The husband spots it first.
He lifts his book from the coffee table and almost drops it on his toes when he watches her spindly legs crawl and pause where the book once was. A moment of childish shaking crests over his hand as his knuckles twitch at the sight.
He doesn’t say anything about her when the wife sits beside him. She might not see her, he thinks absently. The wife is, after all, sitting far on the other side of the sofa. The middle cushion has been left propped, and other table clutter stands in between her eyes and the other, minuscule eight peering up at her.
Instead of speaking, he opens his book and begins to read. He wants to cross one leg over the other but he fears if his knee knocks the table, she’ll scuttle closer.
That small lady, the spider.
So he remains still and vaguely uncomfortable.
Until the wife reaches closer to the table and clasps her fingers around her teacup and knocks an ashtray slightly to one side.
The spider springs forth.
He swears and she gives a little yelp.
That’s bloody massive, she says. He agrees. Jesus Christ, he exclaims, punctuating out the little white lie as close to an appearance of ignorance as he could. Both stand there, breathing in time and staring at her. She preens her legs and finds a new spot to settle against the mahogany, tippy tapping into the wood.
The silence sways between the couple and the husband can already foresee the tug of war that is about to take place. At once, it starts.
Well? The wife propositions. Can you deal with it?
The husband just stares at the spider and swallows.
Please? She tries to catch his eye.
Why can’t you do it? His voice licks forward defensively, and he sees the wife cringe in disgust.
You saw it first, she ventures. She did know, of course. Willful ignorance, she thinks, is very much in his wheelhouse. Hell, it is his wheelhouse. He brings a hand towards the table and hesitates for a moment.
If we leave it, it’ll probably just go away.
Well. She shuts her own book aggressively and moves towards the door. I’m not staying in the lounge while it’s here.
He coughs after a constipated pause. Okay, he says. They both leave the spinning lady to crawl about the table, before hours later returning and finding her missing.
The husband is relieved, the wife merely picks at her cuticles.
++++
One night as they sleep, she lands atop the wife’s cheek.
She does not wake at once, but when pedipalps and chelicerae meet her nose and cause it to wrinkle, then blow, the wife startles and flicks on the light. She squints then gasps as the spider falls from her cheeks and lands on her lap.
The husband wakes at the blinding light.
Wha- He then swears at the sight of his wife’s lap. Christ.
The wife, ever capable, flings her from the blankets and onto the bedroom carpet. The spider, a little disgruntled at her predicament, crawls into a dark corner between the bedside table and wardrobe. She likes cozy spaces, but loathes being launched into the air, as most would.
The wife feels the need to wash her face and leaps up to the bathroom, though before she does, she peers at the spider through the gap. She could just scoop her out with a fingernail, but why should she?
As the wife washes her face, the spider looks on and wonders why she made the woman feel dirty.
++++
They host a dinner party. Another couple came all the way from Australia where they had just been on holiday. The wife stares at the other husband and thinks about his tan in envy. The husband stares a little too long at the other wife’s chest.
When they are sitting, all cheery around the pearly white table cloth, the spinner’s abdomen sticks out from behind a bowl of rice pudding.
Crikey! The other husband says. The other wife is tired of this expression and rolls her eyes until she too catches sight of the spider. Wow…she mutters, and finds herself a little unable to look away. The husband stutters out something light and feeble. The wife feels embarrassed by the little lady now fishing her legs into the sugar of the desserts.
I did tell you to get rid of it, she chastises the husband. He shrinks back and stops talking. The spider, she recognises, has grown. Grown to such a size that to her, seems like something they would buy from a halloween shop or see on a TV show. The spider’s legs now reach beyond a palmspan, fanning outwards. Her fangs, distinct to the human eye, look like they might easily cause bleeding.
The other husband chuckles with a nip of unease. Don’t worry about it, he says. We’ve seen bigger recently. But he’s uncertain, uneasy in his manner. And doesn’t go on to offer to help remove the creature from the spread. None of them do. Instead, they watch in a strange, horrified silence, as the spider leaves the desserts alone and departs the table for the dark once more.
++++
Again: at nighttime. He is awoken from the couch as a weight lands on his chest. In his light, disoriented state, he thinks that it might be the wife’s hand. He hopes that it might be her hand. But instead of seeing that warm, bedrock arm, he opens his eyes to see his reflection staring back at him in eight circular mirrors.
It’s her, of course. She never left.
The spider sits on his chest and at this point, she’s large enough to kill a cat. The fibers on her legs are so long now that they curl against his skin like pubic hair. He can feel her spinnerets lean against his stomach as a little train of silk seems to lead from his toes to his belly button.
He heaves. His eyes open like craters and his nostrils flare. The sound vibrates in his throat and he opens his mouth to scream.
But then she’s there and her front arms are in his mouth.
The husband flails his arms, he sweats and cries and kicks the air. It’s a childish motion, she thinks, as with the neatest care she can muster, she removes a leftover chunk of lamb from between his molars. She claims it and recedes back into the dark of their house. He is left curled and small, crying and crying and crying.
When the wife finally comes out at the noise, he stops, rubs his eyes and tells her to go back to bed.
++++
She goes to work and comes home and goes straight to the bedroom without speaking. She tries to do it without looking, too, but she can hardly manage that.
The spider sits on their sofa.
The wife looks at her, the damned vile thing. Her spindly legs have become trails of long, fat butcher’s sausages. Her eyes have grown from pinheads to apples. A strange, unwanted part of the wife marvels at how much she’s grown. Then she rejects the feeling entirely and feels sick.
The wife then walks quickly towards her bed, slamming the door behind her.
The husband, too, has shut himself away. He’s tucked in his study. Occasionally he puts his sweating fingers in his mouth in an effort to scrape away the feeling of the spider’s legs from his tongue.
When the wife stretches out on the bed, she presses her eyes shut and listens and, inevitably, despairs.
Whatever she does, she can’t get away from the sound.
That squeaky, old-spring sound of the couch creaking without a human body on it. The shuffling sound as an insect body rubs against the fabric.
And the clicking. The clicking, she thinks, is the worst. It’s consistent, hateful, predictable.
Click, click, click.
She presses her fingers into her ears. Hard. So hard that she hurts herself, her nails scraping at her skin. But no matter how hard she pushes, how much force she exerts on herself, it still persists.
She removes her fingers and, at the sight of the browned blood coating her nails, she springs up and marches down the hall towards the study. She kicks the door open, hurting her toes and nearly tripping over something solid in front of her.
A huge pile of books had, a moment before, lined the doorway. They now lay in a strewn pile in front of her crumpled husband.
We need to get rid of it, she persists. She tries, she really does. But he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t even look at her. He especially doesn’t look at her when she starts throwing the books around the room.
Books fly. Dangerous, four hundred-winged projectiles hurl across the room, then to the living room. She flings the books towards the spider and almost finds purchase. But not before the spider locks her thousand eyes with the wife, holds the Oxford Thesaurus of English in her octane hands, and eats the book whole.
++++
She didn’t die in the winter.
The wife leaves, though.
She leaves, and leaves behind a dip in the mattress and a crumple in the cotton sheet. The husband looks at it often, lying prone and smoothing his still-ringed finger over the flipped dune pressed into the springs.
He’s lonely, but the spider has disappeared from view. He can still feel her there, but for the minute he’s exceptionally relieved that he can’t see her. He’s even moved back into the bedroom.
Cold nights, he says to himself. He smiles as he watches the football. He watches football a lot. He also buys a lot of expensive shirts, a new watch and a new pair of trainers. I’ll run, he surmises. I’ll run in the cold.
So he does. He runs down the street and across the road. He runs up the big hill and down again, round and round the roundabout.
And he gets home to be alone and drink his craft drinks, watching more telly before going to his dippy mattress.
He closes his eyes.
Then: weight.
Thin, sharp hairs pressing into his arms.
Did she not shave…he thinks. But, he thinks, no. There is no she.
There is only her.
And his eyes spring open and the spider is filling the blown crater in the mattress. Now the size of him – a grim, pincered mirror lying close and curling its porky arms around his torso.
He opens his mouth to scream, but he finds that nothing comes from his throat but a choked, miserable sound of realisation.
This is it.
She won’t be leaving him anytime soon.