By A Thread (Unfinished)

“That’s damn ugly, is what that is.” The wooden slats squealed as he leaned into them. He took a long pull on his beer, the cheap kind that tasted like the can but still made your head fuzzy after a couple, and added, “Why don’t you get rid of it?”

Annie didn’t turn to look at him. She wasn’t sure about him yet, and looking at him made her want to hurry up and decide. “It’s a barn spider.” She watched a droplet crawl down the side of the can and splash down onto the dirty wooden step. “I looked it up on the internet last night.”

He snorted. “The internet. Waste of money.”

He was probably right, but she didn’t say so. “They only come out at night, to make a new web. Then they hide again during the day.” She pointed at the aged roof. “He probably hides under there.”

“Pervert probably watches you sleep at night,” he said, and cackled. Annie didn’t bother pointing out that the spider would be outside at night, crawling over the delicate strands and replacing them with new ones that hadn’t been shredded by a day of twitching flies and dust mice. She took a sip, ignoring the warm metallic taste, and stared out at the horizon. She’d read all about barn spiders on her computer, the way they creep in and out of existence like some sort of dark phantom.

Dan was like that. He kept creeping in and out of her life, bringing his bad jokes and six packs of cheap beer that she only choked down because he looked annoyed if she turned it down. He had tattoos. Long, slender black lines that chased each other up and down his arms. She always wanted to ask about them, but she was afraid he’d get mad at her prying.

“Did you have a nice day?” she asked.

He spit off the side of the porch. “Damn straight, I did. Ben, up at the lumber yard, said I might get promoted to assistant supervisor.” He nodded solemnly, and rubbed a hand over his day-old stubble. “Man can make a lot of money with a job like that.” He turned and stared at her, running his bloodshot blue eyes over her body. “Give a woman a nice home. Maybe have a couple of kids with her.”

She blushed.

“You want that, Annie? A nice home, someday? Kids running around, dirtying things up?”

“Oh, I’m sure I’d like that, someday,” she replied. She felt warm, nice, thinking about having a house filled with voices and life. She’d inherited her mother’s house not long after her death, but only the ghosts kept her company. The house was stark, devoid, filled with dust that drifted through the silence and calm. God, how Annie wished she had someone to help her shatter that calm and fill the hole with a little chaos.

Dan climbed out of the rocker and sat beside her on the steps. “I’m really sorry about your mother,” he said, almost as if he knew what she was thinking.

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t know her or anything, but I’m sure she was a fine woman.”

“She was,” Annie murmured. She touched her finger to the rough skin on the top of his hand. It was cold, and wet from the beer. They’d had sex a dozen times or more, but she still felt like every time she touched him was the first, and it made her uneasy.

“Why don’t we go on inside?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “It’s getting chilly out here. Bugs will be out soon.”

The air was still warm and soft, but Annie didn’t argue. She took a long look at the sky, which was quickly deepening from pink to red, and exhaled. The roofs in the distance were black. She wondered what their lives were like, what was going on inside each of them. She pictured them each small and cozy, with roaring fires and shelves filled with books. Perhaps each had a big, soft grandmother, heating apple cider sprinkled with cinnamon for the kids clustered around her, crying about their skinned knees.

“Annie?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said quickly, and got up.



He left less than an hour later, flushed and still drunk. They hadn’t stayed in bed long, just long enough for him to get what he wanted and make an excuse about having to get up early for work. She almost asked him to stay, but she didn’t want him to be tired tomorrow. Especially not if he was up for a promotion. The image of children, vague and undefined, running through her house and clamoring for cookies in the kitchen, flashed through her mind and she smiled.

She wasn’t tired enough to stay in bed, so she pulled on a fuzzy yellow bathrobe and wandered into the kitchen. The wallpaper was still toothpaste green and still ugly; somehow, after her mother died she thought it would start to grow on her, since her mother had been so fond of it, but the passage of time hadn’t done anything to make the wallpaper prettier. If anything, it was developing a yellow sheen overtop that made it truly hideous. Annie still didn’t want to replace it, though. Maybe, if she left it for long enough, the yellow would take over. Yellow wallpaper in the kitchen didn’t sound too bad.

She pulled her dented kettle out of the cupboard and filled it with water, stopping to share a little with her fern. She didn’t talk to her fern, even though you were supposed to. Somehow, she could never quite bring herself to talk to a plant, no matter how heavy the silence was. They’d just both have to suffer during those times when the only sound was the television.

The teakettle, which had been bubbling happily on the stove for several minutes, let out a shrill whistle, and she immediately moved it to the back burner. She quickly decided on a bag of relaxation tea she’d picked out at the store because the box had a dragon and a pretty woman on the front. Steaming water drowned the bag, and she carried the cup outside.

The crickets had started chirping in the time she’d been in the house with Dan. There was tire tracks in the dirt from where he’d sped off in his truck. She liked that he drove a truck. Real men drove trucks, he was always telling her.

The spider was still clinging to his web, twitching his banded legs and draping new strands over the old. He seemed determined to finish his work, moving his swollen abdomen relentlessly over the silvery web until there was twice as much of it as before.

“You should take a break,” she scolded him. Somehow, talking to a spider didn’t seem quite as strange as talking to a houseplant. At least spiders have ears, she thought, then paused to wonder if they actually did have them. Well, they have heads, anyway.

He ignored her and kept working. The stars slowly rose through the darkening sky behind his web, illuminating it with a morbid light that sent chills down Annie’s spine. It was as if the web wasn’t quite real; she could see it there, hanging from her roof and moving a little in the breeze, but there was no shadow, no dark lines on the dusty boards of the porch where the light didn’t reach.

“You know what I think?” she said, pausing to sip at her tea. “I think you’re just another ghost.”

The spider actually did stop this time, turning his gray body until his shiny black eyes were facing Annie. The web shuddered, and she realized that a large horsefly had ran into the trap.

She stood up and went inside. The idea of watching the spider wrap up its twitching meal made her sick.

--Incomplete--