Escape from Silence (eBook)

THE SILENCE of the PRISON

Towns like Silence, Arizona are clusters of low-cost services: cheap food, discount gas, and bargain priced hospitalities. The Lazy Daze Motel is a prime example. An uninspired single-story building, its thrifty construction consists of cinder blocks walls, metal doors, cut-rate vinyl windows and a single room air conditioner for every room. Shaped in a U, it cradles the asphalt parking lot with the open top of the U facing the highway. The welcome sign guarantees a good night’s rest at a great price.

Inside room number 13 of the Lazy Daze Motel is Nyxie. In a few hours, she’ll be turning eleven. Staring into the bathroom mirror, Nyxie pauses in the middle of brushing her teeth and conducts a review of herself. She thinks her hair is too straight and her mom cuts it too short. Hair should flow, bounce and swirl like it does in all the commercials. All her hair wants to do is hang straight down. She likes her eyes though, gold flecks dotting her irises that are a color her mom calls midnight blue. She notes with worry that she is tallish for her age and thin. She thinks it makes her look too much like a boy. Her mother swallows a laugh every time she hears this complaint and argues that someday Nyxie will be grateful that she got those genes from her maternal grandfather; a man Nyxie’s never met. Her review finished, she concludes with a sigh it’s the same as it is every time; there’s nothing special about being Nyxie. She spits out the toothpaste, rinses her mouth, and goes into the main room.

Having never attended a proper school because of the constant moving around she and her mom have done, Nyxie substitutes a motel room’s table for a school desk. She plops down on the metal chair, its threadbare cushion no longer softening the seat’s hardness. She slips her arithmetic workbook out of the short stack of homeschooling books, readies her pencil to start her daily lesson when a buzzing sound snags her attention. It’s a housefly pinging off the windowpane, doggedly unaware that it can’t reach what it sees outside.

Nyxie rockets up and charges to the bathroom, returning with one of the courtesy cups. Snatching a sheet of paper from her work area, she stalks the fly. With a practiced move, she slaps the cup over the fly and slips the paper between the windowpane and the bottom of the cup.

Opening the front door, she hurries over to the corner of the parking lot where, beside large trash bins, an old wood crate lies on its side. Squatting down and careful to keep her knees off the heat-soaked asphalt, she eyeballs a mess of a spiderweb. Lurking to the shadowed side of the web, she finds Morticia, her pet black widow spider. Nyxie expertly places the cup near the cobweb and snatches away the paper. The fly zooms for freedom only to be snagged and tangled in the widow’s web! Morticia scurries over to her lunch, quickly paralyzing the fly with a poison bite. Nyxie’s mother wanted Morticia dead, and that’s how Nyxie met Calvin.

† † †

It was a few months back when Nyxie and her mother checked into the Lazy Daze. Her mother’s inspection of the room spotted, up high in the shower, a carelessly constructed cobweb. The underside of the lady spider is emblazoned with the outline of a red hourglass; a warning from the Black Widow that if she bites, your time is short. Nyxie’s mom told her to get over to the motel office and find someone to kill it.

Nyxie took off for the motel office like a greyhound tearing after the racetrack’s mechanical hare. She burst in, ready to yell “Spider!” except the place was empty, save for a well-worn armchair, an unfilled magazine rack, and a check-in counter. On top of the counter, right next to a stack of postcards promoting the splendors of Silence, was a bellhop’s bell; the type that you tap twice to get some attention. Nyxie gave it three quick taps to speed things up.

Even though her eleventh birthday was three months, twenty-nine and a half days away, she was sure she’d turn gray before someone showed up. Her hand hovered over the bell, ready to deliver another three taps, when a man appeared. His long silver hair was tied tight to the back of his head with a whip of rodeo leather. His forehead was large, his nose hawkish. His skin was a crosshatch of wrinkles and his brown eyes, once brimming with curiosity, were now dulled with barren indifference. He wore a white, long sleeve western yoke shirt. It featured twin front pockets and had pearl snaps instead of buttons. The shirt’s long-tabbed collar was closed by a bolo tie, sporting a large clasp made of turquoise and silver. The clasp adjusted the cinch of the tie by sliding up and down the loop of the round braided leather. His Wrangler jeans had just enough inseam to properly break over the top of his timeworn rawhide boots. He couldn’t even get out a hello-how-can-I-help-you before hearing, “Come quick! You gotta kill it!”

The old man looked puzzled, “Kill what?”

“The spider! My mom says it’s a black widow. One bite and you’re dead!”

Nyxie watched the old man’s look of puzzlement melt into what could only be called a suggestion of interest. “Why do you want to kill it?”

“Why??!! I just told you. It’s gonna bite us!”

“Maybe. But only if you bother it.”

“It’s in the shower. I’m pretty sure my mom and me are going to bathe sometime.”

“Do you like mosquitos?”

Nyxie sucked in a deep breath to answer when she realized she didn’t really understand the question. Even though she’d not had a ton of personal experience with the elderly, her mom said they often blabbered and jabbered about things that made no sense. She decided on the slower approach of walking the old man through the situation, “Mister—”

“No Mister, just Calvin.”

“—Calvin, the problem is not mosquitos. The problem is a killer spider, and you need to squish it quick.”

“Black widow spiders are a marvel. They eat whatever comes into their web: ants, flies, mosquitos, even scorpions. Every time you open and close the door to your room, something pesky can wander in. And that ol’ widow is there, just waiting to gobble them up.”

As Calvin spoke, Nyxie’s imagination took control. She could see it all—the careless fly getting trapped in the sticky web, the ant, the mosquito and the… Nyxie couldn’t quite figure out how the scorpion could end up in a shower corner. “How’d the scorpion get up the shower wall?”

“In your case, given where the widow is, scorpions won’t be on her diet. But widows often nest in the corners of floors where scorpions roam. You leave her be and let her get the bad guys for you.”

“Well, she is pretty high up, but Calvin—”

“All creatures know where they fit and what they’re supposed to do.” Calvin elaborated for Nyxie. “Animals, the vegetation, they adapt to where they are. The wildflowers will lie in a crack of the ground and wait patiently—maybe for years—until conditions are right for them to bloom. Insects, like the widow, fit to what nature gives them, even if it’s the top corners of a shower stall.” Calvin paused, grew quiet and pensive. “Humans think nature should bend to their will. They think they can kick nature around, break it to fit their fancies, take what they want, not care about others on the earth. It is not the right way to exist. It is not the Hopi way.”

Nyxie sifted through Calvin’s words, sorted through them all, attempting to determine whether they were the truth or that blabbering–jabbering thing her mom mentioned. “Not sure I get it, Calvin. Maybe after I turn eleven I will. But I know for sure my mom is not going to be happy with being naked in the shower with a black widow spider hanging over her head.”

“You tell your mom what I said and if she’s still upset, I’ll move the widow for you.”

Nyxie turned for the front door, “Okay, I’ll go tell her, but there’s a strong chance I’ll be right back.”

“Fair enough. One thing before you go. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“It’s Nyxie. My first name is Nyx. My middle name is Cole. But when I try to tell people my whole name, Nyx Cole Geste, everyone thinks I’m saying Nicole. But I’m not. Mom says Nyx is like the name of some singer or something and Cole is an old family name. Mostly, she calls me Nyxie unless I’m in trouble. Then I get Nyx Cole.”

“N-i-x-i-e for Nyxie?”

“No, it’s with a Y.”

“N-y-x. Well, that’s a very interesting name. There’s a Greek—”

The door banged open, startling both Nyxie and Calvin as Nyxie’s mother strode in. “What’s going on and why isn’t that spider dead yet?” Nyxie barely got three words out about what Calvin said black widows liked to eat before her mom cut her off. “I’m not interested in the eating habits of a spider.” She riveted her eyes on Calvin. “I am interested in getting it out of my bathroom.”

Nyxie gave Calvin a shrug and Calvin smiled, “Right away, ma’am. I’ll find a good place for it out of your shower.” Nyxie followed her mom out of the office, pleased she’d met a friend for life in Calvin.

† † †

Back at the wooden crate, Nyxie watches Morticia inject digestive enzymes into the fly to liquify the innards so she may suck them out at her leisure. Before leaving to return to the motel room, Nyxie leans in toward Morticia, who is busy winding her silk around the fly. “Don’t forget, Morticia, you owe me your life, girl.”

Inside and at her makeshift desk, Nyxie...