The Spiderling by Marcia Preston

Author:Marcia Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The RoadRunner Press

Another day in southern California

It turned out that Birdie’s old car actually ran. After we ate breakfast, I helped her cram the new stuff she had found into the trunk. The red stool wouldn’t fit, but she refused to give it up. She said it was perfect for climbing in and out of dumpsters. She wedged it into the back seat, which was packed to the ceiling, and cleared out a place for me to sit in front. By then, I had figured out Birdie was harmless, and if not, I was convinced I could outrun her.

We checked on the little rabbit one more time before we left. He was already gone.

Come to find out, Birdie wasn’t homeless like I had thought. But her house looked like nobody lived there, except for the decorations in the front yard. Birdie took recycling to a whole new level.

The first thing I saw was a bunch of old cowboy boots stuck upside down onto the branches of a dead tree. She had two wooden wheels, an old toilet with a cactus growing out of it, and a metal sculpture of a roadrunner made from rusty spoons. Birdie said people threw away too much good stuff and that if we kept doing that, the world would run out of room. All the land would be covered by garbage dumps and cemeteries. She said she was going to have herself cremated to save space for the living. Not until she was dead, though.

The toilet planter and the spoon sculpture were interesting, but my favorite was the bottle tree. Birdie had collected hundreds of colored bottles—brown and blue and green and a few red ones—and had threaded them onto the branches of another dead tree. (There weren’t any live trees in Birdie’s yard.) When we drove up, the morning sun shone through the bottles and sent watery, colorful reflections dancing over the front of the house. It was beautiful.

Birdie parked right by the front door. She opened the trunk and added the purple glass vase she had found that morning to the bottle tree. We stood there for a minute admiring what Birdie called the generosity of colors. Her eyes were as bright as those sunlit bottles.

Her front yard was full of desert plants. To me, they looked just like the weeds in Myra’s backyard. Weed. Plant. I guess it’s just a matter of your point of view. The stucco was crumbling off the house, and the front door had once been painted blue. It wasn’t locked. When she pushed it open, the air smelled like dirty feet. I took a deep breath of outdoor air before I went in.

It was cool inside. Birdie’s house had a living room, one bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and bathroom—all of them stacked as high as she could reach with junk. I followed her down a narrow trail through the living room. If there was a sofa in there, I couldn’t see it. What I did see was boxes and

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