beginning of another story about spiders

It’s just that I already feel like I need to start making sense of the decisions I made, put them into a logical sequence instead of the impulses, pell mell and violent as orgasms, they were when I made them. Because in all my short life I’ve never felt regret like this. I’ve never tried to breathe but couldn’t, because of how sick I feel at the idea of sustaining my own life. I’ve never heard the voice of the storyteller in my head speaking in so many discordant accents, tones, volumes. I’m half-cracked and I know I am and it’s all because last month I set a spider on fire.

A Huntsman. It was bigger than average, the size you can make into a monster with an outstretched hand and not feel like a liar. It scuttled across my bed. I was reading A Discovery of Strangers at the time and a John Serrie album, one of his exquisite collaborations with Gary Stroudos, was murmuring in the background. I liked to listen to Serrie while I read; the sparseness of his arrangements seemed incommensurate with the speed at which I absorbed each page and had the subsequent effect of both slowing down and supercharging time, as if I were surfing a great wave as well as watching it from the beach, building miles and miles offshore. My white blinds were drawn, but backlit brightly enough to know it was still the afternoon. Now and then I could hear Kiera, my housemate, and her boyfriend Daniel making food, which usually made me hungry and lonely because Daniel was a chef and I was in love with Kiera but the window of opportunity had been steamed over by our living arrangements and the fact that she didn’t love me back. Something interesting is that our house was a double-storey but the kitchen was the only room upstairs.

 The sight of the spider almost gave me a heart attack. In that moment I was suddenly reminded of the time when I was a kid that I had gone for a swim and taken a bunched up towel off our table tennis table to dry myself and then felt something in my hair, felt the tickle of it coming down my front, saw it on my chest in the reflection of the backdoor, woke in the night at the slightest odd sensation for weeks afterwards. It was a memory I had forgotten and at the shock of it I sprang up. I managed eventually to track the spider to behind the bed-head, which I had covered in cutout pages of Hesse’s Siddhartha. The spider was sitting as motionless as if it had never moved in its life. Its legs were curled up, like those of a dead crab. Its body – or sac, or whatever you call it – looked like a bulb of nutmeg and the thought of putting it in a nutcracker made me grit my teeth. As calmly as possible I pulled the rest of the bed away from the bed-head, revealing a sliver of dusty floorboards, a pen and a couple of odd socks. Now the spider had nowhere to go.

One of the dusty socks was thick, an Explorer I think they call them, and I put it over my hand like a puppet of death. The dust made me want to cough but I held it down. My dad had always used a jam jar and a paper towel to trap spiders, or cockroaches for that matter, putting them out in the yard or, to make my sister and I laugh, over our neighbour’s fence, but I was panicked didn’t have any empty jars or paper towels. All I had – or thought I had – was a sock. For a split second though I took my eyes off the spider and looked around, maybe to see if anyone was watching. It was then that I noticed the cigarette lighter on my windowsill, sitting in the bonsai pot.  I used it to light candles for my incense burner. There was also a can of shoe waterproofer I had happened to be using that morning in preparation for the trip I was making to Mount Bogong.