure that I kept my head held high, as if I belonged.  The trick was to look like you belonged.

The ghetto here at Warsaw was not what we expected when we were told that we would have to move out of the country and into the city. We had expected clean housing, a community of Jewish people who would help take care of us in the absence of my husband, a people that we could call family, even if we weren't related by blood.  What we found was ... none of that.  What we found was a community living in fear, where we were hunted or holed up like so many vermin, packed in so close that we did not have privacy, in a place where - in order to get ahead - sometimes a neighbor, a roommate, even a relative that you happened to find living in the same terrible conditions would rat on you. And there were rumors that our own Judenrat within our ghetto was working with the Germans, getting ready to deport us all. Some had said that there were families who had managed to find a way out, a place to live outside the ghetto, a way to get away, that their relatives on the council had told them that it would be best if they left.

I had heard that rumor too, through the lips of Marta Klein, who had suddenly disappeared one night with her daughter from the ghetto. She had let slip that she wasn't going to be around anymore for the Germans to kick around, and I was uncertain what she meant, until she was no longer there. It was Marta's disappearance that had led me to finally get up the courage to seek out help from outside the ghetto.

I held Gustav's hand tightly, and in the other hand, I squeezed the stolen ring that was going to be our ticket out.

(to be continued...)

Halloween Poem by Sabra McGovern

Mummies, ghouls, haunts and spirits-
They got nothing, compared to you.
You make my heart beat;
You make my knees weak;
You may my poor hands shake too!

When you climbed into my life I tried not to fight
This feeling of unexplainable dread
But now I can't stop
My eyes want to pop
And now I'm on top of my bed.

Please, I'll do anything, just go away
Stop crawling on top of my mat
I guess I will stay here
Shaking with fear,
All just because of a rat!

Sabra's Poetry

The character for my new novel, Witch, has started to write poetry... in my head.  And so I'm going to leave these here to just.. be.

Beauty

by Sabra McGovern

Beauty walks on glass

The careful steps to make it right

The painful process where we

straighten something curly

Curl something straight, 

Oil something dry, 

Use potions to try out

Prick and poke and pluck and paint

Just to feel

That things can make us perfect

Without realizing perfection

Is just the way we are

And beauty is attitude

Not skin.

Prayer

by Sabra McGovern

I pray that you give me strength

to not kill the moron who

sits in front of me in English; 

to overcome that feeling that

I get where my hand tightens,

and my fist curls, and my body

tenses as he guffaws at the

moron who has stuck an "I'm

gay" sign to the back of a friend

in front of him.

I pray that you give me bravery to

stand up in front of the class

and instead of assaulting this

pudgy faced moron in front of me

with hands

I can assault them with words; 

words that will shame him and blame him

for making the kid who sits in the corner

squirm with embarrassment

because he's too offended to say "Hey, I'm gay

and that shouldn't be an insult."

I pray that you give me peace

to take on the chorus of 

voices that cry out against my opinions

that say it is just a word

that say it is just a word that

we use in fun..."It just means happy....right?

Right, in the same way that  nigger just means 

black person and WOP is just an Italian guy.

A slur is a slur, sir, and words can hurt.

I pray that you give me the wisdom to show that

while a knife or a gun

can break my skin

a word is a weapon

that breaks the spirit

which can be even more deadly.

Through the Screen

We use Skype. It's a comfort thing for us and sometimes we will talk into the night, or just sit and watch videos. Most of the time, we don't use the webcam, but sometimes we do, and we did, last night.  He laid down, and I laid down, and we talked, our heads sideways on our screens, matching eye for eye, lip for lip.  He reached out his hand as if to touch me, and I reached my hand is if to touch his, touching my screen, which was enlarged to full size so that he was nearly life size.  I sat like that, my hand on his, through the screen, wishing it could be our lips pressed together, our skin touching each other, when suddenly... I felt a give.

It wasn't anything that I could truly describe.  I remember wishing that I could touch him, and then there was a push and my hand slid forward, as if through the thin plastic barrier of my screen.  It almost felt a little bit like pushing through a really cold wall of butter. A lot of resistance, but once my fingers first went through, I knew that I could get through. There was no flash, no light, no sound of trumpets. Just a slight pop, and my hand was through the screen, and my fingers were met with warm, soft flesh. His eyes got big and his mouth formed a surprised O at this, but then he simply smiled, and tangled his fingers into mine, dragging them to his lips and kissing the tips of each finger.  My forearm gave a funny jolt and I could feel this though he was nearly three thousand miles away.  

I gave a tug, not separating our fingers, and there were two pops, one as my my hand returned to California, and one as his hand crossed over from New Jersey.  It was my turn to kiss fingertips and I suckled on one.  His smile widened and his eyes became dreamy and peaceful.  I tugged a little bit more, and his arm to the shoulder pulled through the screen.  I rewarded this with a kiss to his elbow and, though his face was obscured from me, I could hear a happy little noise escape him on the other side.  He pulled back against me, and, while keeping our hand still connected, contemplated me through the screen.

"Can you fit?" he asked.

I contemplated my wide hips and my large breasts and my expanse of shoulders and shook my head sadly.  "Can you?"

He pushed me back, our fingers still laced, and pressed his shoulder into the screen.  My monitor had always been pretty big. I liked to watch movies and it was the best thing for it, but his was small, just a tiny little netbook. He pressed his whole body forward and into the screen, up to his shoulder and stopped, releasing my hand and trailing his fingers up to my elbow to give a little squeeze.  I backed up and wrapped my fingers around his forearm (he was a little taller than me) and began to pull.  His scapula fit through, and the he pressed his head to his chest and I watched the top of his head crown through the screen, his face becoming distorted with the pressure.  I continued to pull and his arm wrapped around my waist as his head popped through and he looked a little bit dazed, but he was smiling, parts of him stuck through my screen. One arm in Jersey, the other in California, wrapped around my waist.  I kissed him, testing out the feel of lips on lips, and smiled when I found him warm and willing.  It only took a moment, and it was blissful, and then I was backing up again, pulling now with all of my might, as the other shoulder popped through and now his whole upper torso was in California.  Both hands grasped my waist, and I was afraid to let go of the physical connection, worried that if I did not anchor him here, he would slip back through the screen again.  So, with his hands on my waist, I began to push the monitor away from him, pulling through stomach, and back, wiggling the space around his hips, which stuck a bit and had to be forced, like a fat girl getting into years-old jeans, pushing flesh through the screen, pulling on the bits.  Once the hips were through, and he was laying on my keyboard, it was just a tug and a matter of slide as he his knees and feet popped through my screen, and he laid, face down, across my bed. 

I pulled him to a sitting position, still not wanting skin to release skin, and kissed him full and hard on the lips, even as we smiled around this sudden coupling.  He was here... and I was happy.  

I was worried that he would disappear if I let him go, that he would pop back to Jersey or just pop into non-existence, so many laws of physics and space and time had been broken.  He sat in front of me and he was here. His hands on my waist.  I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my whole body into him, and then slowly, incrementally, backed away, until my fingers were touching his and no other contact.  I took away one hand first, my left from his right, and then looked into his eyes and quickly, only for a fraction of a second, broke the contact between. He was still there.  I closed my eyes, and counted to three, not willing to believe in this good fortune, and when I opened them, he was still there.  I threw myself into his arms with a laugh, and his surprised, happy face met mine at lips and smile.  He was here.

We looked at the monitor, and the empty room on the other side, and laughed. He pressed his fingers against the plastic screen and there was a resistance there that was normal, the screen laid back. He couldn't get through it now, and my laptop laid there like a laptop does.

He asked "How am I going to get back?"

"Who cares?" I answered, and kissed him again.

We would worry about that in the morning.