October 11, 2016

PodCastle 437: The Cruelest Team Will Win

* Author : Mike Allen

* Narrator : Summer Fletcher

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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First printed in the anthology CORVIDAE, edited by Rhonda Parrish (World Weaver Press, July 2015)

The Cruelest Team Will Win

by Mike Allen

A spider with a leg span wider than my outstretched hand squeezed out from the space behind the light switch, and spread its wings.

I froze, my finger still on the toggle. Behind me the dust-draped ceiling fan hummed to life, the light bulb beneath it flicking on to paint the monster with my shadow.

The marks on its body formed a single staring eye above a screaming mouth. Two more false eyes glared red across its dragonfly wings. Another hideous little soul turned demonic, yearning to grow into something far worse.

I showed it my own spirit form.

It made good on its threat and lifted into the air, but its terrifying modification only made my task easier and my beak closed around it. The poison leaking from its crushed body spread warmth as it slid down my gullet.

The first time I ate one of its kind that poison made me quite sick. I underestimated how sick. I told my sweet neighbor across the hall that her three year old wouldn’t wake up screaming any more, her apartment was safe again. Then I drove to work at the fabric store, nearly crashed my car just trying to park, staggered inside and barely made it to the bathroom stall, dry heaving over the toilet while my manager clucked behind me, Leeanne, are you okay? You need the hospital?

But when you eat a ghost, there’s nothing to throw up. And the kind of poison a tainted soul puts in you, no doctor can help with that.

So I told her I’d be fine, it was just food poisoning, I’d be over it soon. I couldn’t go home, I needed the money too much. So I sucked it up and went to work. And then I found out something else about that poison. When the nausea subsided, a euphoria kicked in, not far removed from the time I mixed Flexiril and peach schnapps, a lava lamp glow oozing through me. All day I fought the urge to take my blue jay form right there in the store. My wings, slices of sky, would stretch longer than the fabric tables, and then I’d fly right through the ceiling like a ghost gone giant-size, meld my blue with the blue above.

I did that once, a couple years ago when I was less weighted with sad knowledge of the world: quit a job at a print shop by going blue jay right in front of my skeevy boss and flapping away through the cinderblock wall into the shimmering heavens of the spirit world. But when I returned to earth again, I still needed to pay for my classes, to cover my rent, to eat.

That sad weight kept me grounded that first delirious day of spider poisoning, but the sensation was addictive. The very next time I was asked to cleanse a house, I found another spiderling. It was strange that I found another right away, and not a run-of-the-mill, perfectly-human-looking haint, but it shot out at me from under a closet door, its mutation a second set of legs tipped with pincers, and I didn’t hesitate to eat it. And the next one I found, and the next one, and the next and many nexts since. And this time too.

The urge hit my brain straight away, to stay as I was, shift completely into the spirit world and rise up through the floors and ceilings of this rambling house as if it were mere mirage,

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