You are dangling from the ceiling, staring down at the thing in the box below you, its pallid face reflected in your eight tiny eyes. There is a woman standing next to it, leaning over the box, crying. She’s wearing all black. A man puts his hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t seem to notice. You barely notice either. You are still transfixed by those closed eyes, that waxy complexion. Why is this dead creature so fascinating? It is meat, yes, but not an insect, not the kind of meat that can be consumed. More humans, all dressed in black, start filing into the room, and you scurry back up your strand of silk, into the shadows where you can no longer be seen.
You creep through the gap under a locked door, into a room with the lights turned out. The walls have all been painted bright colors, and large pieces of wood and plastic are haphazardly scattered across the floor. Everything in the room is covered in a fine layer of dust; it has not been inhabited for some time. You crawl across the floor slowly, carefully, maneuvering around carpet fibers that are almost as tall as your entire body. There is a large box in the corner with a piece of fabric draped over it, blue but patterned with red circles that each have crisscrossing black lines and smaller white ovals within them. It is best to steer clear of this box where the humans sleep, as sometimes a large foot can unexpectedly come crashing down from over the edge. The room is currently uninhabited, but one can never be too careful.
As you turn to go in the other direction, something wide and flat blocks your path, and after a moment’s consideration, you decide it would be easier to climb on top of it than to try and scurry underneath it. The smooth surface makes it difficult to keep your footing, but the material is also thin enough that it indents slightly under each step.
Paper. The surface is a piece of glossy paper, with more papers underneath it.
How do you know this? What “paper” is? This isn’t a word you have ever been taught.
It’s there again, the same red circle from the pattern on the child’s bedspread, but now it is attached to something vaguely resembling the shape of a human body, all covered with the same red-and-blue pattern. The circle is this creature’s head, and the white ovals within are its eyes.
Wait. What are “eyes”? What are “patterns”?
This is too much. You know things you that should not know. It is time to leave.
That night, in the web, you dream.
Can spiders usually dream? Had you ever dreamed before?
Everything around you is white, until something slowly fades into view: the pink flesh of a human arm. Your arm. There is a plastic tube sticking out of it, connected to a machine that keeps beeping. You are lying in a bed, with a stiff white sheet pulled up to your thorax—to your stomach. The man and the woman who live in the house are standing over you, staring down at you, and they’re still considerably larger than you are, though nowhere near as much as they usually are. With tears in her eyes, the woman asks if you need anything, and in response, a weak voice asks for something called a comic book. The man smiles and nods, still barely holding back tears himself, and says that shouldn’t be a problem.
The web becomes a flurry of vibrations as a small, careless moth becomes entrapped in it, and suddenly the dream is gone, barely a memory of a memory. As you hastily clamber over to the creature and begin to wrap its struggling body in silk, some inner voice screams that this is disgusting, that this is barbaric, that it needs to stop, but these impulses go ignored. It’s been days since anything has flown into your web, and you are hungry.
The body in the box is gone, but in its place is a framed picture sitting on a small wooden table. You lower yourself, slowly, on a single thread, hanging almost exactly halfway down the room, and gently rotate until the picture is directly in view. It is a young child, the same body that was in the casket, but here it is smiling, and its skin is rosy, and its hair is being blown back by the wind. So full of life, such a stark contrast to the lifeless thing in the box that had been there a couple days prior.
Footsteps come from the other room, and you’re already climbing back up your web when she walks in. She doesn’t see you, paying no attention to what’s going on above her head as she kneels down in front of the photo and once again begins to cry.
The memories are coming back piecemeal. You remember running barefoot through the wet summer grass, screaming and cackling with joy as you barrel into your father’s waiting arms. You remember sitting in front of the TV, transfixed by a Spider-Man cartoon, and breathlessly asking your parents for Spider-Man comics, a Spider- Man bedspread, a Spider-Man-themed birthday party, anything and everything that came with Spider-Man’s face on it. You remember waking up one morning, suddenly not feeling well. You remember going to the hospital.
You don’t remember coming back out.
You’re on the ceiling of your old bedroom, watching as your mother shuffles around it slowly, picking up the toys one-by-one and carefully, reverently placing them in a cardboard box. The urge rises to scream at her, to shout, “Mom, it’s me! I’m back, Mom! Look at me, I’m okay!” but no voice comes out. You don’t know what to do. You try standing up on your hind legs and wave at her with your front ones, but you’re upside down on the ceiling and realize just a little too late that gravity is not your friend—
You land softly in her hair, and she doesn’t seem to feel you at first. Her posture straightens as she lifts a remote- control car off the floor, and at this scale the motion feels unbearably ponderous and slow. You lose your footing once again and tumble onto the bare skin of her neck, and this time she notices.
She lets out a yelp and grabs blindly at her neck, trapping you in her fist and bringing her hand back around so she can get a better look.
As soon as her fingers unfurl she screams, and before you know what’s going on she’s thrown you across the room. You thump lightly against the closet door, then land softly on the carpeted floor.
“What?” your father says, barging into the room with a panicked look in his eyes. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days. Your mother points at you with a trembling finger. His eyes follow the line-of-sight until he finally sees you, then he rolls his eyes and sighs.
“No, Dad!” you shout. “It’s me! It’s really me!”
Your father reaches to the floor, picks up a Spider- Man comic book, and tightly rolls it up in his hand as he strides over to you.
The tears want to come, but can’t. Spiders don’t have tear ducts.
“Please! I know you don’t recognize me, but you have to believe me! Mom, Dad, please—”
The rolled-up comic in your father’s hand rushes towards you, and the glaring white eyes in Spider-Man’s mask are the last thing you see before returning to oblivion.
