PseudoPod 458: Stabilimentum

[Bdoomed]

PseudoPod 458: Stabilimentum

by Livia Llewellyn

“Stabilimentum” was published in the 2013 anthology Shadow’s Edge, which was edited by Simon Strantzas for Gray Friar Press.

“The story was written as a reaction to the massive and rapid development of the Jersey City waterfront, which is so out of character with the rest of the city – in particular my tenement-lined neighborhood – that it seems altogether alien and intrusive.”

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror and erotica. Her fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Subterranean, Nightmare Magazine, and Postscripts; and her short story collection Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. Her website is at www.liviallewellyn.com, where she list all her current works-in-progress and upcoming publications.

Your narrator – Tatiana Gomberg is a New York City based actress of stage, screen, and of course, the audio booth. Learn more about her at tatianagomberg.com.

Preorder your copy of She Walks in Shadows here: http://www.innsmouthfreepress.com/blog/books/she-walks-in-shadows/

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Thalia woke up with a small moan, a gasp of air escaping her mouth as her eyes opened to dim morning light. She stood before the open door of her bathroom, the small room as black and empty as an elevator shaft. Did she sleepwalk? No, that couldn’t be it. She was only still so tired that she didn’t remember getting out of bed. Just like the day before, and the day before–three months of this now, starting the day she moved in. Leaning against the doorframe, Thalia flipped on the bathroom light, peering up at the ceiling as she waited for the vertigo to dissipate. Thirty floors above her, a small city pressing down. She felt it the most in this tight, windowless space, the gurgles of water and pinging of pipes, the crush of so many people above and around her, doing the exact same thing. She had wanted to live high above everyone, far away from the crowds. It never occurred to her that with so many tenants pressed together, she would never feel truly alone, never feel far away from anything at all. Everyone bleeding into each other’s space–city living, get used to it. Thalia pushed the unease away, and reached for the toothpaste.

She only noticed it later, as she was getting ready to leave for work–looking up as she struggled with her hair, she spied a large brown spider trembling on invisible strands, high up in the far corner over her bathtub. Thalia stared, momentarily slack-jawed, as the creature seemingly floated through thick circles and curves of a white spiral pattern within the invisible rest of the web, its pace furious in tempo and intent. That was going to be one big damn web when it was finished. Which would be never.

“Do not have time for this,” Thalia mumbled, half-tiptoeing, half-clomping through the living room in an attempt to keep the neighbors below from waking up and complaining yet again about high heels and noise. A single shake to the bright yellow canister from under the kitchen sink told her all she needed to know. Barely enough to kill it, but it was enough. She tip-clomped back into the bathroom, and rose the can high into the air. Another small gasp escaped her lips, and she leaned back against the door frame. Again, vertigo–always the sensation that she was rising, rushing upward into the clouds. She just needed more protein, that’s all, maybe eggs for breakfast tomorrow instead of coffee and toast. Thalia aimed the can, and pressed her finger down. The first shot sent the spider spiraling down into the tub, and the second, weaker blast slowed its tremulous death throes just enough to assure her there would be no sudden revivals. Thalia felt the prickle of wet mist against her skin, and a second later, an ugly floral scent stung her throat and eyes. She backed quickly out of the bathroom, leaving the frail crumple of body and legs on the bathtub mat, a dot waving eight farewells. She’d deal with it when she got home tonight.


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Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

[zoanon]

nooo not ok, I too have been plagued by spiders all my life, and my current basement abode is no different. I will not sleep peacefully tonight.

[ElectricPaladin]

This happened last night!

The thing where there was a huge lump of spiders in our kitchen, not the thing where my apartment got crosswired with an apartment in another dimension.

I liked this one. It was neat in all sorts of ways, and very well achieved.

[South of No North]

That writhing mass of different types of spiders will stay with me.

I liked this, spiders being a pet favorite for creep factor. I think it is their benevolent effect of clearing away bugs mixed with their malevolent look and movement.

I felt for the MC getting her out of budget dream place and then finding something that would make it unlivable if she could afford to go anywhere else. So she is stuck with the nightmare and the saying just and only the right thing Super, so friendly but so clearly fake. (I've had that same feeling of being promised something with an apartment and never being sure if it had actually been done.)

One thing that stuck in my ear: I have a feeling she didn't actually dropkick her shoes,  that would be taking off her shoes, lifting them up, letting them go and then kicking them barefooted into the corner. More likely she kicked her shoes off into the corner. Just a minor thing but reading the flash contest comments has set me in the mind set of being a  bit of a stickler.

[bounceswoosh]

Maybe I missed something, but this didn't strike me as horrifying. More of a glimpse into a version of reality she didn't know existed. Seemed cool to me.

[Ryan H]

Since I live in a neighborhood with many low bushes and trees that lean close to the houses, we deal with an amazing variety of spiders (not all in one writhing mass, thank god). But now it's fall and they are indeed heading indoors in greater numbers. Now I will spend the winter finding them under piles of laundry, on the wall near the light switch, and cascading from the bathroom ceiling, just out of frame of the mirror. So yes this hit me right where nervous vigilance lives in my heart.

All of Thalia's emotional and mental beats were perfect. That predicament of being trapped by something you need but can't really afford is a very real one, and ownership is a web you can soon find yourself squirming within. But the places where this story went in the end were surprising and left me with a sense of awe. Great narration too!

[adrianh]

This was just super. Especially since it's left ambiguous whether the spiders were doing exactly what the protagonists mother said — trying to save her.

[South of No North]

This was just super. Especially since it's left ambiguous whether the spiders were doing exactly what the protagonists mother said — trying to save her.

Neat. I hadn't thought of that. I guess my own arachnoprejudice prevented considering that potential.

[bounceswoosh]

I should admit that while spiders don't bother me - if it had been tent caterpillars, I would have set fire to the whole building.

[Witchlander]

Loved this story. I have no fear of spiders myself--I rather like them, in fact-- but I felt the main character's fear and revulsion, which I think speaks to the quality of the writing. However, I don't know if I completely understood the correlation between the spiders and the 370th floor. Are they trying to take her there? Is this the dimension she truly belongs in, but she realizes it too late?

This was just super. Especially since it's left ambiguous whether the spiders were doing exactly what the protagonists mother said — trying to save her.

Yes, what was that about? I had a feeling that the mother knew things, but I don't think I learned what exactly.

[Witchlander]

By the way, I was googling stabilimentum and there actually are spiders that make them in the shape of an X as in the story:

[Dwango]

I thought this piece was going in a certain direction and then veered off in another direction.  It appeared to be about spiders and then it was about another dimension on the 370th floor.  I understand now her feeling of lifting, but I don't understand how she got to this room, as she was staying with the neighbors.  Were they rising as well?  Why Spiders?  I kind of expected her to look out the window and discover the buildings were strands of a giant spiderweb, and that she was trapped by the contract she signed, as if it were a web.  Instead it went in a direction that appeared to have nothing to do with the spiders.  It did not tie into her childhood.  It just kind of ended without making sense, not in that oooh its scary and mysterious, more like it was confusing and random.   It really built up nicely, but like the tower, didn't seem to really end, just continue on past eyesight.

[Chicken Ghost]

I too thought it was going somewhere else at first.  I thought we were getting a character piece like Patrick Suskind's "The Pigeon" (about a security guard living a very modest, very regimented life, whose routine is upset by a pigeon, driving him near insanity).  It diverged when the neighbors got involved and it ceased to just be about the protagonist.  

Like most good horror stories that don't seem to make sense, the crazy shit makes sense if you think about it metaphorically.  It doesn't have to be literally coherent to be metaphorically coherent.  (See also: every religion ever)  The apartment that isn't hers with the other tenant, and the operator's reference to never having been down to that point far above where she had thought the building ended, represent her feeling that there's something better that she'll never be able to reach.  She had to stretch herself to the limit to get 37 floors away from the things that she feared, and she knew there was farther to go.  It was a comprehensible distance, both physically and socioeconomically.  She's fallen into a realization both that even that isn't as far as one can go, and that perhaps she's gotten closer to something else she from which she might want to distance herself.  

If my interpretation of the metaphor is somewhere close to correct, then there's some similarity between the endings of this story and "The Pigeon," in that both protagonists end up accepting their new relationships with reality, though for one it is (IIRC) with relief, and the other with resignation.  

I get the idea that this story is more about the fears of someone who lives in a building like that, rather than the fears that drive a person to live like that.  It's a subtle distinction, I think, and I'm more interested in the latter; but I can respect it for what it is, I guess.  

[TrishEM]

Despite getting a bad spider bite on my temple while delivering newspapers some decades ago (walked right into a face-high web, in the dark), I've never had a problem with them -- spiders ARE natural, not otherworldly abominations, and they eat worse critters, so I can stand sharing living space with them as long as they're not TOO close. But at the third incident, with the wriggling mass of hundreds of spiders, my sympathies totally veered over to Thalia.
I'm intrigued by the notion that they might have been trying to protect her after all, and I wonder why and how that would have happened.

I also really felt for Thalia, being trapped in the lease for the too-pricy-but-formerly-perfect apartment. Don't need the fantastic at all to sympathize with that.

[Unblinking]

Interesting story. At the beginning it seemed to be going to a run-of-the-mill spiders are scary and these spiders are going to take over the apartment and then they're going to eat her route.  I was much more interested when it got weirder than that, especially with the 370th floor stuff.  That was a fun and unexpected turn.

[Unblinking]

Also, I might be weird, but am I the only one that guessed very early in the story that the building was unnaturally tall and that this would come into play later?  Early in the story she notes that she has never seen the top of the building, which struck me as an odd thing to say and I wondered if it was like cloud-high in the sky.  And then it turned out that it was!