Laugh Lines
by Samantha Mills
She plucked me from the nursery without hesitation, like I was a fresh-skinned baby model straight from the vat instead of three months old and doomed for the clean-up crew. The nurses clucked their tongues in disapproval, but it wasn't their decision to make.
We looked nothing alike. I had two legs; she had eight. I was small and malnourished; she was gorgeously plump. My skin was translucent, betraying every nervous thump of my heart; she was dark as a shadow, inscrutable, strong. I was just a rabbit-baby, the mediocre result of her reproductive application, preserved by the nurses for extra organs and a bit of meat.
But she picked me up anyway, with arms like warm wicker cradles, and said, "Call me Mother."
I knew every line on my spider-mother's face.
(She collected legs like other women collect gas masks.)
The furrows across her brow were for her work: hours and hours sitting in front of a viewscreen, forcing columns of numbers to produce water three thousand miles away. The creases bracketing her mouth were for uninvited visitors, for late deliveries, for pitying glances at the child on her hip.
Eventually that purse-lipped displeasure turned my way, but in the early days, it was the lines at her temples I elicited most. When she laughed, her cheeks pushed all the way up and shut her eyes, a simple origami that turned her usual flat focus into crisp-cornered delight.
And every time she caught her breath, she tugged me close and said, "Oh, Mira, who wouldn't want you?"
My spider-mother was at home in every social situation. She gleamed at fundraisers and took the lead at anti-vat marches. I would hide behind her signs, cringing at the flash of the cameras, and she would grin her most charming grin and drag me into the light.
My spider-mother was beautiful and brilliant, and I was neither. Her hair was shiny; mine dull. Her shoulders were broad; mine sloped. She was taller, funnier, more graceful, more talkative, more entertaining, more everything.
We fought as I grew older. (Of course we did!)
I said terrible things. That I was an accessory, a decoration, a pet to trot out at one of her causes. That I wanted a rabbit-mother and a brood of siblings with no more than four legs apiece. I demanded a full-body suit to block the sun and keep me translucent forever--better to be vulnerable than to develop a hard shell, I said.
