Spideritis
When I wake up I have a spider bite on my right breast, far enough down that I can’t scratch it from above my shirt without putting my fingers past the knuckles down into my bra. In between bites of cereal, I’m shifting my arm back and forth to scratch the bite through the movement of my shirt.
When I get to work I keep thrusting my hand down my shirt to scratch at it. It’s not like I’m in a client-facing role or anything and holy fuck does it itch, but by lunch, I’ve made eye contact with two coworkers while thrashing incessantly at the pinprick bite. One half of my cleavage is bright red now, so I pull out the cardigan that’s been stacked beneath a bunch of forms I should shred in the cabinet beside my desk and button it all the way up. The redness looks even more obvious against the baby blue cashmere blend.
It’s after lunch when a well-dressed intern comes up to my desk. The pinprick bite has puffed out around half of my chest in blotches, and I feel naked and raw in comparison to the intern who looms over my desk like a great monument to my impending doom.
“Ms. Plunchuck? Mrs. Paolov wants to see you.”
I thank him and excuse him from having to show me to the boss’ office. If he was anyone who had been around more than three months and who I had built up a camaraderie with, I would have interrogated him. Is this about the online shopping? The time I plugged the second floor toilet? The tit scratching? Her curtains are closed over the window, something I’ve never noted before, and I try to ignore this as I open the office door.
Mrs. Paolov sits behind a large oak desk and gestures for me to sit in an empty chair across from her. It feels plush, the kind of chair my scattered, sloppy ass is unlikely to sit in unless to be fired. She has the kind of pin-straight posture that could only be achieved by a corset or spinal surgery. She wears a deep red pantsuit and matching lips. She bends over to the right of her desk chair and when she comes back up, she places two glasses and a bottle of whisky on the table. She pours a double into each, and then pushes one across the desk to me.
“Drink up Miss. Plunchuck. You’ll need it.”
Her voice always held a certain kind of masculinity, the kind afforded to soviet women in civil engineering. Her throat thirstily received the alcohol. I try in vain to take my drink the same way.
“It comes to my attention that you have a spider’s bite on your right breast.” She looks at the skin over my cardigan.
“Yes ma’am.”
Before I can apologize for the unprofessionalism of letting such a silly thing be known in the workplace, she is unbuttoning her pantsuit, and then the white shirt underneath. Her skin is thin and striated across her breasts which are strung up by a practical nude wonderbra.
She contorts her right hand to her back and unclasps her bra. She moves the right cup aside and reveals her right breast.
Above the nipple is what used to be an icepick scar, now stretched out alongside the rest of the skin.
“Here’s mine.” She slides one manicured fingernail (the same colour as her pantsuit and lipstick) against the length of it.
We sit in silence for a while, at least until I stop staring. Then she puts away her breast and pours us two more doubles.
“It happened to me when I was nineteen. A bad bite, then the itching. It’s intolerable, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“A week later, a spider came out - I don’t mean to scare you girl, only prepare you - but a spider came out of the bite, and it was incredibly inflamed. The bite, that is. The bite was inflamed, the spider was fine.” She chuckled to herself at this. “Then I went to all kinds of doctors. They said I was crazy, and couldn’t find anything of the sort. Then, two weeks after the first accident, it happened again. I was ready for it this time, and I captured the little guy, brought him to the local nature centre, then the library, then the ecology department of three colleges, and nobody could tell me what kind of spider it was.”
She gets up from her desk now, and goes behind a filing cabinet. She pulls out a display containing five spiders, all of their dead bodies pinned into cork with a date beside them. “I like to keep them around, remember I’m not crazy.” She let me inspect them for a moment. Each had thin limbs, thin enough to mistake for moving as our breaths move over them.
“And then I met Dr. Beloff. A friend of a friend had a similar condition, and she gave me this number.” She was already writing down his name and address. “Took care of me. Very experienced, this Dr. Beloff. Still gets a Christmas card from me every year!”
Somehow, Mrs. Paolov sending Christmas cards was harder to picture than a spider crawling out of her tits. She snaps me out of this: “You should give this number a call before anything else happens. It’s always a big bite on the right breast.”
She gives me Dr. Beloff’s number and inctructs me to take the rest of the day off. “It’s the least I can do seeing as I doubt the company health insurance is going to cover any of this. HA!”
On the bus home, I call Dr. Beloff.
“Hello, you’ve reached Dr. Beloff’s office,” a woman croaks out through the phone.
“Hi, I’d like to make an appointment.”
“Lucky girl, someone just cancelled.” The woman forces out a phlegmy cough, then two drier ones. “I can fit you in today in an hour, if you’re able to come in.”
We schedule my appointment in between her coughs and the noise of the bus. She assures me everything will be covered by my insurance.
I make my way downtown, Googling parasitic breast spiders, right breast spider bite?, parasite that looks like spider, national doctors registry, and munching on an everything bagel. Dr. Beloff’s office is sandwiched in between a barber shop and a gyro joint.
The waiting room was fuzzy; two crimson velvet loveseats, shag carpeting, and undusted curtains. There’s a glass table with an array of old magazines. Present in the stack is Playboy, Mad Magazine, Cracked, and Reader’s Digest. I pick up the July 1964 issue of Mad Magazine, where Alfred. E. Newman is lighting a missile into the ground, but there’s a bit of grime sealing the first two pages together. I peel apart the pages ever-so delicately, and when I do, I see the grime is really an old squashed spider.
An ancient woman with thick red box-dye hair sits behind the check-in counter. Her eyeglasses have dark green frames with rhinestones set in the edge of the cat eye.
“Hello, I’m here for my appointment. I’m Peggy Plunchuck.”
“Plunchuck. Let me check if you’re in my books.” She begins looking through each page of her agenda, starting in January. I let her flip all the way to July before I interrupt her.
“We got off the phone an hour ago.”
“Well let’s see if that checks out.”
She finally gets to September and taps a stubby finger against my name twice. “Peggy Plunchuck. Follow me.”
I oblige, and we walk past an incredible number of doors for a private practice.
The woman begins a single minded conquest to document everything.
“Step on the scale.”
“Stand against the height chart.”
“Put your arm through this cuff here.”
“Tongue out, say ‘ahhhhhhh’.”
“These are callipers. Now be a dear and put your head down.”
A millenia seems to go by before she asks “What are you here for again?”
“I’m here to see Dr. Beloff.”
“Well you’re seeing her.”
“Oh.”
“What, you think because I’m a woman I can’t be a doctor?”
“No, I -”
“Or is it because I’m old?”
“No, really, there’s -”
“Oh my! The manners we used to have in this city, manners gone away,” she laments as she pulls out a gynaecological kit.
“No, I just mean to say usually doctors aren’t this involved in the process, they usually make a nurse or someone do all the pre-appointment stuff. It’s really not a bad thing, I’m not used to all this thoroughness!”
She smiles at this, and puts away the gynaecological kit.
“What did you say you were here for?”
“There’s a spider bite on my right breast.”
She nodded solemnly. “Have any come out yet?”
“No.”
“Smart girl, coming before it gets bad.” She reaches into her desk and pulls out a piece of stationary. “Can I see it?”
I pull down my shirt, exposing the bite.
“Hmmf. It still looks small. My approach would be to insert a fine needle through the bite, pump it full of anti-parasitic before the spiders have the chance to hatch. I can do it for you right now if you’d like.”
“Yes, please.”
“Okay. Please remove your top and lie down on the exam table. I’ll get some of the anti-parasitic.”
I lie half naked on the table, and I swear I can see something moving under the bite. Not enough to move the flesh, just enough to tug the skin slightly. I think of all Mrs. Paolov’s spiders in the display case pinned down into the fabric, and the spider cementing the pages of Mad Magazine, and how my spiders would be dead inside of me.
Dr. Beloff walks back into the room with a surgical mask, and what appears to be an airbrush canister attached to a syringe. She shuffles over to me and holds the skin of my breast taught and fiddles with a setting on the canister.
“Dr. Beloff, does anything bad happen if I keep the spiders?”
“Excuse me?”
“Does anything bad happen if you don’t put the anti-parasitic in me?”
“Yeah. Spiders come out of you. That’s pretty bad, as far as things go.”
“I mean like will it affect the rest of my life?”
She takes off her mask and sets the canister to the side. She unbuttons her dress and lets the neckline sink. She pulls her right breast far enough out of her bustier to reveal a pinkish hole. She thumps it a few times, and as if commanded, a spider crawls out, and expertly makes his way to her nipple. It digs in two sturdy, fuzzy, limbs, and begins to drink.
“It gets annoying, but I don’t really regret it.”
