As usual, Em Spider had skipped breakfast in favor of half a pot of coffee and five hours of remote work. “QA for a streaming media platform, blah blah, who cares,” Em would say if you asked, with a practiced laugh just uncomfortable enough to encourage a change of subject. Around 2 pm, abdomen rumbling, Em scurried down to the mini-mart located in the lobby of the adjacent apartment building and grabbed a couple of microwave flies — flavorless pill-shaped factory-farmed frozen bugs, filled with a vaguely cheese-like food product.
After the hurried meal and a couple more hours of flagging work, Em turned a kaleidoscopic window-gaze at the lengthening shadows between the city buildings and felt it: the daily funk, half melancholoy, half helplessness. A late-autumn sunset was coming soon, maybe three hours from now. Another empty day was ending before it began.
On the heels of the melancholy, the stirring: I have to get out of this apartment, Em thought. Quick grooming, four shoes, four-sleeved jacket; on a typical restless afternoon this was the prelude to a bar-hopping evening with its range of possible tipsy-to-wasted outcomes, and a half-productive hangover shift tomorrow.
Spiralling down the stairwell, a different plan formed in Em Spider’s mind. The weekend prior, a casual cocktail conversation about hobbies had left Em wondering: why don’t I have any? Like most good questions, there were at least two levels to this one. First, on the social surface: hobbies are things normal arachnids have, enjoyable and completely voluntary activities, and Em doesn’t have one, so Em should get one probably. But there was a deeper level to it: a desire for not just a diverting activity but for an expressive and creative outlet. Em fervently longed for a hobby, passion, pursuit — whatever you want to call it — that would be entangled with meaning.
The notion had kicked around persistently inside Em’s idle thoughts until finally, somewhere between flat and street, it coalesced into an imperative. Instead of doing another local bar-crawl à pied, Em got the car out of the garage and drove thirty GPS-guided minutes down the interstate bypass and through a web of slowly curving four-lane shopping-center boulevards, into the expansive parking lot of Spider-Craft Warehouse.
The craft store was immense and a bit too brightly lit for Em’s tastes. But the wash of flourescent light made it easy to see the overfilled aisles clearly labeled with every kind of legs-on hobby imaginable, from balsa airplanes to dried flower arrangments to programmable eight-legged robots. Em padded through most of the aisles in the store, almost out of obligation — I might as well know what all they have — but returned more than once to the web-makers’ aisle. A traditional craft, but it’s what resonated most.
The aisle contained many bulk web-spinning materials in bins, and many types of helpful implements dangling from projected hangers. There was a magazine-style display rack full of books ranging from kid’s activities to adult beginner tutorials to more advanced projects and patterns. And then there were the kits, which seemed like the best approach to Em: boxes containing starter materials and tools along with instructions.
Like the books, these web-kits varied in ability and complexity. Em didn’t want the simplest kit, nor the most advanced and expensive, and so inspected a few of the mid-range offerings. One had an open box for display, so Em was able to really look through the materials and instructions, and imagine working on the projects at home. “Create a five-axis pentagonal web”, a chapter began, with illustrations of the pattern, pictorial instructions showing how to assemble the project frame and fix the ends of the supplied synthetic web-material, the three approaches you could take to strand connection (quick loop, traditional adhesive, or handy snap-together plastic connector), and so on.
Sometimes a little extra imagination, coupled with a little extra investigation, can combine to make a person truly unhappy. Em’s determined focus on the prospective hobby became increasingly difficult to maintain. Competing with it was a nagging internal discomfort, almost physical, accompanied by a conviction: this isn’t how it’s done. To pursue this hobby, in this way, would be to simply follow pre-packaged instructions, to be guided through a committe-designed activity resulting in an essentially useless product. Em was imaginging not just the outcome, the rudimentary web-like junk item, but the experience: no discovery or invention, no trial and error, no exploration, just idiotic mimicry of a creative process. The eight-legged robots on Aisle 9 could do this, Em thought.
Em left without a purchase, drove away from the craft store, got on the interstate and continued heading away from the city center. A few minutes later a green highway sign marking a state park lured Em off of the exit and down a tree-lined road, to a ridge overlooking a meadow flanked by rising contours of wooded terrain. The sun was mostly down but its rays still touched the tops of three tree-covered hills. The sky was orange and pink.
Em looked at the line of polychrome trees and the brilliant sunset, more restless than ever and feeling like weeping, and also sensing distinct abdominal discomfort. And then, a distracted observation: what’s this liquid on my seat? It quickly became alarm as Em realized that a sticky, oozing substance was emerging. Oh god, it’s coming out of me! What is wrong with me?!? Fumbling with the phone to enter symptomatic search terms, Em decided there was no time for research. “Urgent care near me”… and by the time the navigation result came up the car was already speeding anxiously through the twilight, away from the woods, toward medical help.
🕸️ 🕷️ 🕸️
Nobody watched from the ridge as darkness shrouded the golden leaves of a well-established vine maple, where a nameless spider whose wild realm it was began the evening’s work. Balletic grace and industrious focus combined in the body’s dance, as adroit ends of spindly legs helped guide from the ecstatically aching abdomen the flow of web cord. A natural temple was architected, a sigil of life-stuff and death-trap, in exquisitely fine filament. Once formed, the spider slept, but with one foot on the strand which was plucked like a harp-string by a mosquito’s reckless flight.
After a time, the spider dined, and with the mosquito drank the blood of the forest: the blood of bear, the blood of deer, the juice of berries and the leaves of red clover, water of flowing streams and melting snows filtered through the clean rot of the forest floor and warmed by the endless photons of golden sun that fed them all.