Brown-y

I keep strange hours, which is how I first noticed Brown-y in the corner of my kitchen above the door. Initially, there was the concern that one day I would walk straight into her as she floated down mid-home improvement project. And there was the persistent inconvenience of web-hand as I reached into the pantry for granola if her home improvement endeavors became too overzealous.

Otherwise, when I return from work in the dead of the night and my children have already been asleep nearly six hours and my husband is snoring peacefully in our bed, I depend on her to be crawling around, feasting on the blood of mosquitoes and fruit flies and other home invaders I find more irritating than Brown-y. And over the course of weeks and months of observation and spider-human companionship, I begin to feel a true allegiance and loyalty to her.

Her web is deliberately avoided during cleaning and I allow her corpses to stack up because I figure she is only doing what a spider must. She works diligently to eradicate the summer fruit flies that accompany the toxic combination of summer heat and compost and I watch with increasing fascination at the steady tick of her days. She is diligent and deadly but beautiful and methodical and she quickly becomes a dependable and consistent part of my routine.

I Google how long the average spider lives and learn the average house spider can live up to seven years. Which is probably longer than the vast majority of pet fish adopted by well-meaning children. And I learn about Number 16 in Australia who lived 43 years and was only then killed by an invading parasitic wasp (if you’re going to be a record setting spider, you might as well succumb to parasitic wasps). Scientists think she may have made it to fifty if she had gone on undisturbed. With a life span of that length, Brown-y and I probably have years and years ahead of us. Having dismissed spiders as horrifying and the stuff of nightmares for most of my life, learning about her made her familiar and interesting and certainly the kind of gal I no longer minded visiting with in the loneliest hours.

And with this research underfoot, I begin to incorporate her more fully into my workdays. I come home, out of my mind with exhaustion and say things like, “Well, Brown-y…you’ve really caught a large one tonight, haven’t you?” or “The new addition to the web looks good, old girl, you’ve really got an eye for architecture.”  

And so the days go on precisely in this manner until one evening, I look up and notice a spider friend has joined Brown-y. He is bigger than her and black with a white line straight down the middle. He is large and a little intimidating, but I figure this is just my baseline fear of spiders at play; at the end of the day, I am happy for her. I figure she has gone and found herself a mate and perhaps she and this stranger will have a few hot and wild nights and maybe, if all things turn out the way I hope, she might become a mama-spider and we could share parenthood in addition to our nocturnal schedules. Concerns like, “she may eat her mate” or “she may eat her babies” or “there might be a MILLION tiny spider babies crawling around the kitchen” briefly cross my mind. I dismiss them quickly as hysterical and say a quick goodnight.

“Goodnight, up there!” I say conspiratorially, “Don’t have TOO much fun tonight.”

I figure that Brown-y will have to explain to this new spider that there are humans in this house and no they won’t spray you with Raid and that older long-haired one is a little peculiar and talks to us in the middle of the night when no one else is awake but there is A LOT of insect food around this place and, all in all, it’s not too bad a place to call home.

And so it is with joviality that I go to bed that night and wake up groggy the next day to a house full of screaming children and ABSOLUTELY THE MOST GRISLY SIGHT YOU CAN IMAGINE WHEN I TURN MY ATTENTION TO BROWN-Y AND BROWN-Y IS NO LONGER THERE BUT THE INTERLOPER SURE IS. Upon closer inspection, I note my girl crumpled into a web-ball at the top of her home, eaten and utterly mummified and the Interloper sitting there with his white stripe down the middle and, presumably, a look of gluttonous satisfaction on his face. I look at him in abject horror and shock, bewildered by what he has done to a spider that has become, over months and months and months, a very dear companion.

“You cannibal.” I hiss in his direction.

“What mommy?” asks my five-year-old daughter.

“Nothing, honey,” I say with a smile, “back to your chair and finish your breakfast!”

“You monster,” I whisper venomously.

I go about my day and the endless middle-aged routine of caring for a household with young children with occasional, sad thoughts of Brown-y and her untimely and horrifically violent death. The poor girl didn’t stand a chance. The Interloper was much larger and, frankly, clearly suffering from homicidal fantasies. As far as I know, Brown-y mostly cared about eating the fruit flies in my kitchen and never made a move to murder others of her kind. She was peaceable, going about the work of a spider in a way that never hurt another spider. And she certainly didn’t make it to 43, despite my best effort to preserve her hard work.

Later that night, upon my arrival home, I look up to see that the Interloper has wandered off, presumably to carry out more dirty work and wreck more perfectly fine spider homes. I look up into the empty, stillness of her web and around the kitchen at the empty, stillness of the house and listen to the empty, stillness of the outside street and feel the absence of that eight-legged creature with a wretchedness I thought reserved for the non-arachnids in my life. And still in the loneliest hours of the night, I return home to a deserted kitchen and a now-clean upper corner above my pantry and muse that I would gladly deal with corpse detritus and the presence of Brown-y than the sheer, utter nothingness of my home and the darkest hours of the night without her.