Run and hide, spiders. If one of the other humans catches you out in the open, I don’t want to picture your death in my head.

No, you didn’t come from outer space. You hitched a ride on exotic fruit from a temperate zone, I imagine. Widows black and false, did you eat your husbands? Is your genus Huntsman or Rabbit Hutch? The gap between the washing machine and the wall would make a pleasant home. Come out at night, don’t venture too far. I played with the sounds of the words, like my fingers through running water. I saw that my letters get jumbled when I write fast. My fingers tat, tat, tat at the keys. All the letters are present like an obedient class, but some of my friends know this.

I searched for a video on automatic writing. The kind where you connect to your subconscious. I got no further than typing the keywords when my brain decided to write without thinking. Then it stopped, so I went back to the video. I wanted to solve the mystery of my unconscious mind.

Did writing about spiders create an emotional attachment to the spider? Spiders cause fear in many, but spiders produce tremendous vibrations in me. Wide-eyed awe and wonder-lipped curiosity tied up in a parabolic web. I don’t want a spider to run up my arm. Nor do I want to leap into the ocean with sharks on the feed. Still, I understand their significance in the scheme.

I picture it playing out like this.

“You wait, don’t you?” The spider’s legs twitch, tapping the sand like a nervous metronome. His voice rides on a Welsh accent. “All calm, all steady, circling like you’ve got all the time in the world.”

“Always,” the blue shark replies, its fin slicing the water. The corner of its mouth curls, thanks to the rusted hook stuck in its lip. It gives him a lopsided, rebellious grin. “No room for doubt when you’re hungry. What about you—those webs of yours?”

“Thread by thread, I spin,” the spider says, his voice jittery, rising in pitch. “I spin because I must! No breaks, no room for mistakes—no, no, no! If I lose the thread—” His legs twitch faster. “Well, that’s it, isn’t it? The end of me!”

“Hmm,” the shark rumbles like an Oldsmobile, circling closer. “You feel it, don’t you? The pull. You move. You catch what you need.”

“No hesitation?”

“Never,” the shark says, its gaze steady, the hook glinting as it curves his lip into a perpetual sneer. “Hesitate, and you’re dead. Or hungry. Either way, you lose.”

The spider bobs its head, tapping the sand again. “Hesitate and you lose the thread. Everything unravels, and you’re as good as dead. Nothing left but an empty web, flapping in the wind.

The shark’s grin widens. “Sounds like we’re not so different, you and me.”

The shark lunges, snapping its jaws shut around the spider with a faint crunch. In a spasm of white cabochon bubbles, the shark weaves to the blue depths with a swash of its hooked tail.

Survival doesn’t leave room for hesitation, does it?

It hit me. Be the spider. Keep spinning. Be the shark. Keep swimming. Thread by thread. Line by line. Instinctual. Raw. Alive. Writing should be messy, emotional, authentic and real. I didn’t want to scribble and scratch like an automaton.

Sylvia knew. I didn’t understand the intern’s words at first. Esther Greenwood was not a conventional intern, but a girl who realised she didn’t want the life others expected her to live. Have you read The Bell Jar? Her words moved me in ways words should. Esther’s fig tree yanked at the guts of my paralysis in the face of endless possibilities. Consider me a fly in a web at the mercy of the spider—thrashing and twitching, staccato buzzes, animating my predator. My fear that choosing one path means letting all the others wither and fall.

Could I ever have enough lives to devote all my efforts to mastering one skill? In each one, a new endeavour. Painting, writing, ceramics, and wood carving. Cooking, singing, playing the guitar, making instruments, learning the flowers’ names. A few of my favourite things, Julie. One whole lifetime to protest injustices. And one devoted to reading every day. Teaching literature at a great school or university could be a lifetime. Devoting your life to books. Most I’ve tried to my best ability. Mastered none. How can one master anything if the life you have spreads you so thin?

I had a fig tree, though it wasn’t mine. It smelled of sweet baked tart and old milk. I collected the strange fruit anyway but I didn’t taste them. “Why not?” present me asks, shaking their head. “Still wondering what they might’ve tasted like, aren’t you?” The fruit, like black bulbs of sugar, seeds and spice, but I gave the old-world figs away, shovelling some other grave, not mine. I cared not a jot for these pieces of me, with careless disregard for future me. “Figs. Nothing more!”

My letters look like spiders, a conga line of arachnids. Are the spiders happy? I dwell on what it means to see spiders where there are none. I know they exist. Sometimes they walk across the rug, or the arm of the chair. Shadows of spiders. Once one ran across my chest and I jumped up in fright and swept nothing away. She saw then I was different. “There!” I thought I saw one scurry beneath the fridge. Or a mark on my glasses.

There are several that live under the tumble dryer among the lint. I can hear their legs rustling. They appear late at night when she is not watching. She will scream and squash them—get a kick out of their demise. I warn spiders to run home when she is here.

I saw one today among the dishwasher tablets. I grabbed two blue lozenges from the packet by mistake and a handful of eggshells that had overshot the organic waste. I only needed one tablet and before I realised dropped the second back into the packet, onto the spider. My shoulders slumped. I didn’t check. I prayed it had survived. My stomach twisted. As I washed my hands, my fingers clenched into fists. Nobody saw. I had to know. I offered to take out the trash to escape and steal the evening air. The spider hitched a ride in the recycling bag and I released it. It crawled beneath a large wheeled bin in the community waste collection centre. The weight lifted. It made me happy to see it alive. I hope it didn’t bear grudges.

Sometimes the spiders defy gravity at the corner of my eye. Not phosphenes or floaters that jerk in eyeball jelly when you shut your red lids on a sun-soaked day. But real eight-legged arachnids.

The day is sun-soaked and steamy. I shuttle to school and back. “Da, da, da, da,” is what I hear. A quatrain of eastern bloc males on the clacking train, each unique. One sucked a strong beer and yawped. While one contorted his cheeks and tongue, stretching his face with fingers and thumb. The third was a mystery, his shoulders he’d hunched. The fourth led the group, with puffed chest and bristles. I named him Captain. Eyes wide the grunts listened and whistled. He protested in Slavic with a wave of his fist. I did not get close but I could smell hops, potent, sour and stomach-churning. Captain had a strong accent to match. He snatched the tin from the first grunt with a gruff “Da, da, da!” Threw back his crown, hair cropped, and gulped from the can, which had bent and buckled. As he righted himself, he got to his feet, wiped the spit from his cheek, and bayed with a belch at a passing girl in the street. They banged their heads to hard rhythmic house music, I imagine that’s what it sounds like. Their government has ordered fighting-age males to the front line. But they enjoyed sunshine. I did not picture the Russians as spiders at first. Though the boys had eight legs between them. Spiders follow natural wiring with no evil intent. The part of me that looks down our high-bridged nose at me named them suspect, wrongdoers. To the unit that keeps all my other perspectives, the boys were mischievous, free, relieved. Mutinous, but not wicked. Making for the exit, glimpsing over their shoulders, wary of a jackboot braced to squish them. The part of me that sees the world through a spider’s eyes understood them.

The train rattled onwards. Spiders crawling came along for the ride. Following me home, I couldn’t get them out, pulling at threads of my fears and desires. I fumbled with keys, glanced up at the sky. “Don’t go upstairs.” I heard my friends cry. “Stay here with us. We’ll build you a web of silken thread. Span over oceans, a spring in your step, beware the consort, who weaves her own way. That’s why you must leave, and we will stay.”

I stole away to the bathroom to counsel them once more. Brown Recluse truckled out from beneath the tumble dryer. It wished me no harm, though I’d read of its fire. I reminded it to be careful and keep out of sight. It twitched its round body as if agreeing, and dashed beneath the skirting to gather the others.

“Will I triumph in my ventures?” I spoke straight to the cluster. An Orb Weaver flicked its legs. The Jumping Zebra leaped up in agreement. The Giant House skulked, it had nothing to say. The Long-bodied Cellar dangled in a changing breeze.

“It’s about silencing my critics!” I blurted, but added, “I have made a list. If you want I can get it.” The spiders had gone, my brain carried on. It’s about attaining perfection that only nature can. Spiders built webs to capture their prey. As far as I knew they didn’t consider their existence, meaningless or otherwise. They don’t worry about achievements.

Last night, I found a spider, dead and curled. Caught in a lint web. One of the tumble dryer family—not one I’d counselled. I didn’t know whether she had squashed it under foot or if I had swept it up when I cleaned the bathroom smut. Either way it was dead and dry and it pained me. I apologised for my clumsy actions, in case its family overheard. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I cannot bring you back. I am not a magician, I’m a spider like you, and one day she will squash me too, and I will be dead and curled and dry.”

She was femme-fatale candy when she first caught my eye. Lemons and chilli, spinach and broccoli. Rice and meat. I used food to represent aspects of her character. When she peeled away her human mask, letting slip her true self for the first time, I hadn’t understood.

She retreated in silence to the darkness of the bedroom and sprawled in her web. Her body the size and form of a blackened giant pumpkin. Legs and arms, eight in all, struck out at awkward angles from beneath her thorax. Eyes, multiplied, stung like needles, piercing my soft parts, watching, mulling over which part to eat. I cannot tell you who she is. She would not like it.

I had often wondered what it meant to see spiders where there are none, but now I knew. 

The spiders whispered, “Thread by thread, you can undo her web.”