Spider Story Draft (working title: The Time I had a Beer with Kiera's Dad)

I had to work at Art After Dark that night and so I didn’t think much about murdering the spider until later. I was a ‘ticket scanner’ at the National Gallery. When I had first gotten the job – the outgoing ticket scanner was a friend of mine whose glasses were especially thick and whose R.M Williams boots were at least third or fourth-hand, who painted large pictures of pool tables and sold them to regional hospitals and nursing homes – I had imagined a utopian combination of work and pleasure. But a month or so in, after watching a documentary about construction workers in a spectacular area of the Bolivian Andes I realised that, like theirs, my job was just a job and that I could just as well have been scanning tickets for illegal cockfights or dinner theatre shows. I also realised I didn’t like my coworkers very much because they didn’t see it like that, or pretended they didn’t.

On the other hand, I guess there was a certain valour in working a mundane job at a place everybody else considered an escape from the mundane. Most people worked jobs that weren’t supposed to be anything but a means of paying the bills, which were therefore diametrically opposed to whatever they did for fun. Everything was made ‘funner’ by comparison. For my part, I could easily have come to resent my passion for painting because I disliked the crappy job that that passion had afforded me. But I didn’t.  I didn’t because I had accepted that art was a pauper’s enterprise and I was more prepared to scan a million tickets to the Napoleon Exhibition than to start painting pictures of pool tables or men standing around on a golfing green, waiting for the last man to putt in. It was that artistic integrity that I felt had been queried by Kiera’s dad and his stupid Pirate of Penzance comment.

When I came home I was tired and a little bummed out. So that I could go straight to bed, I immediately brushed my teeth, washed my face, and pissed. I also sprayed the antibacterial spray onto the eyebrow ring I had gotten a few days earlier. Then I entered my bedroom and saw that Kiera had left a chocolate muffin on the little antique sideboard  next to my bed. She’d moved some books to one side and put the muffin on the other side. The muffin was huge and had orange rind on top and it was in my favourite bowl, an old Rice Bubbles one with pictures of Snap, Crackle and Pop in their American clothes, which my grandma had given me when I was little.

I ate the muffin with a heavy heart. Kiera and I had lived together for six months by then and the best way of measuring how comfortable she was with someone seemed to be through the kindness, devoid of ulterior motives, that coloured the stuff she said and did. That was how I knew she liked me, maybe even loved me. I had never known a better or more beautiful person, let alone imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would be on the receiving end of their goodness. It was also how I knew that she could never be mine and why I almost wished she would suddenly become indifferent to me. I took the bowl upstairs and washed it; the microwave clock read 02:17. The apartment was quiet except for the fridge and for me. The first thing I noticed upon reentering my bedroom was the can of water-proofer on the windowsill, as if it hadn’t been there before. At the sight of it I froze. I turned to the mirror on my wardrobe and saw that I looked wrung out and terrified. I sat down on my bed feebly and started to think about what I had done.