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THE BILLIONAIRE’S KISS - Volume One
Miranda
The earliest memory I have is of spiders.
My maternal grandparents were wealthy Southerners who lived on an ancestral plantation south of Montgomery. Every summer I was forced to visit them. I hated it. I hated the humid August days, when water seemed like it could be wrung from the air. I hated their slow, lazy accents. I hated my grandmother’s insistence that I not do the things boys do, that I be ‘nice’ and ‘proper’ and ‘demure.’
But I loved the spiders.
I was four years old when I woke up one morning, opened the front door, and saw it: a perfect shimmering web spun across the columns of the portico, eight feet across. In its center hung a black and yellow garden spider. Its body was almost as big as my tiny hand, and its long, thin legs looked like crooked, vicious needles.
Rather than be terrified of it, I was enthralled – especially when a fly hit the web and sent shockwaves through the silver strands. It struggled to free itself, but failed. The spider raced gracefully across the threads and began to spin its victim round and round. Within seconds the fly was mummified, a tiny corpse shrouded in silk.
I jumped off the far end of the porch and began to find as many bugs as I could, all so I could toss them into the web and watch a replay of that show.
First came the entrapment. Then the struggle. Then the attack… and finally the end.
It was the first time I had ever enjoyed being at my grandparents’ house.
Of course my grandfather ruined it. He came out, saw the spider, and found a stick to tear down its web. I angrily protested, but he ignored me. I remember wanting to kill him.
I didn’t actually succeed until 20 years later.
At least the spider escaped unharmed into the bushes by the front steps. I spent the next several weeks watching her and her sisters amongst the bushes as they feasted on the insects I brought them: blood sacrifices to tiny, jeweled goddesses.
My grandparents thought I was extremely odd. Of course, everyone thought I was extremely odd for many years – until I realized that other people seemed to feel certain emotions I thought were useless, emotions I couldn’t understand except as intellectual abstractions. Until I learned to mimic those emotions and put others at ease. Until I learned about creating a mask and wearing it around other people.
I discovered all that on my own. My grandparents were worthless in helping me find my way in the world, although I did eventually learn many things from them. They were quite skilled in certain arts I did not appreciate at the time – such as playing the game of social respectability to an acquaintance’s face, then destroying him with gossip behind his back. Or lying with an innocent smile. Or manipulating others with guilt and shame.
Guilt and shame never worked on me, but they were curiously effective on others.
I may have hated my grandparents, but I appreciate the lessons they demonstrated, even if they did not realize they were teaching me.
But my first teachers were the spiders.
Entrap.
Enjoy the prey’s struggle.
Attack.
And kill.
I learned something else from those summers in Alabama:
Spiders are not the only species that can spin deadly webs.
