Laurie on the Radio

In a newly integrated insect metropolis, generations clash around art, technology, and capitalism. Boris, a rural vesper, chases modernity to the city, but tradition is there first.

Novelette  |  8,480 words

Boris flexed his mandibles and cut into his food. He indicated that Maggie, his daughter, should eat too. They were waiting on Laurie, his other daughter, who was not present at ten past seven, despite a weeks-old commitment to a six o’clock dinner.

“She and Laurie played together on the Bix Boseman show,” Maggie said.

“What?”

“Mitzi Day.”

Boris rolled his eyes. The newspaper said Mitzi Day disabled an exhaust fan at a shirt factory. The entire building was filled with thick black soot and many shirts were ruined. The article claimed Mitzi Day disabled the exhaust fan as an act of protest against poor labor conditions. The factory purchased whole cloth from BorTek, and Boris was losing money. He was distantly aware of Mitzi Day, a teenage radio sensation compared unfavorably by critics to Laurie, his belated daughter. The newspaper took a smug credit for skewering Day’s output so thoroughly that she turned away from music for what they called terrorism. It seemed like terrorism to Boris.

“Are they friends?” he asked Maggie.

Boris didn’t care for Laurie’s colleagues, but he couldn’t imagine them destroying property, they were too pathologically relaxed.

The door opened and Laurie flung herself into the room, spreading her forelegs and extending her antennae to the diners.

“I’ve never been in such a tall building, Dad.”

Laurie shrugged off her shawl, which landed on a coat rack behind her, as though choreographed.

Boris grimaced and cut the meat on his plate into thinner slices.

“We’ve got yours in the oven,” said Maggie, smiling. Her friendliness was measured. She didn’t want her father to think she approved of Laurie’s tardiness. For her part, Laurie was oblivious to their judgment.

Maggie stood and took her sister’s bristled foreleg into her own.

“I was told your train got in at 3:05,” Boris said from the table.

“It did, Dad.”

In the kitchen, Maggie felt like their mother, rest in peace, wearing her old, embroidered oven mitt. She pulled Laurie’s plate from the brand-new oven and Laurie made a face.

“It melted.”

“Just eat it,” said Maggie. “You’re skin and bones.”

Maggie carried the plate to the table and placed it across from her own setting. She noticed, for the first time since her arrival, that Laurie was wearing an unusual hat, tall and following the curve of her antennae. Maggie had never seen anything like it. Laurie blushed.

“Sorry,” she said, and put it on the empty seat next to her. It lurked above the table’s edge in red felt and black lace. Maggie thought it had a sinister aspect, like the scale model of some cultish monument.

“What I don’t understand,” said Boris, “is how you can be an hour late to a six o’clock meal with that much time on your hands.”

“Oh, Dad,” Laurie said with her mouth full. “We have to wait for the luggage car and then we have to carry everything across town to the drugstore where Chili works. The owner lets us stash our gear there.”

“Our gear?” said her father. “What ‘gear’ does a singer need?”

“What kind of name is Chili?” asked Maggie, rhetorically.

“It’s rude not to help with the instruments, dad, we’re a band, you raised me better than that.”

“It’s rude,” he said, “to be an hour late for a dinner you’ve known about for a month.”

Maggie did her best to keep smiling.

Boris loved the radio. He felt radio was to thank for his success. He did his best work with it on in the background and the speaker cloth he devised had been the catalyst for his small business empire, now in its thirtieth year.

Growing up in the vesper tunnels, there was little electricity. The families with radios had manually cranked machines. Boris’s first experience of shame at dishonesty was befriending his crèche-mate Simon because Simon’s family had a radio. He thought Simon was a bore and his parents were always yelling.

Boris was small, even for a vesper, and especially in his youth. He wasn’t much use on the family digs. He was observant and good at estimating weights and distances by sight. Some of his siblings found this endearing and others found it grating. His father, especially, had found it irritating, though he never said why.

One night after crèche, Boris went to Simon’s to sit around the radio for a live musical concert. Simon’s father always cranked the handle too fast, Boris thought, and on that night, it snapped off. Simon’s father swore and his mother cried. Boris, who was young enough that his exoskeleton still had translucent patches, volunteered to repair it.

“I help fix tools at home,” Boris said, which was true. He was a whiz with simple machines that he was otherwise too small to operate.

Simon’s father laughed, which humiliated Boris, but it dissipated some tension in the room. He saw Simon brace for the family’s usual blowup.

“I can do it,” Boris insisted. He knew every sound the radio made when it started up. He could time the audio crackling into being. He had stood behind the open-backed radio while Simon’s father powered it up, and Boris was sure he knew which parts made what quiet machine sounds and in what order. Simon’s father didn’t know this kind of thing, Boris thought.

“You’re not touching this radio,” said Simon’s father.

That night, Boris dreamed he was very small, scrambling up the interior architecture of the radio. The ground was far below and too dark to see. In the dream, he felt he had to keep climbing, that he had to reach a high-up window where the tuning dial was, because then someone on the other side could see him, could help him. When he arrived, he couldn’t see through the frosted panel and tried yelling, but his mouth wouldn’t open.

He woke with a gasp to his brother Arthur punching him in the thorax, telling him to shut up.

There in the family dark, Boris vowed that he would have his own radio and would not let anyone touch it, much like Simon’s father. Unlike Simon’s father, he would know how it worked and he would care for it, the way his mother cared for larvae and pupa. Boris resolved never to return to Simon’s house, even if it meant missing his favorite shows.

Years later, Boris’s mother retired from birthing, and sibling employees were no longer in production. She returned to work in the tunnels with the expectation that her progeny would follow. This put adolescent Boris in an awkward position. He pulled his weight helping his mother and occasionally repairing machines, but it would look bad if he was the only one not in the tunnels. Some of his youngers had been carrying dirt for a year.

Boris approached his father and suggested that he might repair digging machinery full-time, maybe for one of the big, industrialized families.

“It’s not broken full-time,” his father said. “You seem to take to the crèche.”

What his father was saying was that if Boris wasn’t in the tunnels, his other option was working in the crèche, looking after pupas. Boris didn’t care for babies. He found them completely illegible.

Cousin Felix, who worked as a night janitor in a brand-new city hospital, visited the tunnels and told Boris the hospital was looking for a vesper to service the dirty machines in the basement. The machines were of arachnid design, but no spider would touch them. Boris asked what kind of machines, but his cousin didn’t know.

More vespers moved to the city and lived in mixed-arachnid apartments. The buildings rose vertically into the air, full of windows, so unlike vesper tunnels. There were more jobs in the city than just digging, babysitting, and reproduction. As new jobs were invented, spiders and mantids felt that some tasks were now beneath them, and they actively recruited country vespers into these positions.

“Come find me when you’re ready,” Cousin Felix said.

Boris told his father that he was moving to the city to live with Cousin Felix and work at the hospital.

“Sucking up to bugs that want to separate you from your entrails,” his father said.

“It’s not like that anymore,” said Boris.

When Boris arrived at the address provided, his cousin was not home. The floor was covered in mattresses and the young vespers inside seemed drunk at midday.

“How do I know you’re his cousin,” said the one at the door, which was closed in Boris’s face.

To mute his panic, Boris looked for a newspaper. The classifieds. He knew there were places you could buy a bed with some work. His blood sang with nervous fear, and he soothed himself by outlining the necessary steps ahead. He felt naïve for thinking there was ever a job at the hospital. He hardly knew his cousin.

There was a makeshift newsstand and nut vendor next to a tall colorful tent, pitched on the grass at the edge of a park. Boris bought a partial newspaper at a discount and watched the illuminated sliver of a stage show through an opening in the canvas tent. He would later learn that Vera, his future wife, was inside as a member of the paying audience.

When Boris and Vera finally met at a concert in the same park, they sparred. They jockeyed for the same vantage point on the lawn and their hardheaded flirtation took weeks of argument over coffee and thin cigarettes. Eventually, they linked forelegs in the front row of a popular vesper variety show, and were soon embracing for minutes at a time on local benches and stoops.

During one such embrace at a local café, Cousin Felix materialized and told Boris he was welcome to sleep on the floor with the other vespers, but Boris made efforts to avoid it, preferring the cramped and dusty rooms that came with the manual labor he performed. Most didn’t allow alcohol, and the workers were too tired to talk at the end of the day.

With the appearance of Cousin Felix came a real introduction to those hiring at the hospital. The job was real, fixing furnaces and waste pumps, and soon Boris was looking at apartments he might afford with his limited new income. Vera lived with her aunt and was eager to move out, so she decided that she was nearly in love with Boris and she would acquiesce to his bizarre insistence that they marry, if only for the financial convenience. The wedding at city hall was attended by Cousin Felix, his “festive” roommates, and Vera’s politely scandalized aunt.

At the hospital, Boris was well-liked and seen as highly competent by his peers. He learned how the subterranean waste pumps and furnaces worked and cleaned them regularly, familiarizing himself with optimal temperature and pressure. He tightened fasteners with a delicate precision. With attention more than maintenance, Boris kept the filthy machines in continuous operation, a first since the hospital’s opening. His janitorial supervisor took notice and soon Boris was the first vesper in a new mixed engineering department.

The spider and mantid engineers were visibly skeptical of their new coworker, but Boris felt it had more to do with being engineers than bugs. The new Facilities Engineering Department was excited to work on the state-of-the-art medical equipment, some of it invented right there in the hospital.

Ironically, Boris experienced the true prejudice of his peers when they became comfortable as a team. His fellow engineers were letting their social guard down, a sign of respect, to communicate less-than-respectful ideas. Vespers were last to join the new industrial society and, more than being second-class citizens, they were seen as unhygienic and clumsy, blindly tunneling in the dirty dark. Boris was neither dirty nor clumsy, and his colleagues sheepishly acknowledged this after inevitably stating some out-of-date “truism” that implied otherwise.

Still, Boris was not allowed to work on certain equipment. This was not explicit policy but just what happened when he expressed interest in incubation or intubation or anything with an extra-fetishized sterility. Boris was largely assigned the maintenance of nonmedical devices and it was in this way that he became intimate with the hospital intercom system, which he found mechanically similar to the radios of his youth.

Like the furnaces and waste pumps, the intercom system was always failing and kept Boris busy. They system was designed and installed by a temporary government agency that existed to oversee the building of the hospital. Nothing was saved and there were no diagrams for reference. Boris learned the intercom’s workings intuitively, which he enjoyed.

When he was quite sure he could differentiate between essential and inessential hardware, Boris brought home extra parts to build his own radio. His young wife was thrilled at the idea of their home filled with song on command. He delighted in fine-tuning the device for her benefit, to summon an ideal audio-image for her listening pleasure. Their shared love of music was ever nourishment to their marriage.

The main issue with the hospital intercom was not mechanical, but in the casings. As spidersilk went out of style for being too bodily, it was replaced by inferior plant weaves. The speaker boxes were stretched with an old-fashioned fiber blend that was not only ugly but decayed at an alarming rate under modern cleaning products. The hospital cleaning staff scrubbed the intercoms with disinfectant like any other surface, and the grill cloth suffered for their diligence.

Boris brought this issue to the attention of his supervisor, pointing out that the fraying grill cloth allowed dust and moisture access to the electronic mechanism. When his supervisor asked if this caused any actual and immediate malfunction and Boris had to say well, no, it was classified as a nonmechanical issue and dismissed.

Boris took pride in his own appearance and he took pride in the hospital’s appearance. He felt that he worked in a cathedral of genuinely helpful modernity and that it ought to look dignified, especially for all the frightened bugs receiving treatment for the first time.

One morning shift, a plastic cart was brought to engineering, burned by the shorting electrical devices it was designed to hold. Boris noticed the burnt plastic spiral off as filament and had an idea. On his lunch break, Boris borrowed a mechanical grinder from the kitchen and fed bits of heated plastic into it, extruding thin tubes that melted together and gummed up the device. He replaced the coarse die with a perforated pan used to drain viscera and the plastic extruded more finely. If he was able to keep the threads from touching until they cooled, he could maintain individual strands. The kitchen appliances were ruined and Boris wasn’t sure where one purchased restaurant supplies, so he left some cash and an apologetic note for the cook.

Boris educated himself about looms and weaving and he was soon able to produce sheets of synthetic cloth from the plastic strands, in colors that spidersilk and plant fiber would never take. Without asking permission, he replaced all the hospital intercom cloth with his new synthetic fabric. Those that noticed were not upset, and he received many compliments from the cleaning staff. Boris particularly enjoyed the design element and was proud that the colorful fabric not only withstood cleaning but brought aesthetic joy to patients and employees alike.

His supervisor took credit for Boris’s work, telling his own supervisors that he put the young vesper on the task himself. The more accolades the fabric received, the more menial tasks Boris was assigned to. It was just like in the tunnels, Boris thought. He was being punished for his exception. It seemed absurd that he wasn’t permanently assigned to a more invention-oriented position. There were fifty improvements he wanted to make, just off the top of his head.

The supervisor called Boris into his cramped “office,” a group of temporary freestanding walls.

“Room 304,” said the old mantis.

“What’s broken?” Boris asked. With his luck it was a bedpan.

The mantis was impatient with the question.

“You have been personally requested by the patient in 304.”

The supervisor’s bulbous eyes rotated and fixed on Boris, as though to ask what else there was to say. Boris nodded and headed for the stairwell. The third floor was all single rooms, reserved for “very important patients.”

The patient in 304 was an arachnid Boris’s age, with bandages covering his top two eyes.

“How can I help?” Boris asked.

“Oh!” The spider moved too abruptly and groaned.

“Is something broken?” Boris looked around the room. He saw no machines covered by the engineering department.

“Besides me? I wanted to meet the bug what designed that fabric, I was sure you’d be a spider.” He gestured to the intercom on the wall.

“It’s plastic,” said Boris.

“That’s what the nurse told me! Ooh…” The spider winced again. “My family is in silks for three generations and my father will not budge on what it is we produce. They only want spidersilk for industrial applications now; the garment industry is on its last legs. Mantids don’t want it touching their delicate skin.” The spider rolled his unbandaged eyes. “All my older brothers got watches when they turned sixteen and I got a yoyo. It’s killing my family.”

Boris guessed what was happening.

“I think my synthetic fabric would be very cheap to produce wholesale. I needed very little plastic to do every intercom in the hospital. I ruined a food processor, which I feel bad about.”

“My name’s Albert,” said the spider. “You should meet my father. He would never believe this stuff was made of plastic. Honestly, it would offend him. It looks nicer than a lot of the pure silk I see, and trust me, I know silk.”

Boris did not immediately trust Albert but could imagine he was the emissary of a more trustworthy spider. The opportunity was dancing in his vision and Boris wanted to keep it there. That’s what living in the city was all about. He thought of his life with Vera and how it might change.

“My fabric lasts longer too,” Boris said. “Stands up to repeat cleaning with strong chemicals.”

“Yes! Just like that!” Albert shifted in bed and winced. “Say it just like that and my old man will shit.”

Boris made a face, unused to profanity, and the bedridden spider laughed at him.

“A vesper,” Albert said. “No kidding!”

After dinner, Boris smoked a cigar on the balcony and reviewed the appointment book he kept in his breast pocket. Tomorrow would be busy. He made a note to review security protocols at the factory. He didn’t intend to fall victim to any so-called industrial activism. Through the sliding glass door, Boris watched Maggie and Laurie, his adult daughters, spread keepsakes of their mother on the living room floor. He heard them coo every few objects.

“Hey, Pop.” Laurie stuck her head onto the smoky balcony.

“Yes, dear.”

“Before discs it was shellac cylinders, right?”

Laurie hadn’t asked mechanical questions in years.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Didn’t Mom record a few?”

“When she was little,” Boris said.

“What do you mean?” Maggie asked, joining them on the balcony.

“Your mother’s family had wings, and when they came from the tunnels, they made music with them. I think someone from the college recorded your grandmother and aunts singing for an archive of folk traditions.”

“If I had some shellac cylinders, you think you could help me play what’s on them?”

Boris paused and pulled on his cigar. Laurie had an ulterior motive, she always did. He heard it in her voice.

“Do you have Mom’s?” Maggie asked, first to Laurie who shook her head and then to her father, who was still thinking.

“I’m not sure she had them,” Boris said. “The college might, though who knows if they can be played.”

For a moment, Boris fantasized as when he was a new father. He imagined his machinic impulses directed to entertain his daughters as inventor and toy maker, but when he looked up at Laurie, she looked so much older than Maggie and hardened in a way that made him wince. He did not want to reward or encourage his daughter’s lifestyle, her lateness, her singing and drinking and the bugs she kept company with in the name of a decreasingly commercial art.

“I don’t have anything useful,” he said.

“I picked some cylinders up on tour,” said Laurie. “You can see the shape of the sound in the surface, it’s beautiful. I think they’re like you described, real old songs, folk songs.”

“Is that the latest trend?” Boris asked sarcastically. “What all the teens want to hear? Country bugs moaning out of the past?”

Maggie laughed too loud at her father’s barb.

“Maybe,” said Laurie. “You never know.”

Laurie and Maggie took turns kissing their father, said good night, and rode the elevator down to the lobby.

Boris got in bed, aware that his parental worry was lighter than usual. He reflected on his evening and felt it should have wound him up a little more. After these long visits, he lay awake, worrying that each girl was too much herself. Tonight, it seemed like a good thing. They seemed okay. By the end of the night, even Laurie seemed well-intentioned. For Laurie, everything was an injustice. That it was so hard to play shellac cylinders was an injustice.

For Maggie, every event, every moment that passed, was an opportunity for correct behavior. Had she learned that from Boris? Boris enjoyed being small, excused from the endless chain of formal politenesses that went on above him between spider and mantid. This lack of accountability to social mores occasionally got him in trouble; he struggled to keep track of what constituted etiquette. He had this in common with Laurie.

Maggie, however, was a student of expectation, even when there wasn’t any. She was only too happy to join her father’s BorTek enterprise, without ever being asked. Boris wondered what Albert Sr. would have made of the name. He thought about meeting Albert Jr. that night in the hospital, more trustworthy than he seemed at the time. He wondered what Junior was doing now, convalescing in the lap of luxury somewhere. Senior was long gone.

Boris had gotten on well with the old spider. Albert Sr. called Boris “cutthroat,” which Boris didn’t like, but “Al” insisted it was a compliment. Maggie was not “cutthroat,” Boris thought. As a student of imagined expectation, she struggled to invent her own, to dictate her own terms. Her imagination failed when expectations were not met. She struggled to revise plans. As an extension, she was especially frustrated with her sister, a quality Boris found secretly endearing.

The old vesper fell asleep imagining Laurie and Maggie on the balcony, dim lit yellow from the electric billboard across the street. In the dappled light of his mind’s eye, they loomed through golden static, so old, so beautiful, so grown-up, nearly ancient. Boris slept.

On the street below, Maggie and Laurie stepped quickly with linked forelegs. The sisters loved cars and fell into old habits, playing what they called the “name game”; calling out automobile models in rapid alternation, no repeats. Their father’s new apartment was downtown, and the streets were jammed with every car you could name. For blocks, the only words spoken were make and model. Without warning, Laurie stopped walking.

“Oh don’t go home,” she pleaded. “Come meet my friends.”

“I have work in the morning,” Maggie said and tightened her scarf.

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“So?”

Laurie rolled her eyes.

Maggie put her forelegs on her abdomen. She raised her bristles.

“I want you to meet my friends,” Laurie said. “It’s about Mom.”

Maggie stepped back from her sister. She felt this was too far, even for an eccentric like Laurie. The rule was unspoken, but always observed. They only spoke of their mother in the presence of their father. It was that way since she died, like they didn’t want to steal any pieces of her from Boris, who took it hardest of all.

Laurie was becoming impatient.

“I think I have some of her recordings, my friends do,” she said.

Passing bugs cast glances at the two fashionable young vespers bickering on the corner. Maggie huddled closer to her sister. She was loathe to make a scene at a highly trafficked intersection.

“Well alright, but didn’t you say you have no way to play them?”
“Yes, that’s true,” said Laurie. “My friends and I are learning. To sing them.”

Maggie snorted and rolled her eyes.

“I told them to meet me at Moon’s Café, they’ll go wild to meet you. When was the last time we went to Moon’s? Ha!”

Laurie meant this rhetorically, but her bureaucratic sister stopped to account for the duration. Laurie laughed harder and pulled Maggie down the street. Despite herself, Maggie laughed too.

Laurie was eleven the first time she appeared on live radio. She would sing an advertisement for her father’s new fabric store, in between the late-morning radio drama and the afternoon musical program. Her mother Vera, who was by then bedridden, wrote the jingle in repose, directing her family around the piano at home. She penciled musical notation on BorTek stationary. Despite her illness, this collaboration was Boris’s fondest memory of their marriage. Laurie enjoyed being the center of attention and took the responsibility seriously. She wore makeup and jewelry to rehearse at home.

While the rest of her family practiced the jingle, Maggie sat in front of her father’s precious radio, her adolescent antennae pressed into the real spidersilk grill cloth. She couldn’t stand to hear her family bonding and wasn’t sure how or even if she wanted to insert herself. The music and talk from the radio drowned out and tangled with whatever they were doing in the other room and only her mother’s cough cut through all of it at once.

On the day of the commercial, Boris and Laurie dressed in their best clothes, chosen by Vera. When they arrived at the station, Laurie was disappointed to see the staff clothed casually and disheveled, like the sweaty tailors behind her father’s shop. An arachnid with a clipboard ushered father and daughter to the recording studio.

Laurie was relieved to find the studio more what she imagined, and more like her father described. The room was very clean with pastel carpet all over everything, including the walls and ceiling. A pane of thick glass on wheels stood between a freestanding microphone and a well-dressed young mantis hunched over an electronic desk and smoking. With a focused paternal look, Boris left Laurie at the microphone and joined the engineer at his desk. The mantis smiled at Laurie, in the rehearsed way adults pantomimed emotion for young bugs.

“You ready? I’m going to count from five and the light over there will turn on.”

“Just like we practiced,” Boris said softly.

Laurie nodded severely, a habit her father usually laughed off but, on that day, found it especially off-putting. Were both his daughters inclined to imitate adult gravitas? Had they learned this from him? When the light turned on, Laurie began singing.

“BorTek threads, BorTek threads,

From your silky pants

To the felt on your head,

Even the ash from your cigarette…”

She paused for effect, taking a deep breath that would be comically audible on the broadcast. Her mother had told her not to do this. Boris knew Laurie was going to rush the next line on her exhale.

“Hasn’t met a fabric tougher than BorTek yet!”

“BorTek Whole Synthetic Cloth, now open to the public,” she said in her squeaky voice. “The future of textiles…is here!”

She hiccuped and giggled and the light on the wall went off and the sound of instrumental music filled the room. Thrilled to her core, she looked to her father and found him upset. The mantis stood up, towering over Boris, and patted him on the back.

“Hey, that’s catchy!” the mantis said. “You must be proud. You invented it, huh? Hey, that’s pretty neat.”

Laurie saw her father soften, diminished under the looming mantis.

“I started working on radios,” said Boris.

“No kidding!”

The mantis was practically shouting. Laurie was used to this. Mechanical types were often too excited to meet her father. The engineer took her father on a tour of the studio, identifying all of the custom-built devices. Boris nodded politely and Laurie trailed them, half listening.

On the walk home, her father turned inward, holding Laurie’s small foreleg too tight and in silence. Laurie figured it was because of the hiccup and the giggling, or maybe the big breath. She wasn’t a dumb kid, she thought, those were creative choices, not mistakes. She was going to sell a million yards of BorTek, she knew so. She looked forward to seeing her mother, who she knew would get better. Maggie and her father were so negative, she thought.

At the apartment, Maggie and Vera sat on the couch in the living room, sharing a blanket. When Boris and Laurie came in and Boris saw his wife out of bed, he shouted.

“Maggie!”

“Oh stop,” said Vera. “I insisted. I wanted to be near the radio.”

“The big breath—” Boris started.

“Was wonderfully effective,” Vera said.

Laurie beamed and ran to her mother.

“Our daughter may be some kind of artist,” Vera said.

Maggie rolled her eyes.

The door to Moon’s Café was upholstered in purple and hung on a loud spring. The club was dense with music but the sound of talking and laughing was louder. Moon’s had changed. It used to be a real café. Maggie didn’t see anyone eating, but vesper and arachnid waiters in red vests carried flutes of sparkling wine and silver carafes on ice to peripheral tables engulfed with smoke. Everyone was about their age, which Maggie found embarrassing, though she saw no one she knew. Moon’s had been a vesper club, one of the first, but these glamorous guests were bugs of all sorts. A band in matching white suits played slick jaunty renditions of popular favorites. Maggie knew her sister hated this kind of music.

Laurie pulled Maggie up some stairs she hadn’t seen and then they were on a balcony, overlooking the dance floor. Another new addition. All the smoke from downstairs flowed up and Maggie felt trapped in the poison cloud. Her eyes watered and she coughed. Laurie walked ahead and laughed, pulling her sister through the haze.

The sisters stopped at a dark corner booth and Laurie shoved Maggie between an emaciated mantis in a tan suit and a burly arachnid in an undershirt. Maggie sank into the cushions between them.

“Chili, Ivan, my sister Maggie.”

Chili and Ivan nodded above her.

“Chili’s about the best drummer I’ve ever heard, and Ivan does arrangements for the band.”

“And I play the piano,” said the mantis.

“And he plays the piano.” said Laurie.

Laurie’s immediate and total relaxation was palpable to Maggie. The rictus of her smile was gone and her antennae were flat against her head. Maggie was hurt when she realized Laurie had been performing all night. It made sense that she was more comfortable with her friends, on the balcony at Moon’s. Maggie looked for a red-vested waiter.

“We didn’t know you were coming,” said Ivan coolly.

“Neither did I.” Maggie stood up, smoothing her skirt, and moved to sit with her sister. She folded her scarf in her lap. Her sister’s friends were not going wild to meet her, which was in some ways a relief, though it made Maggie feel foolish for coming.

Laurie slouched in the plush booth, sprawled like a puddle. Maggie sat straight and tried to relax her mandibles, doing her best to appear cheerfully alert rather than uncomfortable.

“You’re a music lover?” The enormous spider, Chili, asked this with evidently genuine curiosity, which Maggie sensed and allowed.

“I am,” she declared. “We grew up with the same parents, after all.”

“After all,” Chili repeated, smiling. He seemed pleased with her answer.

“Well, shall we?” Ivan the mantis stood. He smoothed his threadbare jacket.

Chili stood next and the two towered over the small vespers. Maggie wondered if they were going downstairs to dance. She was awfully tired.

The puddle of her sister leapt vertically from the booth, hooking Maggie’s foreleg on the way up.

“Let’s go, Mags. I want you to hear the music I was telling you about.”

When the integrated public high-school opened, Boris called in favors to place Maggie in its first class. He suggested Laurie suspend her singing engagements, temporarily, to attend with her sister, but Laurie rejected the idea.

In the three years since the radio broadcast of the BorTek jingle, Boris’s business thrived, aided by the staggering popularity of Laurie’s performance. The recording of Laurie’s jingle was the station’s most requested song for six weeks. Boris bought the storefront next to his own and knocked the wall down between the two. He struck fair deals with begrudged arachnids and showed them how to use BorTek products to stay in business.

Laurie took the bus to the radio station three times a week, to appear as a special guest on the Sound of Today show, interpreting popular songs by spiders and mantids. She spent the rest of her time at home with Vera, who slept more and more, rehearsing and discussing their philosophy of music while drinking hot water. At school, Maggie was one of three vespers and kept a low profile. She avoided the whispers of her peers, who saw only Laurie’s sister. Everyone knew the BorTek jingle.

There had never been a phenomenon like Laurie. There had never been a popular vesper singer and there were no vesper standards to sing, but Laurie made the songs of other bugs her own, like she did with the jingle. The imitation of severity she affected socially became real in her music, and the theater of her expression implied grave wisdom.

Laurie was happy when she was singing, although she no longer believed her mother would get better. She wondered if her happiness was related to this change, which made her feel worse, which made her sing more, turning to music to expunge the feeling. She loved being allowed to wander the city alone. She loved reading on the bus and meeting the different piano players when she arrived at the station. They all had their own stylistic tics, and Laurie enjoyed the challenge of adapting to that day’s pianist.

She was tired of singing old songs and wanted to surprise her mother with an original piece. As a surprise, she couldn’t write it at home, so it was written while she walked, looking at buildings and bugs and advertisements, repeating the words she saw on billboards and bumpers. The public language of the city was finding its way into the music. The song she wrote for her mother would be as honest and all-encompassing as Laurie could manage. There was no time left in their relationship for pretense.

Laurie kept the melody in her head and scribbled compositional notes in the end pages of her paperbacks. The song for her mother grew and soon Laurie felt it was for everyone, since she had written it with everyone, walking around the city. Laurie imagined music about real life, music for bugs own her age and not just vespers. She began showing her music to the temp pianists at the station, who inevitably tried to steer her back to the standards. They couldn’t understand why anyone, especially Little Laurie Vesper, wanted to sing songs about billboards and death, and with such strange harmonies. It wasn’t done.

While Maggie spent ninth grade in Structural Geometry 1, Laurie argued with bugs twice her age about the higher purpose of her “new music.” Vera got sicker and BorTek got bigger.

Boris, Laurie, and naturally Vera all missed Maggie’s graduation from high school, and not many applauded when she crossed the stage to shake hands with the principal. Maggie started work at BorTek the following Monday. Her father had no better employee than his daughter.

“You’re going to love this place,” whispered Laurie.

The cab jostled and she pressed sharply into her sister, with whom she shared the corner of a withered bench seat, elbowed there by Chili, the sprawling arachnid drummer.

“I doubt that very much.”

Maggie replied a little too loud, and Chili laughed without turning.

The taxi stopped where the paved road ended in dirt and the driver turned to the mantis Ivan for payment, who turned to Laurie. She produced a wad of cash and peeled bills for payment.

“Another ten if you wait for us. Two hours.”

The cabbie nodded and took the money but drove off when they left the car.

“He’ll be back,” said Laurie.

The bugs walked the moonlit gravel road in silence. Away from the city lights was very dark, and crude improvised architecture suggested itself in the gloom. Maggie thought the ramshackle huts were awful, like haunted houses, but Laurie was unfazed. She smiled in the small glow of her cigarette and chatted with her bandmates about changes to a song.

The dirt road ended at the largest and most improbable shack yet, clearly assembled from whatever was lying around. It was joined with traditional masonry and oozed at its seams. The structure appeared flexible and to sway in the orange dark of a single streetlamp. What Maggie took for electrical hum revealed itself to be music, and she was whisked inside by her companions. The single room was cavernous, larger than it looked from the outside, and lit inconsistently from high in the rafters, giving the throng of dancing bugs and their entertainment an eerie luminance in the sweaty dim. Maggie supposed she was in a speakeasy, as it smelled of tobacco and ferment, and of sweat most of all. She saw a shoddy bandstand where a vesper and mantid ensemble huddled together and scraped at pieces of wood and hit hollow shapes with sticks. The group vocalized in dazzlingly fast and complex patterns, performing a frenetic, ecstatic call-and-response, as though the musicians were confirming their own rapture to each other in front of an audience. The band members appeared to blur at their edges, throbbing with the loud music. It made Maggie’s head spin.

A spider gyrating into the lap of a vesper shuffled between Maggie and Laurie, and Maggie blushed. Her sister laughed, and three winged vespers flirtatiously grazed the long mantid neck of her bandmate Ivan. Maggie pretended not to be shocked, having seen intimations of this behavior at school dances, but never to such an advanced degree.

Laurie did not seem interested in the band or dancing. She stared through and around the crowd, looking for something. Maggie thought her sister looked very serious. Laurie started into the dancers, pulling Maggie behind, followed by Chili and Ivan. They weaved through lattices of leg and wing and thorax. Maggie felt claustrophobic and wanted to close her eyes. To comfort herself, she made plans. When Laurie found whatever she was looking for, Maggie would acknowledge it politely and agree that it was absolutely worth coming to this horrible place for and she would call a taxi at the surely filthy bar, specifying that it pick her up at the very end of the dirt road, as she had no intention of walking back to the pavement either accompanied or alone.

For a moment, she was under a great heavy blanket and could not see. Laurie pulled her through a series of thick curtains, and the sound of the speakeasy muffled. Laurie held Maggie’s foreleg too tight, bending bristles, dragging her sister deeper into darkness. Maggie noticed the black walls were irregular and glittering. They were in a tunnel of the oldest vesper style. Durable and soundproof, the soil around them was held in place with petrified spit. Maggie had read about these methods in school but had never seen them up close.

The crystal soil opened onto a windowless hollow of similarly traditional construction, strung with weak electric lights dangling from the ceiling. It was a shrunken imitation of the larger speakeasy. A sick-looking spider at an ugly piano played quietly and with a delicacy that made his odd melodies tender. There can’t be more than twenty bugs in this room, thought Maggie, noting a bartender with an abbreviated rolling cart of drinks and glassware.

The small group of stylish mingling bugs turned to look as Laurie and her entourage emerged from the tunnel. Some acknowledged Laurie with a practiced minimal effort and she responded in kind, with a demure and false smile like a wink.

“Can I get you a drink?” she asked Maggie.

“What about Mother’s music?”

“You can’t rush these things,” said Laurie, who greeted the bartender.

Chili sat on a bent wire chair and spoke with a young vesper, a female in slacks and untucked shirt. Maggie stood alone, trying to appear aloof. Laurie returned with brass thimbles of a cloudy blue white drink that hissed with small bubbles.

“What is it?”

“House special,” said Laurie. She drained the thimble in one gesture.

Maggie followed suit and thought her throat might be permanently damaged. She gagged and it burned. Laurie laughed and took her foreleg.

The sisters approached the cluster of chairs where Chili spoke with the vesper. Laurie sat down and joined their conversation. Maggie knew that if she sat, she would get a dirty black imprint on her dress. She looked around.

“How long do I have to stay here?” she asked.

Chili guffawed and addressed his friend.

“See? I told you she was a hoot.”

“You’re Laurie’s sister?” asked the grim young vesper, who seemed skeptical.

“I think we look like twins!” said Laurie.

“I guess so,” said the vesper. She rolled down her shirtsleeves, buttoned them, and went to the bartender.

“Don’t mind her,” said Chili. “She’s just nervous.”

“She’s downright antisocial,” said Maggie, which made Chili laugh again.

Their vesper friend came away from the bar cart with a folded rug, which she spread on the other side of the little room. She sat cross-legged on the rug and produced a hollow stick, perforated with a series of holes. She brought the stick to her face and closed her eyes, exhaling through open mandibles before closing her mouth around the thing and softly blowing.

This music was sad from the moment it left the instrument. Impossibly sad, Maggie thought. She wondered how it qualified as music for socializing and tried to gauge reactions in the room.

All present had stopped talking. Some sat on the dirt floor in their chic modern clothes. Maggie felt the music would empty her out, pass through her like a pipe cleaner, scouring her of the evening’s anxieties. The sadness was so all-encompassing that it became neutral, total, a window into a sadness so pervasive as to be ubiquitous and banal. Sadness so fundamental it could be a comfort.

“Who is that?” Maggie whispered.

“Mitzi Day,” said Laurie.

“The shirt factory terrorist?”

Laurie hissed Maggie quiet.

“She’s not a terrorist. She’s a musician, as you can see. Just listen.”

While the sisters whispered, Chili stood and went to Mitzi on the rug. He conjured a segmented plane of shaped wood, weathered smooth. He tapped at the wood tentatively, not yet in time with Mitzi but finding his way. With another leg, he scraped a textured panel in half-time with a pebble. With a third leg, Chili plucked at a section of the plank divided into thin tongues, establishing a rhythm that entangled itself with Mitzi’s wandering melody. When the counterpoint reached Maggie’s awareness, she gasped.

With his remaining legs, Chili held and muted the wood, rubbing its surface to produce playful squeaks and sighs. Maggie was transfixed and didn’t see her sister stand. She became aware of the crowd’s eager murmur and subtle parting to allow for Laurie’s passage. Maggie slouched in her dirty seat and pictured the ruin of her evening wear.

Laurie moved through the crowd like a sleepwalker and sat on the far corner of the rug, listening to her friends play. Maggie rolled her eyes. Ivan the mantis appeared at the edge of the rug, already singing, moaning and cooing in wordless dialogue with the instruments. The longer he sang, the farther the sound moved down his throat and into his chest, visibly vibrating his spines and antennae. Maggie felt the vibration in the flimsy metal chair.

She was suddenly aware that Laurie was singing, and could not have said when it started. Her sister’s voice emerged as a fundamental part of the sounds around it, separating into overtones and disappearing again. Laurie warbled and crooned and stretched words into sound effects, simulating machinery. Maggie heard bits of commercial jingles and newspaper headlines. During one section, Laurie recited the birthdays of friends and family to the music. She admitted to petty behavior in sing-song rhyme and begged for forgiveness in a percussive whisper.

Performing this music, Maggie thought her sister looked bigger, a little wider at the edges. She noticed the rest of the musicians looked like this too. Their bodies expanded and contracted with the music and each other. What she had thought was an optical illusion in the speakeasy upstairs hinted at being actual. The performers’ exoskeletal plates were lifting, fluttering open. Organs unseen in the public sphere were expanding from within. Each extension possessed more folds and chambers, and soon the musicians were blooming outward in ripples, in time with the music.

Maggie found herself backing away from the spotlit rug just as the rest of the audience collectively crawled from the darkness toward the performers. Silhouetted antennae frayed the edges of the rug in her vision. The expanding musicians were oblivious, aware only of each other. Maggie almost stepped on a long mantis, flattened to the floor and writhing. The mantis giggled at Maggie’s surprise and scurried for the music and light.

While Maggie sidestepped the room’s perimeter with her back to the wall, she thought something moved through the air or that the lights were failing. Darkness intermittently laced her view. It was like a shadow play, with shapes swinging horribly in and out of the meager light. Maggie wanted to cry, afraid to look away, and felt behind her for the tunnel through which she had entered.

The shadow play became denser and more frantic. Soon, obstructive lattices swam before her from floor to ceiling. The darkness flexed in her direction and a bristle brushed her cheek. Her eyes adjusted and Maggie saw that the variegated wall of shadows was the audience. Every bug in the room, except for herself and the bartender, had entangled their limbs, holding or biting, strung between sticky secretions in a living stratum taking its shape. Some bugs scuttled across each other, finding their places, and Maggie saw they were forming an enclosure around the musicians.

Through the lightless armature of insects, Maggie could not discern who was who among the players. She could not find her sister. The music was incredibly loud and Maggie felt it all through her body, as though she were contributing to its resonance. Within the encroaching tangle of audience was a layered and writhing mass of slick petals, interrupted occasionally by chitinous exoskeleton. Without intending to, Maggie made eye contact with Laurie.

“Maggie!” Laurie sang. She leapt, separating herself from the wet mass, trailed by ribbons of flesh.

“I need to leave!” Maggie shouted.

Laurie laughed, without cruelty, and reached out for Maggie, as ever. Maggie took her sister’s bristled foreleg and was pulled into the network of insects. Laurie watched Maggie be swept up by the pulsing enclosure. A spider above Maggie extended a limb and she wrapped herself around it. She whirled with the pulsating mesh around the transforming musicians. Her starchy dress felt so constrictive. It occurred to her that what they did in the city was dress up. Had her great-grandparents worn hats and scarves?

After his morning meeting, Boris stood at the picture window and watched the street below. Loud bicycle, grimy trolley, sandwich vendor. Not very dignified. He provided people with dignity, and style when they wanted it, or knew how to ask for it.

He went to the radio and switched it on.

“—insects all over the city are being told to stay indoors.”

Boris considered his lunch for the day and tuned the dial until he heard music, before doing a double take. He switched back to the news.

“They say, they’re saying, it’s a sound, they’re saying it’s a song. You must stay indoors for your own safety and whatever you do—”

Boris heard screams from the open window. He walked away from the words on the radio and followed the sound outside. Uptown, an enormous black and multifaceted shape spilled down the avenue. An industrial accident, he thought. Above the panic in the street below, he heard a low siren from the direction of the spill. His clothes felt constrictive. He loosened his tie and lit a nervous cigar.

As the expanding structure approached, pooling up and between the buildings, Boris saw that it was made of insects, all holding each other, or stuck together with webs and spit. In the street below, Bugs ran from its expansion until they could not, assimilated in various states of ecstasy and terror. The siren was music, Boris realized, generated by an enormous glistening bug within the shifting structure. No, he saw, it was a group of bugs writhing together, making the sounds.

The assemblage rolled past his penthouse balcony and there was Maggie at eye level, ridiculous in a dirty blue dress, held on all sides by bugs enjoying the music.

“Hey, Pop!” she shouted, laughing, before gliding away down the avenue in a dripping ribbon of screaming insects.

Boris went back to his office in a daze, doing his engineer’s best to comprehend what he had seen. His cigar went out and his attention drifted to the news.

“—and it seems the vesper singer and textile heir is responsible. We are told it is an original composition and that the royal guard has been encouraged to use deadly force—”

He found matches in his pocket and puffed an ember into being.

“It’s a special occasion,” he said, blowing smoke into the grill cloth he designed. “That’s my daughter on the radio.”

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