There's a spider in my bathroom who only comes out at night. I named him Neil. He's a typical grey hunstman with a full complement of legs and mandibles and a plump abdomen and rounded thorax. I met him last night, during another shower taken more as therapy, as meditation than anything else, and tonight during the same thing. I'd been wasting another night with my computer on my lap, an embroidery project cast aside, the kitchen piled with dishes and three unwritten essays tut-tutting in my mental background. I figured I'd get up, get clean, sit down, read, maybe write, maybe clean. If I shower I'm tabula rasa, I can begin again, leap from the bathroom damp and minty fresh, ready to take on the world. In theory, anyway.

I pride myself on not being afraid of many spiders. I am afraid of many things; indeed, I'm a timid, ambivalent little hobbitess given to fits of neurotic self-loathing. However, I'm not afraid of spiders, or dogs, or snakes, or closed spaces, or very open spaces, or heights, or any of the showboat phobias people are meant to have. If I really didn't want Neil in my bathroom I'd trap him with a glass and take him outside. But spiders have more right to our homes than we do, and besides, I thought I could get a poem out of him.

He watched me washing my hair and I watched him. Actually, it would be conceited to think he was watching me. He moved across the window, black and flat with night, towards the heat and steam of the shower. I'm proud of not being afraid of spiders, but flash frames from horror movies shot through my head. Neil might hiss like a snake and leap for my face. Neil might turn and roll his many eyes and say 'naming a spider? How self-consciously kooky is that.' He did neither. Instead he lifted one of his legs to his face and began cleaning it, like a cat. I didn't know spiders did that, and I raced to think up a poem. Cat spider? Spider cat? Delicate furred arachnid? I lie; I don't want to write poems. I want to write enough to fill a book so I can print a book and will have something to talk about at parties and whatnot. I haven't written anything that wasn't an email or assessment for weeks.

How do I describe it? I once found a spider, dead and dried like a raisin, in a drawer and I kept it for a few days before deciding such things are intolerably morbid. To tie Neil to my reverie I could be the deflated spider, brittle and powdery, but that simile sits badly. Once, a girl who was my girlfriend was driving me somewhere, and as she drove she railed and ranted about how she hadn't written anything in forever. I knew she was a good poet because peopel would sometimes ask her if she was still writing. Yelling at me wouldn't put poems on paper but she did it anyway and I shrank further into my seat and said soothing things in my brittle and powdery voice.

Neil lurched off the glass, hung for a moment and landed on the window sill, his abdomen poking straight into the air. He scuttled frantically towards the shower and I, unthinking, turned off the water and jumped out. I'm not afraid of spiders but I do startle easy. I rinsed the conditioner out of my hair under a tap, rubbed it dry until it stood on end in frail, feathery clumps. I opened my computer and wrote this in halting high school prose for absolutely no reason.

the stiff woman said - I haven't been
able to move my arms or the diametrically opposed
legs wedded to them by some accident of linguistics
for years now and, y'know, I don't miss it
that much except this itch behind my ear is driving me
crazy, I envy the cat.

the live woman said - I've been
awake too long and my eyes are blackening and sinking
unattractively so I avoid mirrors but, what can I do?
nights are far more flattering for the complexion so I
prefer them to days and, anyway, I'm prone to sunburn.
I've been drinking a lot of cocktails in big glasses and smoking
Gitanes, it seems appropriate.

the deaf woman said - the blind get
too much fucking publicity with their supersonic
hyperbolic hearing, just goes to show, people'd
rather hear shit than open their fucking eyes. does
my vision fatten and swell into the part of my brain starving
for sound? I guess, but who cares? go ahead, ask me what crimson looks like.
I don't fucking know.

(x-posted to As/Is)