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Why a Spider Needs a Parachute

by J. L. Akagi

 

I was the only person who knew that my friend Haru wasn’t a woman. They told me so a long time ago, but I only saw Haru as they were once.

The story goes like this.

It was the kind of New York summer that began in May. The hot wind up the coast brought in tropical storms and giant Joro spiders. The humidity created a jungle mist in Brooklyn so dense I couldn’t discern what was condensation and what was spider web. On my treks to the subway each morning, I’d walk face-first into at least one of the webbed parachutes the giant spiders used to glide.

Haru and I spent most weekends waiting out the heat, crowded in front of Haru’s window AC unit. Even in the airflow, I poured sweat from my temples and pits, but Haru remained dry. Never a silken hair out of place. This was something I suspected men loved about Haru: their physical and mental composure. Men loved feeling as if Haru needed nothing.

“I’m moving in with Josh, I think,” Haru told me one muggy afternoon. Their gentle voice was nearly drowned out by the rattle of the AC.

“You think.” I clung to the phrase like it might save them, save us. I hated Josh with a passion most people reserve for mosquitos. He was a different kind of bloodsucker, a finance bro of the worst sort. Constantly clad in drab fleece over clingy chinos and so-called “dress” sneakers. He never came down to Brooklyn to see Haru; they always had to take the train up to see him. He’d order for everyone at dinner, but only pay for his third. He had the spare key to Haru’s apartment, but they didn’t have one to his.

Plus, he didn’t know that Haru wasn’t a woman.

Once, when they first started dating, I asked Haru if that bothered them. They said it wasn’t the pronouns — their pronouns were more out of convenience than accuracy — but they weren’t sure about Josh’s ability to understand them. A man has his limitations, they’d said. And I knew they meant mankind. I knew that meant me too.

“I want to live with him, but . . . Hm.” An ant had crawled through the gap between their AC and window. Calmly, Haru reached out to press their finger into it. With a clean flick of their tongue, they licked off its carcass. “I don’t want to give up this apartment.”

“You scored a rent-stabilized two bedroom three blocks from the park,” I said. “He should move here.”

“He owns his place in Murray Hill.”

Ugh, of course he does. “Do you really want to live in the city?”

“Will you sublet this place from me?” Haru turned to look at me, our faces only inches apart. Their eyes were rimmed in thick lashes, and I could see all of them under the fringe of their lacquer hair. “I’ll throw in the AC unit.”

My apartment in Bushwick was infested with cockroaches that only evacuated when Haru came to visit. But I would have agreed even if it was immaculate. Even if it had centralized AC. Even it had a washer and dryer in unit. That’s how deeply I loved and still love Haru.

---

Later that summer, I was in the kitchen, frying tofu in a cast iron pan while the AC fought the unreliable stovetop. We had just discovered that 8tracks, a playlist-making website from the days of pre-Spotify ubiquity, was still around. I dredged up Haru’s indie-sleaze playlists. Well, I shouldn’t say “indie-sleaze.” Indie sleaze was dead before it had a name.

“Should I read you your 8tracks profile bio?” I shouted over the crackling oil, rattling AC, and Arctic Monkeys.

“God, please no,” Haru shouted over their Singer sewing machine’s hum down the hall.

My hall, I should say; Haru moved out in June. Mostly. They ran an online vintage clothing shop and their most popular product was jackets they sewed from old kimono. It turns out Josh’s tiny apartment in the city was too small for Haru’s sewing set up, so they cut me a deal on rent in exchange for use of the second bedroom while they worked.

They preferred to work alone, but didn’t mind if I talked to them through the ajar door. So long as I didn’t look. I didn’t need to see them to know I’d love the way they worked. I imagined them simultaneously pulling the fabric taut as they fed it through the machine, balancing the pedal at the perfect speed, all limbs dedicated to their art.

“You said, and I quote —”

“Mar, please.”

“I am a lover of three things.”

“Maar.”

“Music, the arts —”

“The arts, oh god. Not even art?”

“Not even art.” I turned from my laptop back to cooking. I grabbed the green onions from a vase atop the fridge and cut two stalks with scissors.

“What’s the third thing?”

“Hm?” I folded the greens in half and used the scissors to slice them. For some reason, I preferred to use a knife for the whites. I think it went faster.

“The third thing.” The Singer machine paused. “I said I was a lover of three things.”

“Oh.” I wince. “The third thing was my Mar.”

Haru doesn’t say anything. I hold my breath until the Singer starts chugging away again.

---

The next day was Josh’s birthday and Haru had planned a dinner on St. Marks Place in the city. There was this hot pot restaurant with giant pitchers of Japanese beer that Josh loved and Haru had invited all his friends from work.

Things were still awkward between us from the night previous, so we took the subway together in relative silence.

Rather than endure the 4 screeching along the tracks, I listened to some of Haru’s playlists I downloaded from 8tracks. I started with what will would I do without you? but the nostalgia proved too painful. So I swapped over to this is not a playlist about chuck bass because it made me laugh. Sophomore year of college, I got Haru into Gossip Girl against their will. I had this theory that Dan Humphrey gave off trans guy energy and it’s what made Dan and Blair work, but to my chagrin Haru preferred Chuck.

Looking back on it, that was pretty indicative of both of us. Me an unhatched egg, them with perpetual bad taste in men.

We needed to transfer at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall. The 6 was delayed because it was a weekend and everything is always delayed on the weekend. Down in the swamp-sauna of the subway, it was sweltering hot. Too hot for my over-the-ears headphones. When I took them off, a deluge of sweat from my temples cascaded down the column of my neck. Haru offered me a tissue from the travel pack of Kleenex they carried with them. I thanked them, but they weren’t looking at me.

A giant Joro spider had drifted down from the entrance. None of the other commuters had noticed it yet, but as it descended the stairs its legs brushed a girl’s topknot. Her friend screamed bloody murder, which most people ignored, until a guy hollered “bigass spider incoming” and that got everyone’s attention.

The giant Joro spider wasn’t the largest I’d seen, but it was still larger than my head. Its parachute — a dingy balloon of webbing twice its size — skimmed the lights overhead. The spider sunk towards the dodging crowd.

A pack of teenage boys started after it with their backpacks, whooping and hollering in fearful excitement. Alarmed, the spider lifted its legs and tried to steer its parachute higher. But the ceilings were too low.

It was trapped with all these humans.

Amongst the pandemonium, Haru remained completely still. Eyes bright and shiny as they tracked the spider. When it survived the attempts of the teenagers and drifted towards them, Haru sprung into action. They used the wardrobe bag draped over their arm to fan one great draft of air, propelling the Joro spider off the platform, into the tunnel. Safe from those who would murder it.

But Haru miscalculated. A moment later, the 6 train punched into the station. I turned to Haru just in time to watch them watch the spider splatter against the front car.

---

The train was delayed by another five minutes to clean the window for the conductor, making us a grand total of twenty minutes late for Josh’s birthday dinner. By the time we got to the restaurant, Haru had cleared their pack of Kleenex, but their face was dry and taut. If there was a red tinge to their eyes, I was the only one to notice.

The birthday boy himself hadn’t arrived yet. “Just like Josh,” his work friend Connor crowed, smacking me between the shoulder blades. Connor was bisexual so the four of us had attempted a double-date once. Never again.

We waited at the table for another fifteen minutes for Josh to show, all the while I monitored Haru for signs of the version of them I’d seen on the train. The heaving, sobbing mess melting into my shoulder, grieving the spiderling’s death at her hands. But it seemed they’d fastidiously wrapped that part of themself away.

Tonight, they were Josh’s girlfriend. They joked with Josh’s bro-friends, ordered appetizers and drinks, and explained what different Japanese ingredients were with the grace of a professional host.

Haru told me once that their ancestor was a geisha in Kyoto. I wasn’t sure if this was just posturing to impress our college friends, a self-deprecating joke, or the truth. Haru was like that sometimes. There, masquerading as a woman for a pack of white finance bros, I could see it. In that moment, they looked to me like those woodblocks of geisha behind a paper screen, a graceful silhouette backlit by orange light.

When Josh finally arrived, it was to a round of sake bombs and screams from his buddies. Haru presented him with a kiss and his birthday gift: an expertly sewed happi coat, embroidered with resplendent golden cranes. The stitches were so fine, it almost looked as if Haru had painted them on. Josh beamed and, to his credit, extravagantly complimented Haru’s handiwork. “My girl is fucking talented!” he boomed down the long table of men. Haru didn’t even correct him when he called it a kimono. They just told him he looked very handsome.

And he did. Tall and masculine. Next to him, Haru seemed so slim. Everything about them — their neck craned towards him, their fingers laid on his chest, their limbs — seemed so slim. And him so broad.

When he wrapped his hand around their arm, I swear I heard their joints creak under the pressure. I could have caved his skull in.

---

Drunk and jealous, I slunk back to Haru’s apartment alone and with the spins. I blearily navigated into Haru’s workroom where I curled up in the duvet near their Singer. Somehow the floor spun less than a raised bed. My stomach settled slightly. The room smelled like aged silk and warm machinery. Soothing.

My phone lit up with a call from Haru. I missed it by a single ring. Before I could call back, a text came through.

Make it back okay?

I sent a voice message, too spinny to make the keyboard work. “Barely. Did Josh have a good time?”

The best. And then, a moment later. You didn’t though.

I’m ok, I texted back because I couldn’t make my throat cooperate with the lie.

Haru tried to call me, but I let it go to voicemail. They didn’t leave a message, but they did text again. I wish you’d talk to me about this.

I wanted to go back to sleep, by the painful throbbing of my heart wouldn’t let me. “You remember that crane wife story?”

Which one?

 

“The real one. The one you told me. Where she won’t let her husband see her work so she —” I hiccuped here. “And she puts her feathers in her weaving until one day he peeks in on her working so she has to fly away.”

Yeah. I had a picture book of it once. It’s what I based Josh’s happy coat on

Hoppy

Ugh autocorrect

I had already known that. I knew everything about Haru and they knew everything about me. I pulled the duvet higher, beneath my chin, so I was completely encased in a cocoon of Haru’s handiwork. There was a patch where Haru had covered some condiment stains with embroidered flowers. Little daisies obscured soy sauce and Sriracha splotches. Beneath one of these petals, a feather had sprung loose. “I only bring it up because your duvet is leaking down.”

Ha

I thought that was it for the night, so I went to sleep. But in the morning, I had more text messages from Haru, the first sent moments after I’d set my phone down.

There’s a lot of folktales like that one

The crane wife just gets the most attention

Like sometimes she’s a pheasant

According to the time stamps, an hour passed until the next text.

Or there’s one where she’s a snake that becomes pregnant and the only way her husband will let her stay with the child is if she feeds it her eyeballs.

I laughed and it made my hungover head hurt.

 

But my favorite is the fish wife one where she makes a delicious soup every night so long as her husband doesn’t watch her cook. It’s SO TASTY he can’t resist knowing how she makes it, so one day he peeks in to find her pissing in the soup pot

Hahaha

Another few hours passed. Then, at four in the morning, she finally texted, Me and Josh aren’t one of those stories, Mar. I’m not a crane wife. You have to know that.

---

It is said that giant Joro spiders only stayed in New York for the vermin. And they only grew so giant because there was so much vermin — mosquitos and cockroaches and, in the summer, lanternflies.

Haru and I made a sport of hunting down spotted lanternflies — objectively pretty insects that looked like moths until they jumped and revealed bright red hind wings beneath.  They destroyed the local ecology, so New Yorkers were encouraged to kill the invasive species on sight. Typically the first time you lunged for them, they’d hop away a little ways, which only heightened the chase. Apparently Murray Hill wasn’t as infested as near Prospect Park in Brooklyn so for the first time, my kill count was higher than Haru’s.

On a midday walk in Prospect Park, I had just stomped my twenty-third lanternfly for the season when the prickling sensation of being watched overtook me. I looked up and there was Josh, coming in through the tunnel entrance to the park. We locked eyes and he gave me a cartoonish, full-armed wave. As if I couldn’t see this oaf from space.

He jogged over to me, shoulders straining the knit polo he’d already sweated out. I exhaled slowly through my teeth and paused my music. I was listening to another vintage Haru playlist, spinning spinning spinning out. A lot of Snow Patrol on this one.

“Thought I’d find you here. Haru says you basically live here since you took over her apartment. Thanks for doing that, by the way. That’s really real of you.” To my chagrin, he offered his fist to bump. I hated bumping fists; I wasn’t as practiced at it as most men, and I always missed or bumped too hard.

“Hey, so look, can I talk to you?”

“I’m sort of in the middle of something.”

“I totally see that.” Josh pointed to the lanternfly carcass mashed into the cobblestones. Its wings crumpled, red hindwings on garish display. “This won’t take a second. Are you headed somewhere? I’ll walk with you.”

We were in the middle of the park. Even if I’d claimed that I was on my way out, we’d have at least five minutes of chat time.

“Yeah, Josh,” I relented. “How can I help you?”

“I’m on my way to visit Haru. She’s working at your apartment today, right?”

“Right.”

“Working on . . .” Josh suddenly found the tall oak trees in the center of the park fascinating. Or maybe it wasn’t the trees so much as the women playing volleyball under them. “Haru isn’t a lesbian, is she?”

Whatever I was expecting, this wasn’t it. “No, Josh. Haru, who is dating you, a dude, is not a lesbian.”

“Yeah, but you two dated in college, right?”

“I’m not a woman, Josh.” I went for a lanternfly towards the edge of the path. I clipped it, but it jumped into the grass just in time to escape.

“Well, yeah. Now you aren’t. But she’s been kind of distant since she moved in and I saw the pictures and —”

“Haru isn’t a lesbian.”

“Right, right.” Josh rubbed the back of his neck. He lunged forward then, trampling a lanternfly in one try. “Nice, that puts me at twelve today.”

“Is that why you came all this way, Josh? To ask me questions you should ask Haru?”

“No, uh — well, yeah, but it’s —”

A scream came from deeper in the park. Not a shriek of a playing child, but a true scream with a panicked edge of fear. Josh, who had the urban survival skills of a gnat, whipped around to find the source.

“Oh shit,” he said eloquently. “That’s a big fucking spider.”

In all fairness, I’m glad I looked. What soared over the tree line was frankly a big fucking spider. I’d never seen a giant Joro of its size. Spindly legs as large as full-grown men gently pedaled the air. Its parachute was so unfathomably gargantuan that when it glided overhead, the webbing blocked out the sun.

Well, blocked out wasn’t quite right. The webbing was translucent. When the sun shone through, it cast glittering rainbows over the lawn, the cobblestone path, my skin.

The spider delicately wound a leg into a line of webbing. It veered left, towards the entrance of the park. More screams as the bus-sized spider drifted towards Grand Army Plaza. A cacophony of car horns.

Then quiet.

People went back to their day.

Josh gave a full body shudder when it was no longer in view. “Those things give me the fucking creeps.”

“They’re harmless.”

“Yeah,” scoffed Josh. “Except for the venom.”

“They’re not aggressive. Literally no one has ever been harmed by an unprovoked giant Joro spider.”

“You sound like Haru. I crushed one of them the other day and she went hysterical.”

“Hysterical.”

“Yeah, dude. Like, I know how women can be about killing things.” He dug his elbow into my ribs at this, as if I would enjoy the masculine camaraderie of making fun of women. “But I’ve annihilated lanternflies with her, and look. I’m not like some of the guys at work who just leave when their girl starts to cry. I tried to comfort her, but she completely shut me out.”

I couldn’t believe they hadn’t talked about this before they moved in. “Haru likes spiders.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Anyway, thanks for the help, Mark.”

I rubbed both hands over my face. “How exactly did I help?”

“She’s been acting weird lately. Like won’t let me be around her while she works — which, I get. Sewing is an art, I get that. And she’s been over at your place a lot, which I also get. Hell, I don’t want her sewing stuff everywhere. But the way she is about it. I don’t know.” He looked out over the entrance to the park, where we last saw the giant Joro spider. More thoughtful than I’d ever seen him. It didn’t last long. “Hey, could you be, like, a guy about this and don’t tell her I was here?”

---

I called Haru the second Josh got out of earshot. It could have waited until I got back to the apartment, but I didn’t want to risk Josh texting them first.

Haru didn’t pick up. So I sat on a park bench and left a voicemail. “Hey Har, I just finished talking to Josh. He said you’d been acting weird and wanted to know if it’s because you’re a lesbian.” I laughed a little at the way he’d said lesbian. “Hey, I know I haven’t been exactly subtle about the guy. So, I’ll just say it outright: I don’t like him. I don’t think he’s good enough for you. But if you’re serious about him, maybe you should tell him. I mean he came all this way just to . . .”

I trailed off, a horrible realization dawning on me.

I hung up the phone and took off in a dead sprint towards the apartment. The giant Joro spider was still floating over the library as I passed by. The sunlight limned its lacquered body golden.

---

When I got to the apartment, Josh was already there. The screams were audible even out on the stoop. At first, it sounded like both of them, but as I ascended the narrow stairs, all I could hear was Josh’s voice. His incensed accusations through the door, “I can’t believe I fucked a fucking monster!”

My hands shook slotting in my key, but they were stone-steady when I took up the heavy cast iron pan from the stove.

Josh and Haru were in the sewing room. Haru was on the ceiling, backed into a corner. All their limbs and eyes on full display.

As Josh lunged for them, Haru was still, still trying to talk sweet to him. “I was going to tell you,” and “Sweetheart, I’d never hurt you,” and “Please, please,” even as he dragged them down the wall by their leg. Even as he called them a “spider whore.” Even as he twisted their delicate leg. Even as it splintered with a sickening crackle. Haru tried to turn back into a woman, but they couldn’t make the broken spider leg into a shapely human leg.

While they flickered between spider and woman, Josh stomped down. Hard. His foot caught two more legs. Haru scrambled away on their remaining five good legs, the impacted legs crumpled and twitching. Useless.

That’s when they caught sight of me. Our eyes locked and Haru looked away, ashamed.

There wasn’t much time. I spun the frying pan in my hand and swung. It landed with a thud between his shoulder blades. He coughed out in surprise. I reeled back to hit him again, but he lurched forward. “You stupid —” he started, but I didn’t let him finish. I swung, missed. Swung again, hit him directly in the face. His nose popped open, spurting blood as red as a lanternfly’s hind wings. Crush him. The thought came so immediately, so viciously. I almost obeyed it. My hand ached to bring the pan down on his skull, over and over again.

But I heard the window creak open. It drew my attention to where Haru was crawling out onto the fire escape. Out there, Haru wove a parachute of gossamer webbing. All their legs working at once to create a parachute as fine as silk, as strong as their will. They unfurled the thread and it billowed out instantly in the wind.

I raced to the window, leaving Josh crumpled on the floor, just in time to see Haru float out into the sky.

Caught on the railing of the fire escape, there was a single thread unspooling out from their spinneret. Haru was sailing far off now, enveloped by the humectant haze of the city. I could grasp that thread and reel them back.

Back to me.

Possessed with the thought, I took the thread in both my hands, ripped it from the railing. A summer breeze wafted over the rooftops, catching Haru’s gleaming parachute. They looked down to me, eyes sparkling and wild. For the first time, out in the open in their own body, free.

I released the webbing, watched it trail over the neighboring rooftop before disappearing into the air. Haru soared above the city. Joining the giant Joro spiders as they floated up, up to the sun.

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Why a Spider Needs a Parachute” by J. L. Akagi, and if you enjoyed that then Cast of Wonders ran a story last year: episode 634, “Pearl Diving”. There are also stories free to read online at Strange Horizons, Uncanny, khōréō, Small Wonders, Dreamforge and more, all linked pretty easily from the first page of search results for “J. L. Akagi”.

J.L. sent us these notes on today’s story: I grew up with a copy of “Japanese Children’s Favorite Stories,” which includes a version of the Jorōgumo. This adaptation joins my unofficial series of uncanny animal visitations in New York City.

Thank you, J. L. That was gorgeous, wasn’t it? Tender, in every sense: full of deep hurts being gently brushed, because sometimes that touch from someone is still worth the pain it brings; because sometimes, when that pain is the discomfort of hiding the truest part of yourself, feeling the hurt is a connection to that part you’ve convinced yourself you don’t need, and is like a lungful of freezing air, burning and raw and vital.

I know, with a familiarity I wish I didn’t possess, how much it hurts to hide your true self, so deep you’re hiding even from yourself. I know how desperate the attempt is anyway, because the alternative is… inconceivable. Not even to be questioned; not even acknowledged as a possible question. Of course you hide being a spider and put up with a finance bro as your partner, because that’s expected, that’s what everyone expects, it ought to be what you expect of yourself. If it feels uncomfortable somehow, like a poor fit, like it’s the wrong gear and it’s breaking everything up instead of running smoothly, well, the whole world can’t be wrong, it must be you, your engine, that needs reshaping to fit around the part that has to be right.

That applies to Josh as much as anyone in this story, of course, trapped in his toxically masculine world of “be a guy about this and don’t tell her” and fist bumps and “I can’t believe I fucked a fucking monster!”. He hides from the truth that he wants Haru, because the world has told him he shouldn’t: and in trying to reject, to eject, that part of himself that he feels oughtn’t be true, he causes so much hurt: to Haru’s legs; to Mar’s heart; to himself.

It is perfect, then, that this story be told from a trans perspective. To be trans at this particular point in time is crushingly difficult, being made more so every week. And yet still people are coming out, are transitioning, are having the courage, the unfathomable and admirable bravery, to stand up and say: this is the true me. The cost of hiding it is too high and I will not pay it. I deserve to live my life truthfully.

I wish we lived in a world that celebrated that, not feared it. What a wonderful gift to oneself, that honesty, that self-recognition, that self-worth. To know that you are worth the struggle. To know that it is not you that is broken, and must reshape yourself to fit around an ill-fitting part, but that you are whole, you are good, and you need only find the place where you fit.

We ought to be making a world with every possible space we can, so we can all find the place where we fit. Don’t we deserve that? For ourselves, and each other?

But so many, like Josh, resent that: and they resent it because they fear it; and they fear it because it would force them to face themselves, and they cower from that work.