No one talked about the black widows, not openly.

Not in public parks. Not in salons. Not even in the back pages of interspecies health guides. To be labeled one meant shame. Isolation. Questions about what you were doing, and with whom, during the monsoon seasons when barometric pressure rose and the spiders inside you decided to crawl home through your cloaca.

Beffa Lode lived with them.

Her entire adult life had been punctuated by the rhythmic, itchy tides of her internal nest—a colony of sleek, moisture-loving silkspiders that spun web inside her hollowed pelvic bone and emerged in clusters during pressure spikes. It was never violent. Never bloody. But humiliating. Their silky trails clung to sheets, nightgowns, and sometimes the faces of lovers she never spoke to again.

She had once dreamed of children. Harpy children. Not broods of shiny black spiders with scarlet hour glasses.

But to become gravid—to be medically cleared for egg acceptance—she had to remove the nest. And to remove it, the stalk must be bruised until it snapped. That was the only known method.

There were clinics, of course, but they wouldn’t touch her. Too risky. Too stigmatized.

So she came to a place that didn’t advertise. A speak-easy candy and curiosity shop, where a box of anise chews served as the signal. If you knew, you knew. They took you to the back. They checked your paperwork. Then they put you under.

Beffa sat in the waiting alcove, the scent of boiled sugar clinging to her damp skin. Her giant nose dripped sweat in slow, nervous beads. Her mouth was desert-dry. She had 500 credits in cash, folded in half and wrapped in waxed paper.

Her underwear was clean. That had been important. You never know who’s going to see you before you’re cut open.

They escorted her to a berthing unit—a soft-lit, sound-dampened chamber housing five other infected women. All black widows. All waiting for the stalk to be snapped.

Some wept. Quietly. Others breathed so heavily their bodies rocked the padded stretchers.

The air was thick with the scent of ammonia, starch, and pheromones.

Peach Grove College publicly denied everything. But everyone knew the spider problem ran deep there. Girls entering pre-med with full scholarships, graduating four years later with silk threads in their boots and a strange hunger behind their eyes. Some said a black widow walked the halls of the AgriScience building, dropping broods in locker vents and drinking her coffee with extra sugar to feed the nest.

Beffa was a respected professor of entomology there. 

So no one could know... but she was fed up and she just wanted it gone. The terrible nest. 

She lay down. She didn’t ask questions. She watched as the nurse adjusted her IV. The drug burned like pepper at first, then slid cold and slow through her veins.

She thought of her adoptive grandmother who had showed her love,  who had birthed nine children and never once talked about where her pain went.

She thought of silk. Of tension. Of the moment just before it snaps.

And then—finally—she slept.