auto-cannibalistic surrealist feast with familial tension and arachnids

Hieronymus Bosch, detail from Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. 1485, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Ana brushed away the silk scarf that had drifted down from the canopy above the dining table to stroke at her cheek. A carriage clanked past, jangling her nerves even though the red velvet drapes served to muffle the outside world. She picked at a scab on her arm.

‘Don’t pick, Ana,’ berated Nataliya.

‘But it itches.’

The third course was being brought out – great palaces sculpted from potato mash, a flock of quails spiked in mid-air on skewers, their wings fixed into place so they swooped over the table, platters of richly coloured vegetables arrayed in kaleidoscopic patterns. Ana went to tuck a lock of hair away from her face, and a large clump came out in her fingers. The feasting family fell to, destroying entire civilisations of potato with their forks, spearing birds straight from the sky into their mouths. Ana had built a nest of potato and breadsticks bound together with hair for her quail. She watched as the others ploughed their way through the feast. She shuffled in her seat. Her skin felt tight, drawn back over her skull.

‘Anastassia!’

Mama screeched from her seat at one end of the table, red wine and breadcrumbs spattered down her front.

‘Stop playing with your food! Eat it you ungrateful wench, there are starving children in this city that would rip off their own legs to have a scrap of bread! And get that spider off your collar!’

Ana looked down to see a large black spider was sitting on her shoulder, lazily spinning a web from her earlobe to the edge of her lace collar. She picked it up and took a few bites, tearing off the legs with her teeth. She didn’t notice the plate-size spiders on her back and legs that had begun to bind her to the chair with their thick, silky threads.

The next course was brought out – an entire reindeer, roasted and glistening, standing erect in a field of artichokes and zucchini flowers. Ana’s skin had become dry and flaky, and as she went to peel off a ribbon of dead skin, a whole chunk of her forearm came up with it. She nibbled at it.

‘Nataliya, you have to try this, it’s ever so much better than the reindeer,’ she said, tearing off some more of her forearm for her sister to try.

Nataliya took a bite and her eyes lit up.

‘Mama! Mama! Come and try some of this, it’s simply delicious!’

Mama and Papa and Dmitri and Aleksandr dropped their food and turned to Ana’s tender flesh. All that was left when they were done were her bare bones, bound up with spider webs. The spiders, happy with their work, had draped some webs between her ribs and set up residence there. Her neck was snapped, her skull hanging over the back of her chair. Her tongue, too tough to eat, lolled out of her gaping jaw, and someone had stuck a sputtering candle into one of her empty eye sockets. She did not touch her dessert, and Mama yelled at her again.

As the serving-women cleared the table, one of them swept up Ana’s bones with all the scraps that littered the table.

Papa leant back with a belch and lit his pipe.