Laced With Cobwebs

Her lashes were laced with cobwebs, which made me wonder where the spiders went.
I thought maybe they rested gently in her skull, behind her eyelids. For her eyes had been long since removed and her lids shut with a thin, gossamer thread.
A dead woman is not what you’d expect it to be. There was no blood. No blemishes on that satin-like skin. But she was still dead.
The spiders were not deceased. There was life behind those eyes that were sewn shut. For as I looked closely, I saw a small black leg peer curiously out from her ear canal. And if I were to keep going, I’d have seen something entirely different. Vast and intricate cities of web and sinew, spanning across the entirety of the space. Spiders dangling gracefully in the meaty, rotten chamber, forming bridges and roads faster than any man could.
But I didn’t see these things because I didn’t look. It’s not good manners to look inside a dead woman’s ears.
Instead, I saw her exterior. I saw the way her cheeks were flushed with an unnatural pink, how her lips were slightly parted in relaxation. I saw the tiny prodding movements from behind her eyelids and that’s how I knew about the spiders.
At first, I thought she was growing an extra eyelash. In hindsight, that would have been preferred.
The gossamers holding the lid closed started to break as more legs protruded from the slit. It was forced open, unnaturally wide, like the dead woman was winking, as thick, black masses of crawlers oozed out of the opening.
After only a few minutes there were gaping holes in the body, showing intestines that were turning black, covered in clotted blood. I watched the massacre. I watched her skin slowly peel off and her lips become nothing but teeth. It was beautiful, in a sense.
Then as quickly as they came, the spiders retreated, to her skull, I assumed. And she was left a half-skeleton-half-person.
That was what I expected a dead woman to look like. Her eyelids were ripped open, displaying bloody pits, holes in her face left a grinning skeleton and her guts were casually laid out over the coffin to the floor, as one would lay out washing. This was death.
And yet the scene behind her (non)eyelids was anything but deceased. For inside her mind was a bustling, busy city with colour and mansions of thought and ideas. She was a beautiful person, but the beauty of those spiders was far better.
She was a dead woman, but she was not deceased.
And as I walked away from the scene, I found that my thoughts began to stir.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a window reflection.
That was when I noticed a small something on my eyelashes, drawing out a thin, gossamer thread.
And I smiled. For I would be dead too.

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