The Web in the Window — Marlene

By evening, the window had become a dark pane with a little of the room caught in it. Marlene moved the field note nearer the lamp.

Stegodyphus lineatus. Beneath the name, a description of the brood feeding on the mother's body. Marlene read that part twice. The second reading did not make it less strange; it only made the words easier to remember.

There was no villain in the note. No rescue arriving too late. There were young spiders, and there was the body that had sustained them, becoming food.

Marlene put the page down with its edges square to the table. In the window corner, a web stretched between the frame and the wall. One thread showed clearly in the lamplight; the others appeared only when Marlene shifted in the chair. Nothing in the note identified this spider. The small web was not evidence of the same ending.

Still, it was difficult to look away.

One body; many bodies. The arithmetic was simple until it was pictured. Then it became legs gathered close, a brood growing, a mother no longer moving. Marlene rested both hands on the table. The room offered its ordinary things: the lamp, a glass of water, the page waiting to be picked up again.

It would have been easy to call the mother's death a gift. Marlene stopped short of that. A word could make something bearable without making it more exact.

Instead, Marlene tried to remember the species name, slowly, alongside what happened to it. Not a lesson about what anyone ought to give. A fact about a particular living creature, difficult enough to leave intact.

Outside, the last light left the glass. The web remained in its corner. Marlene sat a while longer, without reaching for the page.