A Spider Kind Of Woman

Avitus B. Carle digs into family lore to find a mysterious aunt — who some folks remember but nobody ever understood.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (woman walking with candelabra) from The Louisiana Project, 2013

Mo’Bradie only exists at family reunions. Not on Google. Not on paper. Not a birthday or death day or an anniversary recorded or remembered. Never captured on film, pressed on the glue-covered page of a broken-spine photo album.

Mo’Bradie is a word-of-mouth kind of woman. A “did you hear” or “I heard that she” kind of woman. Someone my family remembers in passing, but only when asked. Someone they knew as children, if they had a chance to know her at all.

***

There go Mo’Bradie, smiling in the rain. Hair loose and flying. Arms out wide, spinning like some kind of propeller, just ready to take off. Not caring what the folks say about how she’s different. Hears things no one else can. Sees what the children and the grown can’t. How that poor Mo’Bradie, can’t no one understand her. Can’t grasp the why of her. Why she out there in the rain. Ruining that good hair. Spinning and grinning like some kind of fool.

***

I’m a child when my mother first mentions her to me. Mo’Bradie, the aunt with spiders in her hair. Not her father’s sister or the daughter, whose voice carried the thoughts and desires for their father ‘cause granddaddy Pigeon had “nim nam” words for little girls back then.

“She’d get real close and part her hair.”

With every telling, my mother tilts her head down until she’s curling into herself.

We’ve shared the story of Mo’Bradie so many times that I’ve started to mimic her movements, even parting my hair down the middle.

“Mo’Bradie’d say, ‘Little girl, I feel something itching me. I got them spiders in my hair.’ You know she’d ask us to look!”

My mother and I bump heads, our scalp and hair nuzzling to scratch what we can’t see.

And we sing the chorus of Mo’Bradie, our heads back, our voices raised. “Quit that! Quit that! Qwoo! Qwoo! Qwoo!”

Mo’Bradie on the porch with a secret — all spiders have a routine. Folk only see them when they go off course. The spiders colliding with the people like the slap of death served with an open palm. Mo’Bradie knows the call of spiders. Knows she’s caught in their routine. Tries to pass the gift to her niece, my mother, if only she would see.

“They in my hair,” she says every time. Every time, my mother looks and doesn't see. The spiders tell her to quit. To move on to someone with a better mind. Mo’Bradie knows in the root of her skull that a better mind does not exist.

“One day, when I got good and grown,” my mother says, “I just stopped looking.” She rubs her lips together, shakes her head. “Wasn’t nothing ever there.”

***

A quick internet search suggests that the possibility of any bug, including spiders, living in someone’s hair is incredibly low. But for Mo’Bradie, those spiders were real. They were real for my mother, too. Not real in the touch-and-feel kind of way. But real in the way a child trusts an adult until they get too grown to believe what they can’t carry in their hand.

***

We’re in the back room of Uncle Leholt’s house.

Uncle Leholt, in and out of sleep in a guest chair by the phone. My mother stealing residence in his usual chair which has the best view of the television. Me, still small enough to treat the burgundy velvet rocking chair like a hammock, my legs swinging over one arm, neck craned over the other.

Aunt Raenelle (Reenie for short) throwing glances with Uncle Satchmo, trying to make sense of what their youngest sister is saying.

“But what were we looking for?”

I like the way Uncle Satchmo says “we.” Like everyone in this room had a chance to know Mo’Bradie. To look through her good hair as she parted ways to her scalp. A chance for all of us to see what wasn’t there. “We,” like the memory is still there, just underdeveloped.

“The spiders!” My mother half screams, half laughs.

To which Aunt Reenie and Uncle Satchmo yell “no” loud enough to startle Uncle Leholt but not enough to keep him awake.

“You two know Mo always said she had bugs in her hair,” my mother says.

“And how you know she had spiders?” Aunt Reenie straightens in her seat.

“‘Cause that’s what she said she had!”

My mother mimics Aunt Reenie’s movement, a common position between the two of them. Ready to debate until the other backs down.

Aunt Reenie asks, “But did you ever see ‘em, Sabby?”

My mother leans closer to my aunt, like closing the gap between them will trigger the one clear memory she has of Mo’Bradie. Like, somehow, talking and searching for the spiders will snap this version of Mo’Bradie back into their lives as easily as the memory of them snapping peas over silver wash basins.

“It’s not like I wanted to, Reenie.”

“Then how you know they were spiders?”

“‘Cause that’s what Mo’Bradie said to look for!”

Uncle Leholt has this way of snoring that makes anyone nearby think he’s asleep, until he can spit your entire conversation back on you when you least expect it.

“I thought you was sleep,” Aunt Reenie says, sucking the gold crown of her front tooth.

Uncle Leholt doesn’t bother to open his eyes until he’s sure Aunt Reenie’s back on my mother. I stare long enough to catch him when he winks.

Then, somehow, he gets right back to snoring.

The folks say how she’s different. Hears things no one else can. How that poor Mo’Bradie, can’t no one understand her. Can’t grasp the why of her. Why she out there in the rain. Ruining that good hair.

“I’m telling you, she’d always sit in the same corner and pat her hair,” my mother says.

“‘Cause of the bugs,” Aunt Reenie says, rewinds a strip of her hair that’s come loose from around one of her blue rollers and tucks it back under her bonnet.

“Spiders,” My mother says, then sighs, then looks to Uncle Satchmo. “You remember.”

“Well, Sabby, can’t say that I—”

“Mo’Bradie in the corner just beating her hair saying, ‘quit that! Quit that!’”

And like my mother and I have done so many times before, we lift our heads and sing, “Qwoo, qwoo, qwoo!”

We are loud enough to make Uncle Leholt sit up wide-eyed and laugh. Uncle Satchmo slams his fist against the floor, giddy, clapping and laughing, the room shaking. Aunt Reenie left gasping and asking, “what she say,” then joining in when we teach her the words to Mo’Bradie’s song.

***

Mo’Bradie in the corner pulling at her braids, watching the children play. Daddy Pigeon telling her to sit still. Be still. Asking why she think don’t nobody fool with her? And Mo’Bradie knows she’s no fool. The spiders know so too. They tell her on the mornings she washes her hair. How she’s pretty and loved and wanted by them. But their voices come all at once, always loud and sudden like gunfire in the backwoods during coon hunts. Better to wash them away. Watch some of them be eaten by the drain. Tighten her braids. Make it hard for the spiders to return. Hard for their voices to find her again.

***

I leave the thought of Mo’Bradie alone until I’m 35 years old and ready to talk to my family without asking for my mother’s permission. Or with my mother present to hold my hand as I struggle to find the balance between respectful and my true personality — a dry sense of humor that can be misinterpreted as too casual over a phone I’d rather use to text.

I call Uncle Leholt who keeps records of the family and might know more facts than stories about Mo’Bradie. And I know he will sense my desire to quit speaking over the phone and will ask to speak to my mother.

Except instead of Uncle Leholt, Aunt Reenie answers.

She says she had made macaroni, and now my uncle is driving the two of them to her daughter’s house to eat, and my stomach caves. Aunt Reenie’s macaroni and cheese is the gooey kind that slides down your throat. The pull-a-pile kind that you wait in line for. Macaroni and cheese that all the cousins want, and that she fusses at us for wanting, but refuses to teach anyone how to make it. The kind she bursts through the door with, demanding access to the oven. I get so lost in my jealous wanting that I almost forget why I called until I look at my sheet of paper.

I’m upstairs with the phone on speaker so my mother can hear. “What do you remember about Aunt Mo’Bradie?”

“We didn’t fool too much with Aunt Mo.”

But Aunt Reenie was a grown enough child to know her. Know about Mo’Bradie on the porch with Granddaddy Pigeon. Grown enough to be given a dime to buy Pigeon snuff from the corner store, a dime she used to buy candy instead.

“Do you know when she died?” I ask.

“Should be in the book.” The book being any number of family reunion books I’d have to find around the house.

Or maybe the book Uncle Leholt has, which is actually a binder that tracks everyone buried at the family church.

After I hang up, I ask Mom if she knows if Mo’Bradie’s out there amongst the family. With the church members, privileged with tombstones facing the church’s doors or with the nonmembers, buried closer to the main road with tombstones that mimic gray color samples as seen at Home Depot.

“Probably.”

I’m thinking, there’s a headstone for the family rumored to have "got burnt up" in a fire but not for Mo'Bradie. No proof of her or hint of her body anywhere out there where the rest of her family lay. Just a woman assumed to be buried somewhere amongst them all.

My mother can always tell when I’ve caught something based on what she’s said. I must make a face or pick or bite my lip whenever a thought grabs me.

"She was a bitty thing. 'Bout this big," she says, raising her pointer finger the width of a Slim Jim, "with that good grade of hair."

***

Mo’Bradie who doesn’t exist online. An unknown woman tongue-tied in the stories her nieces and nephews try to unravel on the rare occasion someone asks. Mo’Bradie with spiders in her good grade of hair she kept in braids resting on the top of her head. Knotted like a carnival pretzel. Mo’Bradie who might have smiled if someone had a chance to capture her in a photo. Might have cried at the sight of what developed, seen and not seen, as if she wore no expression at all.

---

Avitus B. Carle (she/her) lives and writes outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have been published in a variety of places including Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y Litmag, SoFloPoJo, Necessary Fiction, The Commuter (Electric Lit.), and elsewhere. Her work was selected for the 2025, 2024, and 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2023 and 2024, the 2022 and 2020 Best of the Net anthology, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Best Microfictions anthology. She is the author of the flash fiction collection, These Worn Bodies, which won the 2023 Moon City Press Short Fiction award. Find her at avitusbcarle.com or online everywhere @avitusbcarle.