Spider

There was a spider on the ceiling.

The boy didn’t know when it got there, huddled in the corner between two walls of his living room. He just looked up one day and there it was. It wasn’t a big spider. All balled up like this, it must have been smaller than his fingertip, he guessed. He didn’t dare get close enough to check.

He didn’t like spiders, creepy little things that they are, and he certainly didn’t like them being so close. He would always glance at them as they lingered at the edge of his vision. An unconscious compulsion, perhaps his brain’s way of making sure they were still there. After all, the only thing creepier than a spider watching you from the corner of your room, is not knowing where it’s gone.

The sensible thing would be to remove it. Trap it under a glass and throw it outside. But even if he could wedge a glass into that little nook, he didn’t want to give it any reason to run.

The hours ticked by, and each time the boy looked up, he saw that little black dot in the same place. Shouldn’t it be building a web or something? Isn’t that what spiders are meant to do?

By bedtime it was still precisely where it had started. He gave it one last look, sighed, then turned off the light. He went to bed, not knowing if he would be comforted or disquieted if it vanished by morning.

Morning came, and the boy checked the room.

There sat the spider, exactly as before.

As the day progressed, he began to wonder if it was dead. Any living creature should be more active than this, especially something as dependent on instinct as a spider. Surely if it were alive it would be looking for food, or anything beyond the bare white walls and ceiling. Whenever the boy had seen dead flies and moths, they were on their backs. It got him wondering if the corpses of insects and arachnids could remain attached to their surfaces, or if somehow their stickiness died with them.

Night time came and went once more, and he entered the room the next morning to find the spider had migrated about a foot along the wall, its legs more outstretched now than they had been for the last two days. So it was alive after all.

What had it been it doing? Watching? Waiting? Hoping a fly would volunteer itself as a snack?

Maybe it was just dumb. Even compared to other spiders.

Or maybe it was shy. Today it seemed to be gaining some confidence though as it had finally left the safety of the corner. After a few more hours of curious glances, the boy watched as it started to move.

It took cautious steps away from the wall and out over the ceiling. What a vast expanse it must look like to those tiny eyes. The boy would normally shudder as he observed the creeping motions of those thin, wiry legs, carrying the spindly creature over his head. But today he leant back and watched. He almost felt proud of the little thing.

The spider stopped and started frequently, turning slightly to the left, and the boy tracked its progress intermittently throughout the day. By night, it had turned a full ninety degrees and reached the wall again, barely more than two feet from where it had started that day. The wall must be comforting to it, the boy concluded. As if it had gone swimming in the deep end and had just returned to the shallows to rest.

He watched as it tip-toed its way back into the corner where the walls met. Three days now, and the spider had done nothing more than a loop around a light fixture. It still had built no web, caught no fly. Did it even need to eat? It couldn’t be using a lot of energy, but it must need something. No way that little body could keep much in reserve.

Maybe it had a secret web somewhere. It could sneak off in the night for a quick snack just outside the window, then scuttle back in before the boy could notice its absence. A fanciful thought, one he didn’t believe for a moment. If it could get outside, why would it ever return to this room, where there was no other life? Where the white surfaces offered no camouflage for its black carapace? Where the closest thing to a natural landscape were the rolling hills of a paint roller’s wake?

Could it be bored? The boy would be if he hadn’t moved for three days. A little boredom was the least he could expect. He couldn’t imagine a creature being so content with doing so little for so long.

Was it even capable of contentment? Did its attention ever lapse, even for a moment? Did it daydream?

The spider curled up in its corner, tucking its legs in close, looking as small as possible.

The boy went to bed, but he couldn’t stop thinking about that spider.

Maybe its circuit around the ceiling was just the same as the pacing of big animals in zoo enclosures. It wasn’t trapped in that room, so the boy began to wonder where its cage really was.

There was no way a spider could feel anything so complex, he thought. Even so, the narrative planted a seed of pity in his mind. He resolved that the next day, he would get that spider down from the ceiling. He wouldn’t throw it out - he would help it escape.

The boy entered the room the following morning, hit with a pang of sadness as he looked up to find the spider wasn’t there. He scanned the ceiling end to end, he searched every wall. Then he looked down.

In the middle of the floor, on its back, the spider lay. It must have gone for another walk during the night, the boy supposed, and something happened before it could return to the safety of its corner.

The boy kneeled down and looked at it. After a few minutes in silence, one more question floated through his mind.

Had the spider lost its stickiness when it died, like the flies and moths he'd seen before?

Or had it jumped?