Free Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan

razor-toothed carton cutter expertly, schrunk , over and through the shiny membrane of packing tape. Inside, wrapped safe within polyurethane, were dozens of rubber snakes and lizards. Gently, she pierced the topmost bag, then used both hands to rip it open wide, and the rich smell of new car vinyl gushed up from the breach.
    A plastic clatter across the room, and Byron cursed.
    Spyder reached inside, slipped her left hand smoothly between newly slashed lips, and the air seemed much cooler, heavier, down there; she pulled something big out through the slit, molded scales and beady black eyes and a forked red tongue tasting the air.
    Byron had put in her Best of the Doors tape, and Jim Morrison crooned “Spanish Caravan” through the cheesy little off-brand speakers rigged up on the walls, one each in the four cobwebby corners of the shop. He knew she knew that he hated the Doors; he was just being snitty, pushing at buttons, pulling chains, seeing how much more she’d let him get away with. Byron was leaning over the counter, looking at her.
    “God, that’s ugly,” he said. “What is it supposed to be? Some kind of alligator?”
    “No,” she replied. And Spyder read the shiny, gold paper tag to herself, gold and black tied around its neck with an elastic string. The African desert monitor, it said, Varanus griseus . She said the Latin aloud, and the syllables felt delicious on her tongue, like an incantation or eldritch password.
    “What?” Byron asked, leaning out a little farther. “What did you say?”
    Spyder set the monitor aside, hauled an identical twin from the box, one more and she had triplets. She tossed their empty bag away, deflated, transparent afterbirth, tore into the one underneath and found fifteen perfect red-eyed geckos. Digging deeper, she unearthed green iguanas with whiplash tails, a handful of coral snakes like deadly candy-striped canes and a single six-foot Indian cobra, coiled snug inside its own wicker basket. Spyder stuffed the empty bags back into the box, tossed it in the general direction of the stockroom curtain.
    “God, I hate this song,” Byron said, almost a whisper, just loud enough for her to hear.
    And she wheeled on him, no warning, threw one of the geckos hard, and it bounced cleanly off the side of his head.
    “Ow!” Byron clutched at his ear like he was really hurt. “Christ, Spyder! Be a goddamned bitch, why don’t you!”
    “Do some work, buy something, or go home,” she said.
    “Jesus, Spyder. What the fuck’s your damage?” and he smoothed at his hair by the faint reflection in the glass countertop, his face dimly superimposed on an assortment of bondage gear and bongs and clunky silver jewelry. “Did you fuckin’ forget to take your Prozac again this morning or what?”
    Byron Langly, pushing, poking, a mean little boy, always surprised when the animal in the cage finally bites his fingers. Spyder closed her eyes, prayed to herself that this time he would back off.
    “I mean it, Byron,” and her voice was still calm, but she could hear the brittle edge that hadn’t been there a minute before. “Go breathe someone else’s air.”
    A mean and thickheaded child, no regard for signs hung in plain view, the signs posted for his own protection.
    Byron took a deep drag on his cigarette, let the smoke ooze like lazy ectoplasm from his nostrils. His tweezed and painstakingly penciled eyebrows raised slightly, and he cocked his head the smallest bit to one side, twirled one finger absently into his black hair.
    Pushing.
    “I’m not kidding,” and she was slipping past brittle fast, slipping past the carefully constructed walls and brick-by-brick control, the masonry box she kept her mind in. A little more and things might start to spill out, slosh ugly and acid over the top or leak hissing between the cracks.
    And he knew that.
    Byron crushed his cigarette out in the big ceramic ashtray on the counter, the ghost of a smile wrinkling his red, rouged