Our Thing

I was standing inside a glass box whose walls didn’t quite reach the frosted cement below. I withered into myself, hands in the coat pockets, chin buried in my chest. There was no snow falling, but the dry snow which dusted the streets and sidewalks was falling horizontally at the behest of a December wind.

Below me, at the level of the thick rubber soles of my insulated shoes, a spider shared my box without the slightest protection of those glass walls, as transparent as pure ice. I watched him stand there a few seconds, then burst with that unbelievable alacrity of small beings, towards a sweetgum leaf, somehow still adorning the exposed sidewalk this far into a windy winter.

The spider crawled underneath the leaf, gathered a couple of the leaf’s points to itself, and curled them around its tiny opisthosoma. I squeezed my hands tighter in my pockets. The bus arrived and I scurried in as fast as I could out of the wind. I do not know for what the spider stayed behind, waiting.

Her Thing

I’d crossed that very bridge over that very river hundreds of times. Not with great regularity, although not altogether infrequently either, I crossed the bridge at night, sharing the handrail with a tremendous number of large spiders. The spiders regularly gave me a great feeling of unease, not least because of the deep fear our society harbors towards the tiny beings, but also because of the many memories I have by now, personally, associated with spiders and fear. Of playing in the streets and yards with my friends at night as a child and crawling into a spider web, forfeiting to the visceral terror at the image of big, hairy spiders crawling snarlingly back to reclaim their home from me. Of memories inside my own home, in the basement, alone in a room full of darkness but for the blue hum of our old television. Many times, in my restful television watching, my heart would skip a beat as a dark patch of floor would explode into life, crossing the large family room with unnerving necessity. A great many of these spiders I dispatched unflinchingly, with the help of a shoe, or a towel, or a VHS tape.

One particular night, there on the bridge, I found a smaller, more elegant spider than I was used to being afraid of, who was on the move. I watched her set a cross point between the top two rails with two near-vertical filaments from her spinnerets. She placed a few more radial threads, then began her tread backwards through time, leaving, instead of muddy footprints or black marks on hot pavement, wonderful orb threads, in near-circles of increasing roundness.

My transfixation on the beauty of her construction was broken only by the violent honk of a horn of a car that nearly took my backside with it, which I had left hanging stupidly off the sidewalk, in the car’s paved lane of travel.

My Thing

One morning I stepped into my shower. I did so as I often had in those weeks, stepping near a small conglomeration of cobweb in the corner just on the outside of the shower’s raised tile threshold. Today the web was occupied, I presume by its theridiid maker. I did not move to kill the spider immediately, as I have so often done to spiders found inside my home.

This particular event happened in the weeks after the 2016 presidential election. I have been slow in my social development, achieving basic levels of empathy quite late, and applied to quite a small set of beings, mostly just other human people. I am one of the sad ones who require a great and obvious injustice in order to feel called to act.

In that moment, one foot inside the shower on the soon-slippery tile, one foot on the carpet rug, I forged a unilateral peace treaty with that other little person who shared my shower. Who also lived in my living space.

But just for a spell, for a few days later the spider was gone, and I don’t know where to.