Predation

Well past midnight, the air hung thick and warm. Darkness fluttered under my wings. I was flying just to feel the breeze. Gliding, suspended on a bed of flowing humidity, I closed my eyes. My naked body felt like a dart sliding through the night, comforted in blankets of frail moonlight. My arms felt taut and strong, my back arched but relaxed, my fingers raking and stirring the night into gentle turbulences.

I felt myself decelerating first, rapidly as though the air were warped, and then I felt the thick strands on my face and my body. The strands were strong like cable but soft and I was already entangled in them as the web recoiled.

Disoriented, I could not tell which way was up, nor, as I struggled, could I release myself from the net. I flailed my arms and twisted my thorax wildly, but the coils just wound themselves around me and gently tightened.

My heart drummed and filled my muscles with blood. My arms throbbed as the tension of the web began to pull my limbs away from my body and separated my legs until I laid as though stretched on a rack. I became aware immediately of my breathing, quick and irregular, as adrenaline coursed through my body. My limb was swollen and erect, on the verge of bursting. I could feeling it throbbing with the rhythm of my heart. The drumming shook my body as I dangled, wrapped in the tight strands.

I was shaking, it was not my heart; something was coming closer. Above my head, I strained. She was coming--her long elegant legs walked weightlessly across the web, her eyes full of famine. My lower back convulsed, my groin swelled painfully.

She stood above me and placed the ball of her pointed foot on my sternum. She pressed down, crushing my lungs; I couldn't breathe, I couldn't scream. Her eyes were empty and black, and I could see my naked body reflected in them. I looked like meat.

She hesitated for a moment, drinking my fear, salivating, anticipating her delight at the deliciousness of my body. She saw it. I wanted to hide it, but I couldn't move. It was massive now and reached up like a blood red beacon in the night.

She lowered herself down until her terrifying jaws hung just above my groin. She released the pressure on my chest and I took in a bottomless gasp. Before I could exhale, she plunged in, her jaws sinking into my flesh and the pumping blood running across my upper thigh and buttocks. The venom ran through me instantly--my fingers began to go numb and my arms quivered. My eyes rolled back into my skull and white foam formed at the corners of my mouth.

The suction was gentle at first, as I felt the warm blood leaving me and sliding into her stomach, but she began to drink quickly and greedily. She pulled from deep inside my pelvis--my muscles squeezed and my back twisted as a I tried to wrestle it away from her. She had swallowed it whole and I could feel my body going cold.

The death rattle rose up from my constricted anus, building until it filled my whole thorax. It hung on my lips for a moment as a cold shiver and then I released it as a great gasp. My organs flooded out of me in a great bloody burst, covering her face in a gush of my last warmth.

I coughed and felt as though I shriveled inside my body, shrinking to nothing, leaving behind my cavernous flesh. I was nothing more, then, but a wisp of smoke, rising. But as I did, I felt her wrapping my body, over and over again, in its funeral shroud of silk.