Tourmaline by Joanna Scott

Patrick kicked the floor as he followed, furious to have the best game ever interrupted.
    Inside the house Lidia threw open shutters and closed closet doors. She found an old set of bellows and set about puffing clouds of moths from one room to another. Though she’d never seen quite so many moths at once, she remained grimly calm. The moths came every autumn to feast upon blankets and sweaters. I fantasmi — the ghost moths. They were arriving in multitudes this year. In some later year, they would come in even greater numbers. That was the way life worked in Lidia’s scheme. The moths were proof that the future would outshine the past. Next year’s storms would be the worst storms ever. Or they’d be the mildest. If the next summer wasn’t the warmest, then the following summer would be. Or the one after. Every record set would be broken. Every war fought would be worse than the last.
Bella, horrida bella.
There were no surprises under heaven.
    The season of the ghost moths. We loved them, loved to lose ourselves in the thick of their wings and feel the feathery wisps of their touch. We loved to hear them thumping against window-panes and watch their shadows moving like the reflections of raindrops on our bedroom walls. Meena loved to comb her claws through their midsts or hop up and catch one with a gulp, swallowing it whole. Our parents hated them. They bought little metal fans for each room and set the switches on high to drive away the moths. But the fans only seemed to draw more moths. They’d fight their way toward the center of the air current like fish struggling upriver and then turn on their wings and flit off, as though it were nothing more than a game to them. The best game ever.
    No one noticed them leaving. We just woke up one morning in late October, wondered for an instant what had changed, and realized then that the shadows on the walls were gone. Lidia said something we didn’t understand about the sea. Francesca said that the little farfalle had turned into cherubini.
    We would have been disappointed — rather, we were disappointed for a few hours, until Harry found the spider in the tub. It was black with white dots on its carapace and white chevrons on its abdomen, and it was about the size of Patrick’s thumbnail. Harry trapped it in a cup topped with paper and brought it into the kitchen for the rest of us to see. We gathered round, marveling as Harry dumped the spider into a deep crease in the paper. He asked for a toothpick. Patrick brought him a spoon. Harry flipped the spider over, and we were astonished to see it somehow manage to flip back and right itself. Harry touched it with the spoon again. The spider leapt into the air and landed on the table, and it would have escaped if Nat hadn’t crushed it with a rolling pin.
    Harry pushed Nat in retaliation, pushed him right against the rickety table. The tabletop knocked against the shelf in a wooden cupboard. On the shelf the delicate glass flue of a lantern swayed drunkenly and then fell forward, shattering on the tile floor.
    “Che è successo!” We heard Lidia’s voice before we saw her. My brothers fled. I was frozen by confusion. Lidia swooped down, spanked me once, and scooped me into her arms, holding me over her shoulder as she marched down the hall to tell Claire what trouble I had caused.
    I suffered my resentment in my room, alone, for the next ten minutes or so, until I heard my brothers whispering in the hall and went to find out what important thing deserved secrecy. Patrick was holding a milk bottle; Harry was securing a piece of paper with a rubber band to serve as a lid. “Shut up,” Nat said when he saw me. I circled, preparing to kick him, but my attention was soon absorbed by the spectacle in the bottle — not just one striped spider but a whole clutch of them leaping toward the stick, bouncing against the glass and tumbling down upon one another.
    My brothers had gathered the spiders from windowsills on the