Diamonds in the Sky by Ed. Mike Brotherton Page A

jaw tightened. “Did you? And how exactly could you afford that?”

    “I’ve been saving all year. I worked odd jobs being a Mechanical Turk. I did web design for neo-Luddites. I worked in the field.” As I said that, it was like strength came back into my body. “I earned it.”

    Dad worked his jaw for a moment and that vein in his forehead died away. He hung his head, then picked the box up. “Okay. Let’s tell your mother.”

    * * *

    How Dad explained it to Mom, I’ll never know.

    It seemed as if, once the egg arrived my folks joined me in the anticipation of its hatching. I’d sit in the nesting house, my school work in my lap during the last weeks, and Mom would sit with me, knitting. I don’t know if she was there to make sure I did my homework, or because she found the bower of woven branches peaceful.

    “Jaiden?” Her voice was almost reverent.

    When I looked up, she was staring at my egg. A sound I had taken for a branch scratching the side of our house came again. At the same time, the egg rocked slightly.

    I dumped my work without any care and scrambled across the dirt floor on my knees, scarcely daring to breath.

    What’s the longest you’ve ever wanted something for? It felt like every day I had ever wanted that teddy bear spider all piled in my body at once, ready to split my skin down all the seams. I couldn’t breathe for the pressure of my wish finally coming true.

    Oh, how I wanted to help it out of the egg, but I knew it had to come out on its own. I wouldn’t have a role until it was free and then — then I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the fruit paste its mother would have given it or the towel to help wipe the moisture from its limbs so it would imprint on me.

    I must have made some sound of despair because Mom said, “What is it?”

    I told her what I’d forgotten and then, bless her, she said, “You stay. I’ll get them.”

    I stayed. Oh, how I stayed. I don’t remember Mom coming back but I know she did because I had the towel and fruit paste when I needed it. But everything else, I remember as if I were still living it. Each tiny rock of the egg. The barely audible scritching from inside.

    The moment when the first triangular piece of egg broke away from the end, a strange, almost acrid smell came from the interior. I strained to see in that opening for the first glimpse of my teddy, but it was still too soon to touch the egg.

    The process of hatching took most of an hour. When my teddy pushed its head out of the egg, damp, with the fur matted against its head, it seemed almost entirely helpless. It chirruped, like a cricket, and tumbled free.

    Using the towel, I wiped its face, the way its mother would lick it dry and the teddy pushed against my hand.

    I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a newly hatched teddy bear spider. When they first come out, they look like nothing so much as a drowned house cat. By the time they are dry, their downy baby fur has sprung out to give them the plumpness you associate with them. Their ears are outsized to their heads yet and their eyes are closed for the first several hours after hatching. The combination makes them seem adorable and helpless.

    “Well,” Mom said, “is it a boy or a girl?”

    I pulled the towel away to look for ovipositors and noticed — I don’t understand how I didn’t notice until then — but I finally noticed my teddy was missing a leg.

    “Jaiden?”

    I remembered to look for the ovipositors. “A girl.”

    Then I counted again, touching each long leg. My teddy squirmed with pleasure as I fondled her toes. She cooed. Oh, my heart melted even as I was dying inside. All I could think about was that I had somehow caused the leg to be missing. That I had mishandled the egg or the nesting house hadn’t been the right temperature.

    “What are you going to call her?” Mom knelt beside me to look into the bundle.

    “Kallisto. Kali for short.” I’d thought that was terribly clever. Two