Four tarantulas, a woman kept in an underground cage, a dead duputy and the laughing boy

Four tarantulas, a woman kept in an underground cage, a dead deputy and the laughing boy

fiction
edward w pritchard

They kept whistling boy strapped to oak crate boards, facing the large fire and when the tourists came up the hill from the restaurant someone would rattle a stick against the bars of the top of the underground cage that the ship Captain's wife had been imprisoned in these last five months.

The ship Captain's wife had become crazy in her long captivity; the woman would clean and clean the musty underground burrow. The woman caught the earth worms that moved through the walls of her temporary home and placed them in a bucket hooked and attached by wire to the top of her cage. Each morning very early the fisherman gathered up the worms and at night after a long day at sea the men from the boats would leave a whitefish or a tuna for the captain's wife to supply her with nourishment for the day.

When whistling boy heard the stick scraping and rattling on the iron bars of the ship captain's wife's cage he would become violent and rock back and forth explosively foaming at the mouth until whoever was scraping the bars would bring the stick over and whistling boy would try to bite it in half. The tourists always would applaud loudly at Whistling boy's agitation and some of the rich tourists would throw silver coins to commemorate the spectacle.
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