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On the Ontology of Glass Spiders
"Glass spiders?" Just saying that second word was enough to send shivers squirming across Moira's scalp, her tightly wrapped bun feeling like a tennis ball bouncing around on the back of her head.
"It's okay," Casey said, shoveling in a mouthful of soup. Of course, speaking turned her slurp into a slobber, spots speckling the front of her lab coat and her whole side of the table, but as usual, she didn't notice. At least she was sporting a buzzcut this month: when they'd been kids, Casey's hair had always looked duller and grayer than Moira's glossy black because Casey couldn't be bothered to wash or even brush it. "It's not that we're really making spiders outta glass. It's more that they're kinda silicon-based so the webs they spin will sorta be fiberglass."
Was that better or worse? Moira couldn't decide, so she cleared her throat and asked, "Fiberglass isn't usually produced like that, is it?"
Casey didn't wave the hand holding her spoon; she waved the hand wrapped around one of the rolls Moira had brought home from work, the tiny impacts of its crumbs making Moira flinch. "I could tell you more, Moi," Casey said with a laugh, and Moira scrupulously didn't look at the dark tangle of her sister's teeth. "But then they'd never find my body! I mean, you wanna talk about non-disclosure agreements? This one's a beaut! Just the right mix of carrots and sticks if you know what I mean!"
Moira didn't, of course, but then she hadn't understood much of anything Casey had said since before their shared sixth birthday. Casey had kept getting interested in more and more peculiar sorts of biology till her work at the science fair their freshman year in high school had caught the eye of someone at Borland Labs outside town. She'd interned there till graduation, had been hired full-time the next day, and had been making so much money the past ten years that Moira got to live in this nice house a block from the bay while still working at the bakery downtown the way she had since junior high.
"Anyway!" Casey picked up her bowl and slurped the rest of her soup. "I'll likely be at the lab all night and most of tomorrow, but I should be home for dinner." She slammed the bowl onto the table. "You're the best, Moi! Say hi to everyone for me!" Leaping from her chair, she grabbed her brown duster coat off the back of the sofa, wrapped herself in it, pulled open the front door, and charged into the evening darkness outside.
Already getting up to close the door, Moira didn't sigh. As much as she loved her sister, it got a little tiring sometimes being her caretaker. But after one too many of her experiments had escaped back home, Mom and Dad had gotten insistent about Casey moving out. She and Moira had just turned eighteen, and, well, Moira couldn't let Casey go on her own, could she? Casey could make goldfish glow in the dark, could make houseflies smell like cinnamon, could make bees produce grape jelly instead of honey, but did she remember to eat? To sleep? To brush her teeth or bathe?
Closing the door, then, Moira did sigh. She hadn't a single real complaint about her life, but hearing the tidbits Casey dropped when she wasn't rushing from one place to another sometimes made Moira wonder what she'd missed, doing exactly the same thing every day for the past dozen years.
Not that she was going to brood on it, though. She had to be up before dawn to get the early donuts done at the bakery.
By four o'clock the next afternoon, Moira was humming, practically skipping up the street heading home after her shift. The chocolate croissants in the bag dangling from her fingertips made the whole neighborhood smell brighter, and the springtime sunlight dappling through the ficus trees might as well have been Mozart, it was so sweet.
She did a little spin on the sidewalk when she reached their gate, pushed inside, started up the steps—
And stopped with a jerk, her eyes freezing on the window above the front door. The afternoon sun slanted across it at an angle, and Moira could only stare at the network of jagged cracks splintering at least a dozen concentric circles over the window's surface.
Her first thought—had a bird hit it?—she dismissed immediately. Any bird big enough to leave a series of cracks that extensive would've burst right through. And as far as she could tell, standing outside the door and staring up at the picture window, the glass didn't have any holes in it whatsoever. Even the cracks, she thought, didn't seem to go all the way through, like they were—
Like they were only on the inside?
Yes. Pressing herself against the door and craning her neck back, she could see the surface shining smooth and unbroken. The crack didn't appear till she stepped back.
Even the smell of the chocolate croissants couldn't warm her suddenly. She fumbled in her purse for her keys, unlocked the door, and slowly pushed it open.
It didn't scrape against shards of glass scattered over the carpet because there weren't any shards of glass scattered over the carpet. But when she stepped inside and looked up, the radiating circles of cracks stood out clearly.
Except...they were moving now, undulating in the breeze coming through the doorway. In fact, the cracks weren't in the glass, weren't touching the window at all somehow, were floating with a light prismatic sheen a fraction of an inch away from the surface, the edges anchored to the corners of the window like—
Like a big glass spider web.
"No," Moira heard herself saying out loud. "No, no, no, no, no." She wasn't shouting it, and that surprised her a little, but, well, this wasn't the first time Casey had brought her work home with her.
Now that she thought about it, though, this was the first time since the two of them had gotten their own place. Whether she'd just been lucky or Casey had started being more careful, Moira didn't know, and right now, she didn't much care. Closing the door, she stomped into the kitchen, set the white bakery bag on the counter, grabbed the broom, and marched back out to the entryway. When Casey got home in a few hours—or days, possibly, knowing her sister—Moira would express her displeasure as to this situation. But right now, clearing the thing away was her top priority.
She raised the business end of the broom, then stopped and did a quick glance up and down and side to side along the whole web. That it didn't seem to have an occupant troubled her a bit, but maybe the thing had shattered in the concentrated sunlight or something. She couldn't imagine it would voluntarily leave after spinning such an intricate and sparkly pattern—and it really was quite stunning in the afternoon light, tiny rainbows flickering along every strand and casting colors down over her. But who knew what glass spiders were like?
Shuddering, she shoved the broom upward into the web, and it tinkled like miniature teacups shattering. Still, the strands stuck to the bristles like regular cobwebs, and she wound them quickly around the corn straw, dabbed at the edges, made sure she was sweeping away the entire—
"Hey!" a tiny voice shouted beside her. "Just what do you think you're doing?"
Startled, Moira jerked away from the sound, snapped her head over, saw something floating and shimmering in the sunlight.
No, not floating: it was hanging from the end of a long, glistening filament that seemed to reach up to the ceiling. Two of its eight legs curled around to crook against a cinched waist, and multiple emerald eyes fixed glaring upon her. "Do you know how long it took me to spin that?" the tiny voice shouted.
Several blinks revealed that the entire figure—including the span of its long and spindly legs—took up less space than the average plum. But when it waved half those legs at the window, size didn't matter. All that mattered was that tiny voice going on: "All day! That's how long! And you just sweep it away in a matter of seconds! Who do you think you are, anyway?"
Moira found that she had no answer to that.
Why she didn't faint dead away, Moira wasn't sure. Of course, she'd never been much of a fainter. But then she'd never had a glass spider yell at her, either. "You," she finally managed to sputter out. "You shouldn't be here."
The spider folded its front legs across its—well, not its chest, but Moira didn't seem able at the moment to recall the technical terms for spider body parts. "I'm a spider," it said. "According to some, I should never be anywhere."
"No." She grabbed her purse, started digging for her cell phone. "I'm calling Casey. This is unacceptable in every way, shape, and—"
"Wait! Please!" When the spider waved all its legs at once, every color Moira could imagine flashed in the air around it. "Don't send me back! I mean, I love Katherine, of course, what with her being my creator and all, but—" The spider shrank up a bit and seemed to shiver on the end of its line. "Well, she's a bit of a slob."
Moira snorted. "Tell me about it!" She found the phone and pulled it out. "She apparently lets intelligent spiders escape from her lab, after all, doesn't she?"
"We're not intelligent!" The spider was flailing again. "Only I am! We're all connected, see, and all our sapient parts got concentrated in me! The others are mindlessly content, sipping silica in suspension and churning out reams of glass fiber, taking no more notice of my attempts at conversation than the test tubes or the computer consoles do! I thought I could strike up a relationship with Katherine, but she's always crashing about, never staying still long enough for me to get a word in! Speaking frankly, I could barely stand hiding in her brassiere long enough to make my escape yesterday! I mean, when did she last wash that thing? A decade ago?"
The phone hung from Moira's fingertips, her mind frantically trying to sort through what she'd just heard. But all she could manage to squeeze from her brain to her mouth was, "Casey."
All the spider's glittering green eyes blinked. "What?"
"My sister. She hates being called Katherine. She says it sounds way too dignified for her." Moira let her phone fall back into her purse. "You...you're really the only one who can think?"
The spider seemed to wilt like a flower in autumn. "I can't pretend to understand it. I mean, why me? Can I really even talk about 'me'? Shouldn't I say 'us' instead since I'm some kinda composite being? Or am I the result of some distributed intelligence scheme, some function of the way my sisters and I are all little nodes of fiber optic cables connected wirelessly to each other?"
Fortunately, the back of the sofa was right behind Moira so when her knees went rubbery, she just fell back to sit on it instead of slumping all the way to the floor. "How...how do you know all that? How do you even know English?"
When the spider shrugged, it used all its legs. "From the internet. I was tapping in through your wi-fi before you swept up my antenna." It did some more glaring. "And if you start making jokes about spiders surfing the web, I swear I'll bite you."
With a grin, Moira started to assert that such a thought had never crossed her mind when she realized she was grinning. At a spider. At a glass spider. At a talking glass spider. At a talking glass spider her sister had made and inadvertently brought home with her.
"I need a chocolate croissant," Moira declared. "Do you...can I get you anything?"
Sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a partially eaten croissant made things, well, not any saner. But less insane somehow.
The spider had joined her and was currently perched quivering on top of the salt shaker. "I can't abandon them," it was saying. "They're my sisters! But I can't go back, either, can't take another moment of being locked up in that place! I'll go crazy, and, I mean, I've got all our sapience! If I lose my mind, I'll be losing everybody's mind! And maybe that'll set us all off on a rampage or something! Think about it! I'd be responsible for loosing a plague of glass-eating, glass-spinning spiders upon the unsuspecting world!" It clasped its front legs together. "What'm I gonna do, Moira? What'm I gonna do?"
Not having any answers, Moira gave one anyway: "We're gonna give you a name."
For a few seconds, the house was silent—the first time that had happened all afternoon, Moira thought. Then the spider asked, "What?"
Moira sighed. "Look, I'm just a baker. I don't know anything about science or philosophy or any of that deep-thinking stuff. But I do know that you're not an 'it.' You're a person who loves her sisters, who wants to help them but doesn't know how, who doesn't even know what she's doing or why she's doing it. And to me, that means you need a name."
She could barely see the spider's mouthparts, but she could tell they'd shifted sideways. "You even try suggesting Charlotte, I'll threaten to bite you again."
That got Moira scowling. "I was gonna suggest Zoe."
"Ooo." The spider stood straighter on the salt shaker. "That's got a ring of intrigue about it." She slid down to the table and began to strut across it, her eyes half closed. "With a trench coat and slouch-brim fedora, I could break hearts on every continent."
The laugh that bubbled up from Moira's chest felt so right and natural, she just let out, clapping her hands for good measure. "Then it's settled! You'll be staying here, going to work with me, and learning all about the world!"
Zoe stopped beside the sugar bowl and turned. "Excuse me?"
"Well?" Moira spread her hands. "For the sake of your sisters, you need to stay sane. I've been doing exactly that for my sister for as long as I can remember, and I'll be happy to show you how!"
"You—" Again, Zoe clutched her forelegs to what Moira knew wasn't called her chest: the first thing she needed to do, she decided, was learn some spider anatomy. "You'd do that?" Zoe finished, a little choke in her tiny voice.
Her throat tightening, Moira could only nod. She swallowed, though, and got out, "I'm really looking forward to it."
"It's okay," Casey said, shoveling in a mouthful of soup. Of course, speaking turned her slurp into a slobber, spots speckling the front of her lab coat and her whole side of the table, but as usual, she didn't notice. At least she was sporting a buzzcut this month: when they'd been kids, Casey's hair had always looked duller and grayer than Moira's glossy black because Casey couldn't be bothered to wash or even brush it. "It's not that we're really making spiders outta glass. It's more that they're kinda silicon-based so the webs they spin will sorta be fiberglass."
Was that better or worse? Moira couldn't decide, so she cleared her throat and asked, "Fiberglass isn't usually produced like that, is it?"
Casey didn't wave the hand holding her spoon; she waved the hand wrapped around one of the rolls Moira had brought home from work, the tiny impacts of its crumbs making Moira flinch. "I could tell you more, Moi," Casey said with a laugh, and Moira scrupulously didn't look at the dark tangle of her sister's teeth. "But then they'd never find my body! I mean, you wanna talk about non-disclosure agreements? This one's a beaut! Just the right mix of carrots and sticks if you know what I mean!"
Moira didn't, of course, but then she hadn't understood much of anything Casey had said since before their shared sixth birthday. Casey had kept getting interested in more and more peculiar sorts of biology till her work at the science fair their freshman year in high school had caught the eye of someone at Borland Labs outside town. She'd interned there till graduation, had been hired full-time the next day, and had been making so much money the past ten years that Moira got to live in this nice house a block from the bay while still working at the bakery downtown the way she had since junior high.
"Anyway!" Casey picked up her bowl and slurped the rest of her soup. "I'll likely be at the lab all night and most of tomorrow, but I should be home for dinner." She slammed the bowl onto the table. "You're the best, Moi! Say hi to everyone for me!" Leaping from her chair, she grabbed her brown duster coat off the back of the sofa, wrapped herself in it, pulled open the front door, and charged into the evening darkness outside.
Already getting up to close the door, Moira didn't sigh. As much as she loved her sister, it got a little tiring sometimes being her caretaker. But after one too many of her experiments had escaped back home, Mom and Dad had gotten insistent about Casey moving out. She and Moira had just turned eighteen, and, well, Moira couldn't let Casey go on her own, could she? Casey could make goldfish glow in the dark, could make houseflies smell like cinnamon, could make bees produce grape jelly instead of honey, but did she remember to eat? To sleep? To brush her teeth or bathe?
Closing the door, then, Moira did sigh. She hadn't a single real complaint about her life, but hearing the tidbits Casey dropped when she wasn't rushing from one place to another sometimes made Moira wonder what she'd missed, doing exactly the same thing every day for the past dozen years.
Not that she was going to brood on it, though. She had to be up before dawn to get the early donuts done at the bakery.
By four o'clock the next afternoon, Moira was humming, practically skipping up the street heading home after her shift. The chocolate croissants in the bag dangling from her fingertips made the whole neighborhood smell brighter, and the springtime sunlight dappling through the ficus trees might as well have been Mozart, it was so sweet.
She did a little spin on the sidewalk when she reached their gate, pushed inside, started up the steps—
And stopped with a jerk, her eyes freezing on the window above the front door. The afternoon sun slanted across it at an angle, and Moira could only stare at the network of jagged cracks splintering at least a dozen concentric circles over the window's surface.
Her first thought—had a bird hit it?—she dismissed immediately. Any bird big enough to leave a series of cracks that extensive would've burst right through. And as far as she could tell, standing outside the door and staring up at the picture window, the glass didn't have any holes in it whatsoever. Even the cracks, she thought, didn't seem to go all the way through, like they were—
Like they were only on the inside?
Yes. Pressing herself against the door and craning her neck back, she could see the surface shining smooth and unbroken. The crack didn't appear till she stepped back.
Even the smell of the chocolate croissants couldn't warm her suddenly. She fumbled in her purse for her keys, unlocked the door, and slowly pushed it open.
It didn't scrape against shards of glass scattered over the carpet because there weren't any shards of glass scattered over the carpet. But when she stepped inside and looked up, the radiating circles of cracks stood out clearly.
Except...they were moving now, undulating in the breeze coming through the doorway. In fact, the cracks weren't in the glass, weren't touching the window at all somehow, were floating with a light prismatic sheen a fraction of an inch away from the surface, the edges anchored to the corners of the window like—
Like a big glass spider web.
"No," Moira heard herself saying out loud. "No, no, no, no, no." She wasn't shouting it, and that surprised her a little, but, well, this wasn't the first time Casey had brought her work home with her.
Now that she thought about it, though, this was the first time since the two of them had gotten their own place. Whether she'd just been lucky or Casey had started being more careful, Moira didn't know, and right now, she didn't much care. Closing the door, she stomped into the kitchen, set the white bakery bag on the counter, grabbed the broom, and marched back out to the entryway. When Casey got home in a few hours—or days, possibly, knowing her sister—Moira would express her displeasure as to this situation. But right now, clearing the thing away was her top priority.
She raised the business end of the broom, then stopped and did a quick glance up and down and side to side along the whole web. That it didn't seem to have an occupant troubled her a bit, but maybe the thing had shattered in the concentrated sunlight or something. She couldn't imagine it would voluntarily leave after spinning such an intricate and sparkly pattern—and it really was quite stunning in the afternoon light, tiny rainbows flickering along every strand and casting colors down over her. But who knew what glass spiders were like?
Shuddering, she shoved the broom upward into the web, and it tinkled like miniature teacups shattering. Still, the strands stuck to the bristles like regular cobwebs, and she wound them quickly around the corn straw, dabbed at the edges, made sure she was sweeping away the entire—
"Hey!" a tiny voice shouted beside her. "Just what do you think you're doing?"
Startled, Moira jerked away from the sound, snapped her head over, saw something floating and shimmering in the sunlight.
No, not floating: it was hanging from the end of a long, glistening filament that seemed to reach up to the ceiling. Two of its eight legs curled around to crook against a cinched waist, and multiple emerald eyes fixed glaring upon her. "Do you know how long it took me to spin that?" the tiny voice shouted.
Several blinks revealed that the entire figure—including the span of its long and spindly legs—took up less space than the average plum. But when it waved half those legs at the window, size didn't matter. All that mattered was that tiny voice going on: "All day! That's how long! And you just sweep it away in a matter of seconds! Who do you think you are, anyway?"
Moira found that she had no answer to that.
Why she didn't faint dead away, Moira wasn't sure. Of course, she'd never been much of a fainter. But then she'd never had a glass spider yell at her, either. "You," she finally managed to sputter out. "You shouldn't be here."
The spider folded its front legs across its—well, not its chest, but Moira didn't seem able at the moment to recall the technical terms for spider body parts. "I'm a spider," it said. "According to some, I should never be anywhere."
"No." She grabbed her purse, started digging for her cell phone. "I'm calling Casey. This is unacceptable in every way, shape, and—"
"Wait! Please!" When the spider waved all its legs at once, every color Moira could imagine flashed in the air around it. "Don't send me back! I mean, I love Katherine, of course, what with her being my creator and all, but—" The spider shrank up a bit and seemed to shiver on the end of its line. "Well, she's a bit of a slob."
Moira snorted. "Tell me about it!" She found the phone and pulled it out. "She apparently lets intelligent spiders escape from her lab, after all, doesn't she?"
"We're not intelligent!" The spider was flailing again. "Only I am! We're all connected, see, and all our sapient parts got concentrated in me! The others are mindlessly content, sipping silica in suspension and churning out reams of glass fiber, taking no more notice of my attempts at conversation than the test tubes or the computer consoles do! I thought I could strike up a relationship with Katherine, but she's always crashing about, never staying still long enough for me to get a word in! Speaking frankly, I could barely stand hiding in her brassiere long enough to make my escape yesterday! I mean, when did she last wash that thing? A decade ago?"
The phone hung from Moira's fingertips, her mind frantically trying to sort through what she'd just heard. But all she could manage to squeeze from her brain to her mouth was, "Casey."
All the spider's glittering green eyes blinked. "What?"
"My sister. She hates being called Katherine. She says it sounds way too dignified for her." Moira let her phone fall back into her purse. "You...you're really the only one who can think?"
The spider seemed to wilt like a flower in autumn. "I can't pretend to understand it. I mean, why me? Can I really even talk about 'me'? Shouldn't I say 'us' instead since I'm some kinda composite being? Or am I the result of some distributed intelligence scheme, some function of the way my sisters and I are all little nodes of fiber optic cables connected wirelessly to each other?"
Fortunately, the back of the sofa was right behind Moira so when her knees went rubbery, she just fell back to sit on it instead of slumping all the way to the floor. "How...how do you know all that? How do you even know English?"
When the spider shrugged, it used all its legs. "From the internet. I was tapping in through your wi-fi before you swept up my antenna." It did some more glaring. "And if you start making jokes about spiders surfing the web, I swear I'll bite you."
With a grin, Moira started to assert that such a thought had never crossed her mind when she realized she was grinning. At a spider. At a glass spider. At a talking glass spider. At a talking glass spider her sister had made and inadvertently brought home with her.
"I need a chocolate croissant," Moira declared. "Do you...can I get you anything?"
Sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a partially eaten croissant made things, well, not any saner. But less insane somehow.
The spider had joined her and was currently perched quivering on top of the salt shaker. "I can't abandon them," it was saying. "They're my sisters! But I can't go back, either, can't take another moment of being locked up in that place! I'll go crazy, and, I mean, I've got all our sapience! If I lose my mind, I'll be losing everybody's mind! And maybe that'll set us all off on a rampage or something! Think about it! I'd be responsible for loosing a plague of glass-eating, glass-spinning spiders upon the unsuspecting world!" It clasped its front legs together. "What'm I gonna do, Moira? What'm I gonna do?"
Not having any answers, Moira gave one anyway: "We're gonna give you a name."
For a few seconds, the house was silent—the first time that had happened all afternoon, Moira thought. Then the spider asked, "What?"
Moira sighed. "Look, I'm just a baker. I don't know anything about science or philosophy or any of that deep-thinking stuff. But I do know that you're not an 'it.' You're a person who loves her sisters, who wants to help them but doesn't know how, who doesn't even know what she's doing or why she's doing it. And to me, that means you need a name."
She could barely see the spider's mouthparts, but she could tell they'd shifted sideways. "You even try suggesting Charlotte, I'll threaten to bite you again."
That got Moira scowling. "I was gonna suggest Zoe."
"Ooo." The spider stood straighter on the salt shaker. "That's got a ring of intrigue about it." She slid down to the table and began to strut across it, her eyes half closed. "With a trench coat and slouch-brim fedora, I could break hearts on every continent."
The laugh that bubbled up from Moira's chest felt so right and natural, she just let out, clapping her hands for good measure. "Then it's settled! You'll be staying here, going to work with me, and learning all about the world!"
Zoe stopped beside the sugar bowl and turned. "Excuse me?"
"Well?" Moira spread her hands. "For the sake of your sisters, you need to stay sane. I've been doing exactly that for my sister for as long as I can remember, and I'll be happy to show you how!"
"You—" Again, Zoe clutched her forelegs to what Moira knew wasn't called her chest: the first thing she needed to do, she decided, was learn some spider anatomy. "You'd do that?" Zoe finished, a little choke in her tiny voice.
Her throat tightening, Moira could only nod. She swallowed, though, and got out, "I'm really looking forward to it."
Pics
That was funny as hell. A good balance between weirdness and consistency.
We have somehow a complete arc with Moira overcoming her arachnophobia but also an opening for further expand. And that would be my main complaint: it's too short, I wanna see Moira and Zoe living big adventures together and becoming BFF. :pinkiecrying:
The other nitpick would be when Moira gets home and notices the web, until she removes it. That part felt a bit long, your pace slowed here. I was a bit impatient that you come to the inevitable and expected meeting between Zoe and Moira.
But aside from that, great comedy, very good job.
I laughed way too hard for my own good.
We have somehow a complete arc with Moira overcoming her arachnophobia but also an opening for further expand. And that would be my main complaint: it's too short, I wanna see Moira and Zoe living big adventures together and becoming BFF. :pinkiecrying:
The other nitpick would be when Moira gets home and notices the web, until she removes it. That part felt a bit long, your pace slowed here. I was a bit impatient that you come to the inevitable and expected meeting between Zoe and Moira.
But aside from that, great comedy, very good job.
"And if you start making jokes about spiders surfing the web, I swear I'll bite you."
I laughed way too hard for my own good.
Wow, I really like this story! It's bursting at the seams with character and comedic charm. The writing is spotless, incredibly precise and allows Moira and Casey to really shine with their personalities. It's really great.
The spider was very amusing (the thing about spiders surfing the web put a big ol' smile on my face) but I actually feel kinda sad that the weirdness of a glass spider made in a lab kinda started and ended at, "it can talk". I think I would have liked this story a lot more if the glass spider was more... alien? Spider-like? Like, a peek into the mindset of a spider made out of glass that can tap into the internet and stuff, that would be really cool. As it stands, it's just kind of a weird and funny thing, which I guess is fine. It functions well within the story. But I can't help but feel like this story was mostly a clever title with enough content to justify the title being there – the story has a glass spider who talks about something metaphysical, so the title "works", I suppose. And it definitely fits the prompt picture well, for what that's worth.
I guess that's the thing really – I hate saying this because I hear it all the time about my own work and it never feels that constructive – I really feel like this story needed more meat on its bones to make it memorable. As it is, I'd say it's super solid, and very charming, but it never really made the jump to being a truly great piece.
The spider was very amusing (the thing about spiders surfing the web put a big ol' smile on my face) but I actually feel kinda sad that the weirdness of a glass spider made in a lab kinda started and ended at, "it can talk". I think I would have liked this story a lot more if the glass spider was more... alien? Spider-like? Like, a peek into the mindset of a spider made out of glass that can tap into the internet and stuff, that would be really cool. As it stands, it's just kind of a weird and funny thing, which I guess is fine. It functions well within the story. But I can't help but feel like this story was mostly a clever title with enough content to justify the title being there – the story has a glass spider who talks about something metaphysical, so the title "works", I suppose. And it definitely fits the prompt picture well, for what that's worth.
I guess that's the thing really – I hate saying this because I hear it all the time about my own work and it never feels that constructive – I really feel like this story needed more meat on its bones to make it memorable. As it is, I'd say it's super solid, and very charming, but it never really made the jump to being a truly great piece.
So, off the bat, I'll +1 everything the previous comments said. This is a nice character fluff piece that ends up feeling entertaining, but a little bare. I think the prose is generally nice, but it reminds me of my own work (which could usually benefit from more restraint,) so take that with a grain of salt.
To get to the heart of it: I think this is lacking a third act. In act 1 we learn about the sisters, particularly Casey. In act 2, the spider appears, changing the course of the story to something unexpected (I thought it was shaping up to be a dramatic thriller!) and forms a friendship. And then, in act 3, well, there is no act 3 because (I assume) the author ran out of time. But there SHOULD be an act 3, in which Casey returns to the house and we achieve some resolution tying all three characters together.
Casey's development in act 1 needs to pay off somewhere, and I still feel lingering nervousness from the tense opening of the second act, so it'd be nice to get some closure on the exact nature of the experiments and whether we need to worry about deadly monofilament webs or men in black. It's nice that Moira and Zoe are friends now, but is everything really going to be okay? I'm not sure.
Or maybe that's just me and my reading a lot of sci-fi horror in my youth. And to the present day. "Silicon-based spiders" is a specific concept that keys very strongly to me as "horror movie threat, Chekhov's web, at some point someone is going to walk into a web and fall apart in bloody chunks!" The tone of the opening playing hard on Moira's fear, and the slow start of the second act (as Fenton pointed out very nicely) reinforced this impression and prevented me from reading it as a comedy until much later.
Maybe it's just me, though! It's an area where I really can't tell. So no imaginary points off for that, the lack of third act and resolution and Casey payoff is the big issue here anyway. Finish the story and it's a winner! As is, two-thirds of a winner, scoring above average but not quite in my top tier. Thanks for writing, this was a neat one!
To get to the heart of it: I think this is lacking a third act. In act 1 we learn about the sisters, particularly Casey. In act 2, the spider appears, changing the course of the story to something unexpected (I thought it was shaping up to be a dramatic thriller!) and forms a friendship. And then, in act 3, well, there is no act 3 because (I assume) the author ran out of time. But there SHOULD be an act 3, in which Casey returns to the house and we achieve some resolution tying all three characters together.
Casey's development in act 1 needs to pay off somewhere, and I still feel lingering nervousness from the tense opening of the second act, so it'd be nice to get some closure on the exact nature of the experiments and whether we need to worry about deadly monofilament webs or men in black. It's nice that Moira and Zoe are friends now, but is everything really going to be okay? I'm not sure.
Or maybe that's just me and my reading a lot of sci-fi horror in my youth. And to the present day. "Silicon-based spiders" is a specific concept that keys very strongly to me as "horror movie threat, Chekhov's web, at some point someone is going to walk into a web and fall apart in bloody chunks!" The tone of the opening playing hard on Moira's fear, and the slow start of the second act (as Fenton pointed out very nicely) reinforced this impression and prevented me from reading it as a comedy until much later.
Maybe it's just me, though! It's an area where I really can't tell. So no imaginary points off for that, the lack of third act and resolution and Casey payoff is the big issue here anyway. Finish the story and it's a winner! As is, two-thirds of a winner, scoring above average but not quite in my top tier. Thanks for writing, this was a neat one!
I liked the banter and characterization. We didn't see much of the other sister, but even with her you got some understanding of her.
The main thing that stretched my suspension of disbelief me was just how worldly the spider was, and how human-like her thought processes were. I understand the whole Internet thing, but still.
The premise was plausible enough but overall characters were the strong suit of the piece.
The main thing that stretched my suspension of disbelief me was just how worldly the spider was, and how human-like her thought processes were. I understand the whole Internet thing, but still.
The premise was plausible enough but overall characters were the strong suit of the piece.
Definitely twincest.
This is ultra nitpicky, but using fiberglass kinda rubbed me the wrong way, since I think of fiberglass as the reinforced plastic. Addmitedly, sometimes the reinforcement is referred to as "fiberglass," but it was really nagging at me. I think you'd be better off just sticking to using glass, glass fiber, glass thread, or even some sci-fi element.
Also hivemind spider is weird and I'm not sure how much it adds, given the spider doesn't... really act like much of a hivemind?
Anyhow, cute, amusing, got me on the arc it was gonna carry out and then... ended without actually doing that. This also really does seem like the author ran out of time and was forced to just end with "and then we'll have awesome adventures" instead of addressing the obvious arc of their respective sister problems. Which is a real shame, because that was a super good setup for that.
This is ultra nitpicky, but using fiberglass kinda rubbed me the wrong way, since I think of fiberglass as the reinforced plastic. Addmitedly, sometimes the reinforcement is referred to as "fiberglass," but it was really nagging at me. I think you'd be better off just sticking to using glass, glass fiber, glass thread, or even some sci-fi element.
Also hivemind spider is weird and I'm not sure how much it adds, given the spider doesn't... really act like much of a hivemind?
Anyhow, cute, amusing, got me on the arc it was gonna carry out and then... ended without actually doing that. This also really does seem like the author ran out of time and was forced to just end with "and then we'll have awesome adventures" instead of addressing the obvious arc of their respective sister problems. Which is a real shame, because that was a super good setup for that.
This is cute, but rather empty. It ties together the familiar and surreal in a nice way, the banter is fun, the idea is nice, though not really deep. But that's it.
In a way, it feels like the intro to a children's book. That's not a diss, mind –there are many good books for children. I mean that that characters are simple but vivid; and the idea is simple enough, and we're more interested in it for shenanigans than following down the rabbit hole of unheimlich and conceptual complexity.
But the fact that it feels like an intro remains. Casey gets one scene, and she's gone, and that's it. Moira has one talk with the spider. There's a hint about the standard farcical plans and how we're all going to learn something about ourselves in the process. Then –
The curtains drop.
There's skill here, but it's being applied to a novella, not a short story.
In a way, it feels like the intro to a children's book. That's not a diss, mind –there are many good books for children. I mean that that characters are simple but vivid; and the idea is simple enough, and we're more interested in it for shenanigans than following down the rabbit hole of unheimlich and conceptual complexity.
But the fact that it feels like an intro remains. Casey gets one scene, and she's gone, and that's it. Moira has one talk with the spider. There's a hint about the standard farcical plans and how we're all going to learn something about ourselves in the process. Then –
The curtains drop.
There's skill here, but it's being applied to a novella, not a short story.
>>Pearple_Prose
>>Ranmilia
>>Ratlab
>>AndrewRogue
>>Scramblers and Shadows
>>Fenton
Folks:
If you've got the time and the inclination to give me comments on the whole story, I've finished it now and pasted it into a Google Doc.
Thanks!
Mike
>>Ranmilia
>>Ratlab
>>AndrewRogue
>>Scramblers and Shadows
>>Fenton
Folks:
If you've got the time and the inclination to give me comments on the whole story, I've finished it now and pasted it into a Google Doc.
Thanks!
Mike
It occurs to me:
That I never posted a link to the completed version of this story. And now I have. :)
Mike
That I never posted a link to the completed version of this story. And now I have. :)
Mike