House of Spiders

The spiders have hatched today—that was what Celia had been thinking when it happened. In the bathroom that morning she had seen hundreds of miniature spiders walking across the surface of a mirror. Their legs, bending on themselves in reflection, had been on her mind when she first heard the voices coming from the parking lot. But that was not exactly right, since in that first instant both Beth and Celia had not known the source of the voices, or even—if Celia was going to be precise about what had happened—that they were voices at all. What struck Celia first in that moment when she was thinking of the hair-strand thinness of the legs of spiders, was merely that there was sound, some commotion filling the stillness of dawn like wind.

There had been a long train of thought preceding the reflected legs of the spiders, so it was hard for Celia to say exactly what had been on her mind. Beth and she often took their morning walks without speaking, striding down the main street in the hope that, should anything happen to them, there would be, if not protection, at least a witness. What had never occurred to Celia was that it might be she who was the witness. In the immediate moment before the thought of the legs of spiders—which was broken off by her realization that, in fact, the commotion was not natural, not wind, but voices, and, what was more, the voices of men—in that moment, Celia had been holding no less than three separate thoughts in her mind.

She had been thinking of the sickly fig tree. Not of the fig tree per se, but of the number of years that she had spent doing nothing more than seeing, taking in—in other words, blankly registering—the plant's same stand of leaves while the mumble of talk radio out of the offices behind the reception desk went on ceaselessly, only becoming audible now and again as the fury of a caller lifted a distinct phrase into the air. The fig tree grew—or, perhaps, existed—in a brilliant blue pot on the far side of the hospital lobby. Since the renovation the year Celia had started, the fig tree sat in its same spot tossing its same branches to and fro whenever the hospital doors slid open. The whole of Celia's situation, not only her job but her house with its splintering window frames and haphazard beds of swamp lilies, the always deteriorating condition of world affairs that the radio reported, all of it seemed contained in the sickly leaves of the unprospering yet unyielding fig.

Omnipresent as it was, the fig had not arisen out of the empty depths of Celia's mind, but rather was brought into being with an image of her husband, Carl, loading the plant and its blue pot onto a hand truck. This was not fantasy. It had happened back in Celia's first years at the reception desk. Carl had been on the groundskeeping team for five years already, but they were both young, and they were still possessed by the fever of anticipation that comes with those years. Anything seemed possible to them, even the removal of the fig tree. And all Celia had done was to make a comment. That's how Carl had treated her in those days. One comment, and the next morning, as she sat at the reception desk counting down to lunch, he had appeared.

Nothing like this, it seemed, would ever happen to her again.

She remembered how she laughed at the sudden image of Carl wheeling the hand truck through the front doors of the hospital lobby. The bright blue of his groundskeeper shirt billowed over his body, but at the sight of it Celia could feel his chest beneath. The bulges of his back as he swam in the local pool erupted in her mind, and, as she thought back to this moment, she could smell the chlorine that she had come to associate with his skin, and, inexplicably, with their...