Malice Domestic by Michael Bracken

Author:Michael Bracken [THE MALICE BOARD OF DIRECTORS PRESENTS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

INTO THE DEVIL’S DEN

By Maurissa Guibord

Catching the spider is always the tricky part. You wouldn’t think it would be hard to find a spider in a small, musty cabin in the middle of the Maine woods. And there were four of us. Well, three anyway—I was too drunk to be much help. I usually got hammered before we took the picture, that being a time-honored part of the tradition, for me at least.

Leo lurched into a darkened corner of the cabin and clapped the empty peanut butter jar against one of the exposed rafters. “Got him.”

Griff walked over, squinted into the jar. “That’s a Daddy Longlegs.”

“So?” Leo screwed the lid, with a hole poked through it, onto the jar. “A spider’s a spider.”

“A rose by any other name,” I added helpfully.

Griff didn’t look happy, but he didn’t say anything.

Eric flopped down into the sagging sofa. “We should get one of those plastic spiders from a party store. Then we can just use the same one every year.”

Nobody bothered to reply to this brainstorm. I threw one of my empties at him, and it missed, clattering to the floor. He knew the drill; everything had to be the same for the picture. So it had to be a real spider, alive, in an empty jar of Skippy.

We’d had this tradition going on twenty-five years now. There were four of us: Griff, Leo, Eric, and me. We’d been friends since our UMaine days together in Orono. Now, even though we were spread pretty far apart, as often as we could all make it, we’d come back to this same cabin for a guy’s trip. Even so, I’m not really a “guy’s trip” kind of guy. I teach high school math in Portland. I happen to like NPR. I’m not particularly outdoorsy, but I can plunk a line in the water and reel it in again as well as the next guy. I don’t like bugs and also feel vaguely ill when there’s no internet access. My wife, Marie, always likes to kid me a little before I leave for one of these trips.

She’d handed me a Thermos of coffee through the window of the Subaru. “Have fun with the boys. Don’t get in trouble.”

“I’m too old for trouble.”

“Lucky me.” She’d smiled and kissed me.

When we first arrived at the cabin, we always took time to catch up on everybody’s news as we unpacked our stuff and stocked the shelves. But we were getting older. The news wasn’t as good as it used to be.

Griff Mason had been my best friend in college. He retired early from the Boston PD last year. He and his wife got a divorce about five years ago, and now he lives with a hairdresser named Jeannette on Cape Cod. He’d always been the unspoken leader of our little ragtag band of brothers. You know that big, calm guy in the back of the room that everybody turns to when the trouble starts? Yeah, that’s Griff.

Eric Grenier has a wife and two daughters, both in college now.

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