"There's always a tickle of crazy in the spider's legs."

There were two reasons the spider was never accused of poor bedside manner. The first – she conducted her patients' surgeries from the comfort of her own bed. And when your rear-end was the beginning of all things luminous and voluminous, you needed plenty of blankets and quilts and pillows and other such soft things to keep it comfortable. During their operations, her patients experienced a conflict of sensations – most of them marvelous, a few of them malevolent. Physical discomfort was not one of them.

The second reason her patients kept their opinions to themselves - the real reason - the spider was mad.

But not the dirty flavor that tastes like cold stares and plastic smiles. The spider’s madness was so quick and clean and pristine in its machinations that one might mistake it for genius. Hers was the sort that made other mad things cage their feathered wits, cough into their motley sleeves, and cross quietly on the other side of the street, pockets clasped between their palms, noses buried in their necks.

The method to the spider’s immaculate madness was maddeningly simple – and appropriately so. Dirt and decay are the seeds of sitting still and in time bear rotten fruit. So, just as the heart freshens the blood by pumping it through the kidneys and spleen, the spider flushed her madness out of her head and into everything else. And because her crazy was so clean, 'everything else' figured it a splendid house guest.

Sometimes, the madness blistered through her, propelled by a queer combustion that was part carbonation, part corruption. Other times, the bad ideas bottled themselves inside her body's secret pockets and lay tranquilized, in time aging like fine wine, waiting patiently until stray sparks of inspiration cracked her cork.

Her madness pooled where it pleased. But her patients were quick to note.

“There’s always a tickle of crazy in the spider’s legs.”

Perhaps that’s why they were so prone to picking on one another – especially at especially inopportune opportunities. Such as when the spider's hands were full and she needed all eight of her legs to fold her laundry. Or when she found eight pairs of matching shoes on sale, but only seven color coordinated socks.

But the moments a patient spends drifting between the doors of life and death? Those moments, more than any other time on the clock, were their favorite minutes to misbehave.

The scarecrow’s surgery was eight hours young, and the spider’s legs would not stop arguing. They all wanted to be first in line to stick him, having spent the whole night poking him, and measuring him, and scoring him, organizing, and then re-organizing him, without being allowed to take so much as a single creative liberty.

But now that the spider had armed her legs with an assortment of scalpels and splints and silver-tipped sharps, her legs were tripping over themselves for the chance to sink their toes into him.

The scarecrow watched the chaos unfold from between the spider’s bed sheets, one swift kick at a time. He appeared nonplussed at the prospect of his impending dissection, but inside his head, he was fighting to stay lucid.

The sound of the spider's engines in his ears was like a lullaby. When she saw him swaying, the spider smiled, and unbuttoned his vest and straddled his chest. She was bigger than he was – three times his length and likely three-hundred times his weight. And when she lay with him like this, she was only just gentle enough to avoid crushing him completely.

The spider drew a vial of syrup from a swamp of pollen pooling in the sinks of the scarecrow’s cheeks.

“You." She strummed his parched lips puckered. "You are revolting, Ichabod.” A leg leaned in close and scrubbed scraps of straw dangling from the scarecrow’s scattered hairline. The spider framed her patient with her fingers, cocked her head, and then clapped her hands in concession. “At least on the inside.”