I.
After everyone finally agreed to raise spider goats, it only took about a week for the modular trailer to arrive in the driveway. The driver had no way of unlocking the gate so they dropped it just off the road and left a note saying they would be coming back from Prineville in two days and would pick it up then.
There were supposed to be ten kids but they only ended up with nine. The distributor had sent an extra collar but hadn't sealed it in the metal box so the other goats had half chewed it up in transit. The only other thing that came with them was the box, filled with a fabric strip holding thirty glass ampules of some nutritive solution, thirty disposable syringes, and about three hundred tiny pellets in a brown bottle.
"They're way younger than I thought they would be. I shouldn't have believed them when they said that they would ship with all the food they needed, and we definitely don't have enough mothers to feed all these guys." Natasha folded down the ramp and let the goats amble out. "Let's put them in the far shed and I'll call and see what they want us to do."
They had a hell of a time getting a rep from the distributor on the phone, so they ended up calling around to some neighbors and setting up a couple of "milk dates." For the next couple of days they watched in bafflement as each kid turned up its nose at the milky teats, and happily gobbled down their daily pellet. A few days later they called and thanked their neighbors, and told them they didn't need their nanny goats anymore.
The distributor had sent seven female goats and two males, but as they grew they all developed the same gray-brown udder with stubby, almost choadly teats. The udders distended and swung like pastry pouches, dry to the bone inside. They behaved skittishly and the other animals on the farm didn't care to be around them.
Just before the pellets ran out and the goats were scheduled to eat solely grass and roughage, some of the udders started filling with what felt like hard little marbles. In a week's time they were all swollen up and the goats got cranky as hell. Everybody pitched in to help figure out the best way to milk the goats. It was an enormous clusterfuck.
First of all, the goats were ornery little cusses. They had been cute as a button at first, but they grew into goggle-eyed teens ceaselessly head-butting and kicking everything in their path. Secondly, the gene therapy had made them subtly sick or mutated in a variety of ways. Some of the goats had been growing little horn clusters out of their foreheads and necks, some would grow a millimeter of horn and then lose it; a handful were just straight sick and covered in suppurating lesions. The last fuck in the cluster was that nobody in the world knew how to milk a goat producing a liter of super-superglue a day. The best they could do was coax it out in long ropes which stuck to everything, and wind them like warm frogurt into metal pails.
After a particularly enraging session that left about half her hair glued to a barn beam, Natasha called up the distributor for advice. This time a representative got on the phone immediately, and began to ask a barrage of questions. "Who did you say you work for?" Natasha inquired. The person said that the distributor had been acquired by a new division of a different company, and that they were scrambling to provide support to their partner farmers. It had been a mess, they said.
"The nine we have are fairly healthy. Not as much as our regular goats. Yeah, that's about what we've seen too. We're looking for advice on what exactly to do with all of the smilk. That's what we've been calling it. I mean it's coming out and we're collecting it, but it's not easy. We separated it. Some of it's turning yellow but it hasn't gone bad. No, we wouldn't know what that looks like. It hasn't turned into cheese or anything. No, I didn't think it would. It was - never mind."
The representative scheduled an inspector to come out and talk to them. They were going to buy the three vats of smilk that had been produced, at a rate that was both impressive and made them suspicious that maybe it was worth more than they had been offered.
The inspector turned out to be three people in two vans. None of them seemed interested in inspecting anything. They collected the vats first. One inspector handed them a check with the agreed-upon amount, then drove the van away. The other two took cheek swabs of the nine goats. "Where's the tenth specimen?" one asked.
"We only got nine kids. The rep said on the phone that you guys were going to show us how you've been collecting their sm- how you milk them."
One of the inspectors took out of her pocket the chewed-up collar that they had found in the modular trailer and tacked up in the barn. "Was this from the tenth specimen? Did it pre-decease or did it die here?"
Natasha rolled her eyes. "We only got nine delivered. If you're not going to do what you said we've got a lot of other stuff we need to do."
"These goats were given to you on a provisionary basis with the expectation that you would report certain metrics and findings to our outfit. Why didn't you report the missing goat?"
Natasha shared a glance with the other farmers. "We called but you wouldn't pick up the fucking phone. Look, we're not interested in having you on our property anymore."
The walked the inspectors back to their van and watched them drive away. For the next day or two they avoided the goats, until the whining and bleating got to be too much. Inside the barn, they found an impossible mess. The goats had been backing up against the walls and sticking their smilk strands to the walls. The strands criss-crossed the room, and half of the goats were tangled up in their own effluvia.
They spent all day taking the goats out one by one and cutting the smilk-mats out of their fur. With alternating hot and cold water and some mineral oil they were able to coax most of the smilk to stick to itself, and they piled the nasty mess up outside of the main house.
When they were almost done, Natasha stood inside the barn looking at the walls, wondering if it would make more sense to clean the place or knock it down and a build a new one. There were a couple of smilk-threads dangling from the ceiling, which she just could not figure out. "What the fuck?" she murmured to herself, and started pulling them down. As she did, she noticed the tenth goat hiding up in the corner of the ceiling.
The goat was much smaller than the others had been, and she could see why the collar hadn't stayed on. Its head and neck were miniscule, but its body was fat and round, and its inverted legs gangled outward into the corners keeping it stuck in the air. It wasn't supposed to be possible, but if all the other goats looked like their mother, this one had obviously gotten its father's genes.
She heard some commotion from the far side of the farm, near the locked gate that went to the road. She could see a couple of vans, and at least two sets of red and blue lights flashing. She motioned to the goat to climb down, which it did without fear, and she picked it up in her arms and carried it to the main house. She set it inside the door and ran over to the front gate.
When she got there everyone was yelling. She slowed to a stop when she saw a police officer pointing a gun at her. She could barely hear them arguing; she was watching the inspectors round up the goats and hoist them one by one into the back of the van. She saw another set of inspectors, who must have been parked on the other side of the farm, on the dirt road behind their back fence, coming out of the main house. The inspectors then went into the little barn, came back out, got in the van, and drove away. The barn went up in flames but nobody moved or said anything. Five minutes later the police told them to go back inside and call the fire department.
They called the fire department, and the state police, and the news, and just about everyone they had ever met or known. The state and local police had records of every call and officer movement that whole day, but nothing matching the officers who had shown up at their farm. The distributor had gone out of business weeks ago, and no one could drum up anyone willing to talk about it. Besides the nasty, soapy mess outside of the main house, and the pile of dirt and embers that remained of the little barn, it was like the last couple months had never happened.
II.
Natasha moved the plywood cover off and scooted feet-first into the crawlspace. She grabbed the strap on her bag and pulled it inside. There was an old plastic menorah nailed to one of the beams in here, but she needed to inch in a couple of feet to find the switch. In the orange glow, she could see most of the low-ceilinged room. Rumi's eyes shined, and she heard its clicking bleats.
"Rumi, Rumi." She felt one of its tiny pointed hooves tap her leg. She tickled the fur around its ankles. "Hi Rumi."
She pulled two tap lights out of her bag and set them on the ground. She tapped them on, then off, then tapped one back on. She motioned for Rumi to tap the other one, which he did. She smiled quizzically.
"I brought some books and some food. Do you want to eat? Do you want me to read to you?"
Rumi tapped its hoof on a beam.
"I brought a couple of new ones. There's a sci-fi book, sort of what we'd call young adult. If you're like a regular goat you'd be a young adult now, so you might like that. It's about a ship that takes people to look at the sun, but then it drifts into the sun's gravity and this astrophysics prodigy has to help get them out. No? There's a book I'm reading about interpersonal dyn - no? Let me guess, you want to read this book of poems."
There was an impatient tapping.
"Yeah yeah, I get it. Here, this one's by Samuel Coleridge." Tap tap tap. "Okay, fine, but there's only three Rumi poems in this whole book, and when I'm done we're going to read something else. Let me see, this is number one:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense."
Rumi clapped its four hooves together, imitating the applause it had seen the night it watched them gathered around the fire making music with friends.
"Why do you like Rumi so much? I mean, he's okay but it's - never mind." She put down the book and got out some cans of food and opened them. She pointed: "This is olives, this is mackerel, this is some dog food. I know you're not a dog but I really can't tell what you like. They don't make canned flies, not that you like flies."
Rumi ate a little bite out of each can and then turned back to her.
"I brought you some other books, too. Stop complaining, they're for you to read on your own. This one shows you what the different letters are, this one lets you see how the letters work, and this is a book that a kid might read when they first learn. Okay? I'll read you the other poems, but I have to go soon."
She slid next to Rumi and flipped one of the tap lights up onto the book. "When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy..."
Things on the farm had been intense. It was like they had adopted a child and then it was taken away and no one wanted to hear about how upset they were. Friends acted sympathetic, and the news seemed interested in their story at first, but the more they divulged about what had happened, the less people answered their phones. Their own complicated feelings about both the spider goats and having to take care of them just made things worse.
Natasha hadn't mentioned Rumi to anyone else. She meant to but they had felt so violated by what had happened that she didn't want anyone to think it might happen again. A day after the fire they had been sent a messenger that told them to produce the body of the tenth goat. They told the messenger that it really never had been sent, or never made it to the farm at least. They just wanted to be left alone, and the person seemed to believe them. It had been weeks since then, and they just wanted things to be normal again.
Natasha woke up to a note one day saying that some of the partners were moving on. They didn't need remuneration for their shares of the farm, they just wanted to start over somewhere else. They didn't leave numbers, and their phones weren't in service. She found herself down in the crawlspace more than she was up in the land of the living. Whenever she could get away from the demands of the farm, and the demands of her relationships. Whenever it felt safe.
When she first brought Rumi into the house she thought that it might die. Their first representative had joked with them about spider goats and goat spiders, told them that this wasn't Frankenstein. "The gene therapy is like a scalpel going in, slicing out the milk protein production. Then we stitch in the spider proteins," they had said. They told her they didn't know what outcome to expect from the program, but that the goats had been healthy so far, and things looked promising.
After the fire she thought it had run away, but she found it a few days later peeking out of the crawlspace in the basement, looking exhausted. She gave it some straw and fresh grass from the yard, and then some eggs and slop when it didn't eat those. It didn't seem to like any of the food she brought, but it stayed alive. She wondered what had been in the pills they sent along with the kids.
It was much friendlier than the other goats, and its eyes had this spark that made it seem like it was smiling. She liked being near it, and began to read to it when she felt lonely. It stared at her mostly, but it tapped and clicked when she read it poetry, especially love poetry, especially Rumi. It was obsessed with Rumi, which she thought was amusing enough to name it after, but was a little maddening at this point.
When she left she explained that she had to go into the city for a night, but that she would be back soon. She told Rumi that she would go to the library and get some new books. She pet it on the head and gave it a hug. She tapped the books and said, "Until the juice ferments a while in the cask, it isn't wine. If you wish your heart to be bright, you must do a little work."
In the city, Natasha ate at one of her old favorite restaurants. She got drinks with a friend and bought some lightbulbs. She went to the library and almost got some children's books, but it felt ridiculous so she walked down to the waterfront and watched the boats going down the river. She felt normal for the first time in a long while, and when she thought about going back to the farm she chewed on her nails.
When she finally got back, Dave was looking for a book of his. She asked him if it was a book of Rumi poems, but he just stared at her and said no. When he went out to the big barn she stepped into the basement and found Rumi in the crawlspace with a pile of books next to him. There were the children's books, but then several more that he must have pulled in from upstairs. "Did you read all of these?"
Rumi tapped on the ground and pushed the books towards her. She asked him if he wanted more and he tapped again.
"Do you want me to read to you?" He didn't tap, but he moved closer and started nuzzling at Natasha's pocket. "All I've got in here is my phone."
Rumi tapped on the ground and pointed at the phone.
"You know what this is? It's called a cell phone. You can talk to people who aren't around. Not that anyone uses it for that anymore. Mostly it's got the Internet. You can write things in here and then it shows you pictures and - um, let me just show you. I don't usually have to explain the Internet to people. It's sort of confusing?"
They sat next to each other as she showed him how to get to Google. She asked him what he wanted to look up, shook her head, then just typed in goats. They looked at goats for a while, then looked up spiders. She tried googling "spider goats" and they found a couple of hits. There was a movie, "Google Spider Goats," but it was mostly filled with conspiracy theories and she didn't want to confuse him.
She heard someone coming back in upstairs and told Rumi that she would bring him some more books later. He pushed the books away and pointed at her phone with his hoof. "I can't give you my phone but you can use my old Kindle for a while. It's got a couple of books on it and I can get you whatever you want."
That night she put all of the free books she could find on the Kindle and then dropped it off by the crawlspace entrance. He had finished them all by the next day. She remembered that one of their old laptops was in a box in the closet. It still worked so she connected to the wireless and pulled up Google. She typed in, "Teach me how -" and looked at the results.
Do I need Rumi to learn how to Dougie? Do I want the Internet to teach him how to love? Am I really going to give the whole Internet to someone who just learned how to read? she thought, but the thoughts made her feel old and out of touch and paternalistic. She loaded up Wikipedia, dictionary.com, a website about plants and animals of the world, and some blogs she liked. Then she opened Notepad on top of the browser and wrote, "Write words here."
The next time she saw him he looked very, very tired. She came over and stroked the back of his head. He was on hour nine of a ten-hour Youtube loop of a cat jumping and not quite making it. "It's just a loop, you don't have to watch the whole thing." He looked at the screen and the cat fell and he made a noise like laughing. She laughed too.
He showed her how aluminum foil is made, and a man with glasses blending a Rubik's cube in a blender. They watched "Thriller" twice while Rumi scrolled up and down in the related videos. Natasha moved his hand off and checked Notepad, but he hadn't written anything.
"Can you type?" she asked. She slowly pushed her fingers on the keys, continuing "Write words here and we can talk to each other."
Rumi put one of his tiny pointed hooves over the keys and typed "klae;gnzfdm,se" and then clicked back into Youtube and they watched Thriller again.
"I don't think I can watch Thriller anymore today. Do you want me to bring you some food?"
Rumi waved his hoof in the air and went back to staring at the screen. Natasha shrugged went upstairs. The next time she came down he had moved on to researching the history of submarines and the various influences on Punjabi cuisine across two wikipedia pages that he scrolled through simultaneously. She brought him some eggs and a bucket of slops, which he absentmindedly ate as he read.
"Do you want to read to me?" she asked him, but he shook his head. "Do you want me to read to you?"
Rumi looked over at her and closed the laptop. She felt around in the dark for any books that were left, but she didn't find anything. He pushed the laptop over to her. She opened it and found some Rumi poems and started reading them. He tapped her shoulder after a while and pointed to a different window. "I'm not going to read to you about the various models of early German submarines. Sorry. Do you want to see some of my friends on Facebook?"
Rumi pointed to an open tab that said /r/pics. She clicked over and found a bunch of opened pictures: a baby dressed like an Ewok, a smashed-up car with a note that just said "SORRY," a cat in a box, a smiling girl with a celebrity neither recognized.
"Is this what reddit is? I don't get it." She clicked to the main page and read him a post where people talked about their worst dates. "Oh God, I can't believe that she went on a second date with him. This is horrible. That one's terrifying! Ugh!"
After a while she closed the laptop and scratched the fur around Rumi's knees. He looked a little sickly, but he was also getting bigger and bigger. She had no way of knowing how much he was supposed to grow, but they would need to find him a new home before he outgrew the crawlspace. "You know, Rumi, if you figure out what kind of food you like, I'll bring it to you. You can see everything that exists on this thing, kind of. Don't get the wrong idea. It's not everything, not even most of the important things. It's like a living dream humans wish about themselves. I need to go take a walk."
Next time she went down he told her he wanted a sandwich. "I already brought you a sandwich, and you didn't eat it. Stop Googling sandwich, I know what it is. What kind of sandwich do you want? A sandwich can be almost any food, it just has to have bread on either side."
Rumi opened the notepad file and wrote. "Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich."
"Jesus, I get it. What kind of sandwich do you want?"
"Get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, bitch."
"What the fuck, Rumi? That's not funny." She snatched the laptop away and looked in the browser. What have you been reading on here? Don't read this shit, Rumi. Is this the fucking red pill? Rumi, this is not cool. That is some gross misogynist bullshit. Do you even know what a misogynist is?"
Rumi rolled his eyes. He turned away and pouted.
"I knew this was stupid. If you want some books I'll get you whatever you want, but there's no way I'm going to let you turn into a men's rights activist. Do you even identify as a man? Do you even - ugh, fuck you, Rumi!" She stuck the laptop under her arm and pulled the cord out of the outlet next to the menorah. She went upstairs and threw the laptop in the closet. She went into the kitchen and put some random shit from the refrigerator on a plate and threw it down the stairs where it shattered all over the floor.
The next day she came back in and Dave was cleaning up the kitchen. All of the glasses and plates had been knocked out of the cabinet onto the floor. Two of the windows were broken outward. There was a long scrape up the stairwell wall, and holes in the hallway upstairs. The closet door was open and the laptop was gone. "Someone broke into the house," Dave said.
Natasha went pale. "Look," she said, and told him everything. Together they went down to the basement. The plywood was propped up against the door, but when they went to push it, it wouldn't budge. Gray-white clumps of spider-silk anchored it on. "Rumi! Open the door!"
They went to get a crowbar, and without saying anything Dave got a gun from the safe upstairs. They pried off the plywood, but inside the crawlspace there were thick ropes of smilk hanging all over. Natasha reached her hand in to brush it away, but it was everywhere. "Rumi, what are you doing?" she called.
In the far corner, she could barely make him out in the glow of the laptop screen. She picked a flashlight off the basement wall and shined it in. The whole crawlspace was covered in white ropes. Rumi looked almost completely deflated, having covered the whole corner with a cocoon-like mass of smilk. When she called his name again, Rumi turned away and sprayed a chunky dollop towards them.
"He's dangerous," Natasha almost whispered. "He was so cool before, but I couldn't protect him."
"You tried to save him," Dave said. He offered her the gun, but she took it and put it down.
"I don't think he's got much longer to live. Hand me those." He handed her a hammer and some nails from the tool bench. They set the plywood against the door and took turns nailing it in. Smilk plopped over the edges of the board as the hammer hit, dribbling slowly down like jizzy white molasses.
Inside the crawlspace, Rumi blinked into the light. He clicked submit and refreshed until his post appeared. "DAE Hate When Women Try To Control You?!!" the title said. He logged out and into his alt account, and read the comic he had made. It depicted a spider weaving a web, and then his girlfriend coming home and telling him not to eat the flies he caught. With the last ounce of strength in his body, he commented "Sick comic dude women are total hypocrites" and then upvoted it and died.
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