The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

of them. They were mostly problems with very few solutions, so he had closed off their—the wives’—bedroom. He didn’t go in there ever. They would come to him. He thought maybe the spiders were gathering there. It made sense. He first slid a mat of duct tape under the door and left it a day and night. That evening, he decided to sleep in the living room.  He dreamed his feet were on fire, but he peed on them to put them out. Thankfully, the inflatable mattress was plastic, so he was able rinse it off.

There was nothing but dust on the duct tape mat. He had to proceed with the new fumigation, no matter what, evidence or not. The wives had been so much trouble and still were.  He hadn’t let the wives take his house, although the last one tried and tried. It was his house. It was in the contract. He was certainly not going to lose it to the spiders. He would exterminate them all.

He paid extra to schedule the fumigation date as soon as possible. Still, he was spider defiant. He slept in the wives’ bedroom as a challenge. He put two buckets of warm water by the bedroom for his feet and a plastic tarp under the sheets. The room had been very dusty, but he saw no webs or mesh. He had heard that spiders ate their webs every night and then built a new one the next day. Maybe these spiders just recycled efficiently. He kept missing them.  His third ex-wife would love that. She kept telling him he missed out on life. “Miss out,” she would laugh. “Miss! Miss! Miss!” It was an accusation of some kind he never understood. She would laugh harder if he asked for clarification. She was a bitch not a witch. Maybe witch and a bitch; they weren’t mutually exclusive. “Witch bitch!” he yelled at the bedroom ceiling. The spiders might be up there.

He didn’t care about the dust, but it did make him sneeze.  He checked the dust layer for spider footprints. He wasn’t certain what they might look like, but he checked anyway. There was nothing there he could determine, but he left the dust undisturbed anyway. They might still scamper out.

The mattress was too soft, just like the wives. Life with him wasn’t that hard, but “Soft! Soft!” they all had whined. It was what he was: a disappointment to them. The experience was mutual. He would kill these spiders, the real spiders and the dream spiders. He heard her laugh in the dream cocoon he broke out of that night.  He heard her, too, as he burst awake. “Witch bitch!” he shouted back. He spent the day looking through every inch of the wives’ bedroom. He found nothing. Nothing! All that was there was the dust from before.

He expanded his search to the rest of the rooms of the house. Nothing still. Nothing.  Nothing. “In the walls, then!” He banged at the wallpaper the witch bitch had insisted on installing, but he didn’t want to damage the drywall. He could get in between the walls through the crawl space: no need for damage, just a tight squeeze, a thorough, tight squeeze search.

He hadn’t eaten since the night before, which was good because he would be thinner. He went under the house to get in between the walls. He had his flashlight for light and a weapon.  He crawled slowly, examining all of the dust and roach bodies. Slow, thorough, and tight was his search. He would continue until he found something. He would find something. It was too dark in between the walls to keep track of time. He searched and searched to no avail but continued, even though he was so tired of it all. At one bend, he fell asleep.

The spiders didn’t come because the exterminators had. They had been given the keys. They prepped and tented the house in the rush they had been paid to do. They had been paid to use extra gas, despite regulations. The house looked like the circus had come to the neighborhood; clowns of death jumped and tumbled throughout it.

But after the appropriate time, the venting fans couldn’t get rid of the smell. It just got worse. The exterminators couldn’t reach their client, so they tracked down his ex-wife. They were surprised by her laughing response.

“About time you called,” she said. “I will be right over to take care. The house is mine. I have the will.”

Der Hölle Racht

Laura Saint Martin

The couch felt better than it looked, a thrift store find of questionable pedigree but unparalleled comfort. It made itself right at home in Rima Sonke’s tiny living room with the ease of a stray cat, world-weary but content.

The old couch was a far cry from the streamlined modular precision-parked in the house Rima once shared with her husband, Derek. Like Rima, it blended itself with the modern granite counters and latest Best Buy toys. Bland, obedient, frictionless surfaces that cleaned easily.

Even blood.

Very little of the blood in the ramshackle tract house Rima now occupied belonged to her or her daughter Haylee. It was one ugly-ass island of calm after the rogue waves of her marriage. They were safe here.

Until Derek found them.

The letter sat unopened on the cheesy kitchen table. It abstracted the once-comforting light, that letter, made shadows clang and bong in Rima’s head. Outside of the little window next to the table, several junk carsranked themselves in the yard, reminding Rima of unmade beds and unmade decisions. Two retired toilets sprouted weeds. A raven clacked in one of the sentinel pines by the road.

Rima uprooted herself from that nurturing couch, picked up the letter. Like a losing game of rock-paper-scissors, it covered the copy of the Order of Protection.

The court reporter’s well-trained texting,

spells out in legalese perplexing

A strong and dire message authored too concisely to ignore.

A cease/desist to frail bones snapping,

and local gendarme’s schemes entrapping.

The gavel’s final gentle tapping seals the ruling of the Honorable Lenore,

that Derek Sonke will abandon vows of union he once swore

and bother Rima nevermore.

Dreadful day, that. Who likes court? On the other hand, who likes traumatic head injury? Just out of the hospital, Rima appeared at the courthouse in heavy bandages, still using a