The moon is no longer as low and no longer quite full. It's a portal slowly closing, drawing upward.
Since it's night, the orb-weaver's at the gate to my house. "Hello, orb-weaver," I say.
He says nothing. He is still, his abdomen round as a rock under other rocks at the bottom of a stream. He's listening for vibrations on the wheel of his web.
I go inside.
I'm drinking my daily decaf chai and clicking through the newsfeeds when my sugar craving kicks in. I unwrap two cereal bars and put them in the toaster oven. Chocolate, blueberry. I put the kettle on for a second cup of tea, and here's where something startling ought to happen, something frightening maybe, something real.
Nothing happens.
Outside, dogs argue. An ambulance goes by, seems to be going by for a long time. I think of the people who die in ambulances. "A man died in a garbage compactor this morning," I think. A car parks.
Doors close. People laugh.
Dogs argue.
After a time the night becomes quiet. Still the orb-weaver stands, head down, listening. Quiet. He knows it's a joke, quiet. Quiet means their wings have stopped beating, quiet means the web of night has stopped rebounding from that final crash.
"Even you, orb weaver," I think. "One night the frost will betray your work. In the morning you will swallow your icy home, crawl downward to find only rock and wind, its unfragile scream." I pick up a stick and idly detach the corners of the web. The spider — not my familiar, not the guardian of my home, just another opportunist like the ones who will litter my windowsill, come winter — falls, scuttles across cracked stone and onto the soft damp earth.
The night is calm, and that is frightening, and true.Beth Langford's flash fiction has recently appeared in Sporty Spec: Games of the Fantastic and Kaleidotrope. She lives in Calgary with various spiders, isopods, and other basement fauna.