"The summer after the spiders invaded..." #microfiction
The summer after the spiders invaded, we returned to our old houses to find them covered in thick sheets of white webbing, a winter landscape wholly out of place against the rising heat of the season.
Like children on Christmas morning, we tore them open greedily, exposing the long-covered rooftops and dislodging the drained-dry husks of those who, the year before, had not been able to flee fast enough, sending them tumbling, like little ornaments shaken from a tree, to the ground.
John and I had spent the winter hardly speaking to one another. On the day the spiders invaded, he'd been screwing my best friend June in our bed while I was pulling a double shift. Quick on his feet, he'd made it out, but not June. She'd fallen behind, fallen prey to one of the monstrous arachnids.
We'd met up some days later, in a refugee centre, and something about the shock of it all had made him break down and confess everything. With so much shit hitting the fan, what else could I do but wordlessly accept the news, bury it beneath layer on layer of cold, pearly silence.
But now, the army having finally driven the spiders away, we had our home back once again, and it seemed only appropriate that the troubles of our past should also vanish along with them. As we unwrapped our old house, I grinned at John, like I used to, and kissed him, for the first time in an age, lovingly on the cheek. He smiled. All might indeed be well again.
Around the back of the house, while clearing the webbing from the low bathroom roof, I made a discovery. A great tangle seemed to be caught on something just above the gutter. I tugged at it with force, and—down she tumbled, dry as a mummy, sucked clean as a carton of juice. June.
I thought about calling John, about letting him see her, his former lover, in all her ghoulish grotesquery. But I thought better of it. The sight of her like that might spook him, send him running. Instead, I pounded her to dust with my boot.
The spiders would come again. I felt as much in my bones. And when they came, I wanted John near me. I wanted him near me so that when we heard the mad scuttling across our rooftops and the ravenous clicking of giant fangs against our window panes, I could make damn sure that he would not be so lucky a second time—that he would know, at last, what it was to feel his insides dissolve, to have his heart sucked clean from his chest.
In the grassy patch next to the house, I watched a money spider spin its web between two blades of grass, waiting, with infinite patience, to catch a fly.