A breath, a momentary glance. She stood before her window staring, arms spread curtain gathered bunched up in her fists. One second, a single click of the clunky clangy clock, one heartbeat than another. She had not moved then and she could not now, the faint pale winter light slipping in through the cracks in the shades. She had tangled her hair in her fingers like so many spiders and the moment had passed, no different than any of the previous thousands of moments but leaving her extraordinarily changed inside. Like someone had reached in through a hole in her throat and yanked everything out in one awful single tug. What had filled her before was gone, no more organs or tangles of veins, just a hollow map of webs but no one on the outside could see there was any difference through the thin shell of her skin and bones, they couldn’t see that everything was gone and that she was just a home for spiders.
It hadn’t been impressive. In fact, thinking back on it she could not remember what it had been at all, the thing that had entirely uprooted everything she had hugged to herself as true her entire life. It had just been one of those things, something you see out of the corner of your eye that makes you turn back for a second look, and then you just turn away and shake it off ignoring that strange feeling invading your gut. And now she was wholly different. An utterly unchangeable change, and no one noticed that the girl who climbed into bed that night was not the same girl who had woken in it.
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