Fiction: How to Paint a Nursery

By Travis Flatt

Dave the Spider crinkles the plastic tarp as his eight little legs scrabble around the nursery. He scurries across the floor from ladder to ladder, calling up to Jay and me—telepathically—how our painting looks off. He means well. If our human eyes could see the color we slather on with rollers our strokes would be even. 

I check the silver grandfather clock. Maya will be home from directing her middle school musical at eight, so we need to hurry. 

“It’s crooked,” Dave the Spider yells at Jay. His vermin eyes can detect the color; our human eyes only see a glistening slime, like Vaseline.  

The color comes from space originally. We bought buckets of the paint off the dark web. The Bad Book says it makes babies strong. This is our gift to Maya, whose dead husband, Rory, gifted her a son. 

Rory was our High Priest, until the Outer Gods sucked the life from his bones like a strawberry milkshake, poxing him with a cosmic kiss the baffled doctors could only name “leukemia.”

He didn’t say his prayers, grew lax with stuff like grace. 

“How’s mine look?” I ask Dave the Spider, who shuffles in place noisily—he never stands still—and he says I need to roll up higher toward the crown molding. Otherwise, I’m cool. 

At seven, Dave the Spider announces the room looks good enough.

(Dave the Spider’s filling in as interim High Priest because there’s a lot of paperwork and no one else wants to. Also, the Outer Gods have grown pox-happy.)

 We take a break to smoke a eucharist joint (soaked in formaldehyde) on the patio. 

While I sharpen the knives, Dave the Spider wobbles around on the glass patio table, stoned. He punches the air with his tiny, clawed fist, saying: “I don’t know, man, like cancer, you know?” 

Dave the Spider can’t hold substances and grows maudlin. “It’s dumb, right? Cancer, you know?”

 We’re quiet. 

Jay stubs out the joint and asks if spiders get cancer? Like, terrestrial cancer. Dave the Spider says, “I don’t know. Probably. I got hemorrhoids.” 

We laugh for a long time, then go back upstairs to the nursery. With our last thirty minutes, we attempt to assemble the crib; we’re arguing over how it’s lop-sided when Maya comes in downstairs, shouting, “Hello?”, dropping her bags and sounding annoyed.  

Dave the Spider climbs on Jay’s shoulder like a parrot so they can run grab her for our presentation. They leave me to fold up the plastic tarp, which I mangle and botch, crumpling it into a ball to toss in a corner. 

When they open the door for Maya—“Ta-da!”—she sees the crib and is like, “Oh, thanks, you guys,” but she’s looking at the buckets and rollers. She sniffs, asks what’s that cinnamon smell (it’s vanilla to my nose, Jay says roses—Dave the Spider says humans can’t smell their own farts and the color’s actually goat cheese-y) and why are the walls slick and shiny? Dave the Spider explains about the color. As an apprentice, Maya’s not allowed those chapters of the Bad Book.  

The grandfather clock chimes nine. 

I wink at Jay, who’s readied his knife. We take our places for the circle dance. 

“Hey, Maya, we’ve got to do the thing now,” I say, making an arced, stabbing motion. 

She frowns, says she’s tired, asks if we can’t do this another time? 

Dave the Spider gets fussy, says she can’t wuss out now, insists we all three circle up. Maya sighs, takes her knife from the crib, and then moves to the equidistant spot we practiced during the dry run. It’s more of a triangle without Rory. 

Under the moonlight shining through the window, we orbit the crib in our hop-skip dance. We slice our palms and let blood drip on the floor so the baby will grow up smart and successful. And an unselfish lover. 

“Come on, Maya,” Dave the Spider shouts in our heads, “Maya—stab somebody.” But she just starts crying. “Do it for Rory,” he adds, sounding desperate. “For the baby?” he mutters, defeated. Maya only cries while we hop-skip dance. “Aw, fuck it,” pouts Dave the Spider. “Nevermind. Rory would’ve done it.”  

We drop our knives and go downstairs to drink Natty Light and watch The Traitors and wait for signals to decode from Alan Cumming, the current Supreme Priest Elect.

Travis Flatt (he/him) is a teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear or are forthcoming in HAD, Bending Genres, JMWW, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and many other places. He enjoys theater and dogs.