Short Story: The Spider

The spider in the glass piepan on the stovetop skitters in drunk circles, ever-expanding circles drawn wrong as if by an illiterate drawing pendulum, for days and days in circles and circles—until it hits the edges of the pan where then the spider and its circles creep up the sides and then again in hesitation turn around and circle back down as if the edges of the pan are the edges of the world, a world just waiting to be drawn. After a few days more the spider just stops moving altogether and curls its legs toward its body, defeated by unknown geometries.

So I take my dinner napkin and make an enveloping petal out of the edges of the napkin and I gently coax the spider onto the napkin and then I take the spider and napkin and rest the napkin against the kitchen curtains. The spider crawls onto the curtains and just stays there for a time, unmoving, lost in the furls and billows of the curtains, the loneliest ebb tide.

I take the spider back again on the napkin and put the spider onto the fronds of the fern in the terrarium on the shelf by the window and place the glass top back atop the overgrown now-giant once-miniature fern. The spider disappears into the ferny forest by the window and I don’t see it again, as if it were all in a dream—the spider trapped by invisible circles, the piepan in the amber glow of stovelights, all these moments stuck fast in perpetual incandescing twilight, just before sleep’s grip takes its cinching hold, a rope without anchor amid crashing waves of curtains rolling shut on the looming winter night just outside, the spider living its spider life there in the jungle by the window and wanting for nothing, all its spider desires and dreams of spider things slaked and forever thirstless and out of sight from ideas of danger, if it were all in a dream. The spider lived there were it in a dream.

[Written November or December 2023]