Jar of Spiders
By Matt Freeman
The place where they brought him back to life was worse than the place where he almost died.
At first, the hospital seemed clean and safe. Everything in it was made of rounded pastel plastic, like a kindergarten scaled up to adult size. But being lost for so long had sharpened David’s perceptions; he could smell decay hidden all around him. Bodies. Rubbery wafts of food. His sheets were changed every day. They even had a decent thread count. But when he pressed his face against them, he could smell the sharp tang of piss under the fabric softener, as if a former patient had marked the bed as their own territory.
He remembered mosquitoes screaming in the night. Ant-bites like tiny fires. All the agonies that meant you still existed. He eyed the lukewarm apple juice on his tray and remembered sucking water from cupped leaves at dawn.
The doctors and nurses told him he was lucky to be safe and back in Australia.
He was worried if he said too much, he’d start spewing everything he’d learned, so he answered their questions as briefly as he could. ‘David Merchant. Forty-four. Married. Marketing consultant. No, not yet today.’
The doctor scrutinized him and pinched the skin on his forearm. ‘The nurses say you’re having trouble eating.’
‘It’s difficult.’ A pit of hunger yawned inside him, but he felt sick at the thought of filling it with any of their food. ‘I don’t have much appetite.’
‘You’ve had an ordeal. Your body doesn’t know the difference between safety and danger anymore. Rest. Eat what you can.’
After a few days—days and nights smudged together in the hospital—he heard an argument outside his room and knew that it was Chelsea, her influencer treble rising above the stern undertone of the nurse.
‘It’s alright. She’s my wife,’ David called out, his voice cracking. ‘Let her through.’
He’d wondered what it would be like to see her again—so many things had been a disappointment—but she still had a tan from the resort and looked perfect as always. Around her throat, she wore a silver chain he’d forgotten giving her. Above it, devotion and anger battled for possession of her face. ‘Why did you go off like that?’ she demanded.
David looked at his hands, filigreed with bright scratches. One finger was still capped with a blood blister earned from mashing a spider with a rock. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
#
It had just been a bad day. David had paid for Palm Villa’s penthouse suite, and at five o’clock the sun stabbed into the room like a searchlight while they winced and struggled in the bed. Still hungover, he tried to work the blinds, and Chelsea moaned into the pillow wrapped around her face. ‘You could help instead of complaining,’ he muttered, and their moods clashed for the rest of the day.
At breakfast, she chattered about their plans while David watched withered tourists drift past and wished he had a decent cup of coffee. Chelsea piled fruit on her plate and recited their names like a nursery rhyme. ‘Lychees,’ she said. ‘Rambutans.’ She spooned something called custard-apple into his mouth and the sickly mass of it almost made him choke. It didn’t help when the unctuous waiter stopped at their table to make sure he and his daughter were enjoying their stay.
Their travel planner had said the resort was bordered by endless rainforest on one side and ocean on the other. The rainforest part was true. On the ocean side, a band of desperate humanity jostled between Palm Villa and the waves: bars, stalls, people rinsing down the street with bright blue buckets.
Chelsea wanted to explore. She wanted to see the real country, and David pretended he’d prefer that to lying comatose by the pool. A hundred metres from the gates of the resort, a wiry local with one red eye harangued them while they stood waiting for the lights to change. David smiled and patted all his pockets to show he couldn’t help, and the man shook his greasy curls and started barking in their faces. They escaped to the nearby market, but Chelsea couldn’t get it out of her head.
‘It just feels wrong,’ she said, spooning pork mince into a lettuce cup. ‘We’re on holiday, sleeping under the air-conditioner, paying by credit card. People like that are just surviving. Not even surviving.’
We aren’t paying for anything, David thought. ‘I wanted to give him something.’
‘I know. I’m just saying. How are we supposed to enjoy ourselves?’
He said they had to try, surprising himself with the emotion in his voice. The couple studied each other, remembering the months before the holiday.
Chelsea pressed her mouth into a line as thin and flat as a scar. ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘We’ll try.’
#
For the rest of the day, they tried. They tried holding hands in the heat. They paid ten dollars each to go in a gloomy tent and tried not to notice the poking ribs and desperate eyes of the floating crocodile inside. Over dinner, they tried laughing at their scalding soup and dubious shellfish. David had a beer everywhere they stopped, and Chelsea tried not to say anything about it. She took a picture of everything they ate and posted it. He looked over at her phone and saw a steady stream of love-hearts floating across the screen.
By sunset, they were tired and irritable. They’d been talking, but David couldn’t remember the last time they’d looked at each other. The bars opened. A headache from the sun and beer lodged over his left eye. People Chelsea’s age were laughing in the street and she watched them, looking defeated. David decided what they needed was a quiet place to sit and have a drink. To be alone.
He pulled her into the nearest bar—dark and stuffed with junk like someone’s attic. The bartender looked just old enough for a paper round. On the blackboard above him, one cocktail was listed separately, outlined in multi-coloured chalk and straggly Christmas lights. ‘A Xanadu?’ David asked. ‘What’s that?’
The bartender giggled. ‘Try it. Hella tasty. Gets you lit.’ He pronounced the last phrase with sing-song intonation, and David wondered if he was being mocked, or it was just a cross-cultural mix-up. What the hell. He was on holiday. Even Chelsea was drinking. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘And a Mojito. Not too strong.’
The bartender grinned, dumped a blender on the bench and started pulling bottles from the shelf.
Chelsea smiled warily when he returned with the drinks. The Xanadu was a mound of shaved ice served in a toppling goblet. It was the colour of spite and pierced with a paper umbrella that looked like a biohazard warning. Chelsea’s Mojito sat toylike beside it.
‘Wanted to try something new,’ said David. ‘We have a lot to celebrate, the two of us.’
Chelsea took a prim sip from her straw.
He slid into his chair and wondered what to talk about. Nothing about their failed day, nothing serious. They could plan tomorrow, but sometimes making plans turned nasty. He licked his lips and took a beer-sized pull from his goblet of booze.
It wasn’t beer. It was a psychoactive gut-punch in a syrupy glove. His head rocked on his shoulders like the dolls that bobbed maniacally on taxi dashboards. He carefully lowered the glass to the table. Even the fumes were intoxicating. ‘Not bad,’ he managed. ‘It’s a little sweet.’
Chelsea started planning the next day of their holiday. A museum. Traditional handicrafts. Her voice sounded like it was being piped through a faraway speaker. They could take a cruise along the beach and up the river into the jungle.
The alcohol went into him like an injection. He took another sip. What was there to worry about? He was on holiday—a bloody hard-earned holiday with his beautiful young wife. They’d just needed a change of location.
‘Well?’ Chelsea asked, eyebrows raised, lips parted. It was what TikTokers did to convey annoyance, and for a moment she looked about fifteen.
He leaned forward and gently covered her hand with his—she was always telling him not to be so rough. ‘Whatever you want. It’s your holiday too.’
Chelsea turned her head toward the beach.
The music was louder now. A couple in the bar had started dancing, and their tanned limbs writhed like a mass of worms. Ground control, he thought, I may have had too much to drink. Time for fresh air and a walk. He stood, mumbling something about stretching his legs, and took another swig from the goblet before they left the table. The bloody thing had cost forty dollars.
She followed him along the beach. He stopped to look at the moon rise over the town, and Chelsea bumped against his back.
The pus-coloured streetlights made the promised paradise look sticky and cheap. A scrum of young men passed, and David was terrified they’d spot him and Chelsea and yell out something cruel. Laughing couples took pictures of each other—they’re only doing it for likes, he thought. He swayed and Chelsea’s warm body crushed against his arm. The band of jungle at the end of the moonlit beach looked like mould on an old slice of bread. Not so bad, he thought, and turned towards her for a kiss.
She pulled away. ‘What are you doing? Really? After today?’ She coughed an angry laugh.
‘Well, it’s never the time with you, is it?’ He heard that he was slurring and spat out the next words as precisely as he could. ‘Not all bloody year.’
Chelsea blanched, as angry as he’d ever seen her. ‘There are two of us in this, you know. You sit around and act like everything is so disappointing.’ She stabbed a finger in his chest. ‘But you don’t do anything to change things. You just … rot.’
David sneered. ‘And all I get from you is fucking complaining and …’ He tried to remember every inane thing she’d ever said, the times he’d wondered if there was a person at all behind her face. ‘Rambutans.’
Chelsea turned to face the ocean. ‘You think you’re so much better than me. I really hate you sometimes.’
David stared at her stony profile, considering the worst things he could say to her. She’d already said, ‘I hate you’. He wanted to demand a divorce, but images of lawyers and mounds of paper flooded his head. The worst words he knew for women felt like feeble playground taunts. His fists tightened until he felt the bones would rip his skin. ‘Fine,’ he croaked, turned and stomped away from her.
He lurched for the black rim of the jungle, the night rushing around him like he was driving in a tunnel. At the edge of the jungle, thick creeper crunched like glass under his shoes. He looked back and could just make out the pale smear of Chelsea’s limbs and face in the dark. That bitch, he thought. She hasn’t even turned around. Fucking fine with me.
The jungle swaddled him in the trapped heat of the day, rank and sweet. He swayed inside and the sounds of traffic faded until they were muffled by the surf. The image of his wife on the beach dwindled to nothing, like a still from an unmemorable film. In a blind rhythm, he hacked into the jungle's heart, bashing vines out of his face, kicking roots away and tunelessly chanting—‘I’m alone with you tonight. I’m alone with you tonight’—until, nauseous and exhausted, he collapsed against the bole of a tree, closed his eyes and dropped his head.
He woke to stagnant water pooling under his cheek, the rattle and whine of a thousand stirring animals, and wondered where the hell he was.
#
Chelsea was examining the swollen saline bag beside his bed. The heart-monitor beeped, making her flinch. Her parents were still alive, David remembered, and she hadn’t been in many hospitals.
‘Were you trying to …?’ She gnawed her lower lip. ‘I mean, did you wanna get lost? Not come back.’
‘No. Christ, no. I just couldn’t get back.’
The first morning in the jungle, he’d found a gap in the trees and walked through it, sure it was the way he’d come in. He followed what felt like the right track, looking for something familiar from the night before, but the jungle was a different place by daylight. In his head, he scripted his apology to Chelsea. The sun climbed. The jungle steamed. His shirt clung to his back like a wrinkled second skin. It hadn’t been this far, had it? He’d been pissed, but surely he hadn’t walked for half an hour.
Resting against a fat tree, he remembered a special forces psycho on the television, drinking his own urine and talking wilderness survival. You were supposed to find higher ground, the psycho said. You were supposed to find water. David had a good memory. People like him didn’t get lost and die in the jungle.
He climbed an incline and found a pool of water topped with silvery scum. Turning in the direction of the beach, he slid into a gully and had to follow it out. He walked for hours before he remembered that if you were lost you were supposed to stay in one place and wait for rescue.
#
‘Nineteen days,’ Chelsea said. ‘It’s a long time.’
‘It felt longer.’
She sat down and pulled the chair close to his bed. His experience had impressed her, he realised, and she was looking at him like he could reveal some vital secret. How not to give up. How to protect yourself. She’d looked at him like that when they first met. ‘You must have been starving. What did you eat?’
Tiny pricks of hunger crawled along David’s gullet. He cupped his stomach with his hand and Chelsea quickly poured a cup of water from the carafe by his bed and lifted it to his mouth. He shook his head. ‘Did they say when I could get out of here?’ David asked.
#
They made a silent pact not to talk until after he’d recovered.
Coming home, David felt as dislocated as he had during his feverish last days in the jungle. His mind kept jumping back to different places. He was staggering along a dirt road. He was lying in the tray of a bouncing ute. He was strapped down in a plane. He was looking at their two-story neo-Georgian like it was the embassy for an alien civilisation.
‘Oop’, Chelsea said, when the wheelchair bumped over the threshold. He’d told them he could walk, but he’d been sympathetically ignored. Crouching, Chelsea squeezed his hand. ‘How does it feel to be home?’ she asked.
She made an elaborate welcome-home meal that David couldn’t eat. ‘It was on Masterchef,’ she said.
He ate warily, paring tiny slivers from his chicken breast. He remembered what he was supposed to say. ‘This is really good.’ The vegetables tasted like mud. Every piece of meat was an ordeal.
Chelsea discussed her next video. She was worried about showing people how they lived, without oversharing. To David, it seemed like she was speaking in a different language. They watched a movie after dinner—some bright idiocy about a bungled plot to kidnap the apathetic daughter of a CEO—and he was fascinated by the stern, beautiful faces of the actors as they performed stress and pain. Chelsea put her feet in his lap and the sudden contact startled him.
When Chelsea fell asleep beside him that night, her breathing recalled the distant waves against the beach, and David thought about the last days in the jungle.
#
Starvation had hit him hard some time in the second week, leaving him light-headed, halfway between heightened awareness and hallucination. An hour stretched to eternity as he stood fixated on whatever was in front of him, wondering if the petals of a flower could really be that colour. If he could really see faces in the leaves. A helicopter buzzed overhead and he chased it, arms windmilling, screaming himself hoarse before he realized it was just a cloud passing over the canopy, the coming storm clapping palm fronds to make the sound of chopper blades. His arms dropped to his sides. His whole head was on fire. He swayed and crumbled to the dirt, and the jungle intertwined and arced above him, like a cathedral’s high-vaulted ceiling, forming a tunnel for him to crawl along. He was sure there was something for him at the end. His fingers gouged the rich, black dirt, releasing the stench of rot, as pungent and sweet as rum.
Thunder rolled over the canopy, and when the lightning followed, it illuminated a patch of bare, dry ground just ahead of him, and a broad, pristine leaf that had been torn from the trees. In the stark flash of the lightning, it glowed as bright green as a traffic light. David dragged himself toward it, and when he turned it over, he saw the fat black spider squatting underneath, like it was waiting for him, its legs tucked primly underneath its body.
He inched closer. The spider stayed frozen. Beneath its coarse black hair, the sheen of its swollen abdomen was the exact colour of butter. His hunger coiled in his guts, as if it was a living thing. He lunged forward and crushed the spider in his mouth. The bitter, vital meat of it soaked into him. One leg twitched against his lip, tickling deliciously.
It was a revelation after weeks of chewing roots and nibbling at moss. He felt if he just ate one more, he could fly right out of the jungle. The storm broke, and rain lashed down. David rolled onto his back and let it fall into his gaping mouth.
#
The memory of food made his stomach churn so loudly that Chelsea shifted next to him. David groped for his phone and padded to the kitchen.
Bananas. Apples. A freezer choked with rubbish. The doctor had said to eat whatever he could manage, but it all sickened him.
Tarantulas were easy to catch when you knew where to look. They froze under the shadow of a reaching hand. On a stick, they crisped quickly over a fire. When he ate, every milligram of them became him. Because he’d earned it. Because he was surviving. Now he was expected to sit on his arse all day, then happily chew a cow.
He poured himself a glass of water. Clean. Safe to drink.
A tiny daddy-long-legs curled in the kitchen window, its filament legs gathered against the cold. David set his glass on the counter and leaned close to admire it. The dusty white abdomen. The pin-prick head. How could something so delicate even survive? The cold made it sluggish, and it barely shifted when he closed his hand around it. He pressed his palm against his mouth, felt a scurry against his tongue, and then it disappeared in him, like a strand of bitter grey fairy-floss. The spider’s energy coursed through him like rivulets of rain across the forest floor, and he stood, solitary and alive, as dawn seeped across the garden and blushed behind his eyelids. Safety. Nourishment.
‘Accidents never happen, in a perfect world,’ he sang to himself.
He decided to go back to bed. He wouldn’t wake her.
#
It was the perfect day for a barbecue: a single white scar of cloud across the blue sky, an ocean breeze curling the serviettes laid out on the tables. Twenty-eight degrees. Not a chance of rain. Chelsea caromed by with trays of garlic prawns, steaks and pineapple slices. She smiled at David every time she passed. He reminded himself to act normal when their friends arrived. Look them in the eyes, he told himself. Practise saying all their names.
They told him he was looking well. It was good to have him back. Most of the men were awkward. Some of the women spoke with voices shaky from suppressed emotion. Ross Cavendish hugged him fiercely and said ‘It’s good to have you back, mate’ with deep commitment.
Every time the sun fell on his skin, David remembered peeling burns and dehydration. The time the stream had dried, and he had to wander searching for another, his tongue feeling as thick and dry inside his mouth as a roadkill lizard. He kept to his table in the shade, pouring glass after glass from a carafe of cool water, aware of frequent glances from the others.
Chelsea fussed over the barbecue, and something about her frustrated expression and the sparking gas lighter reminded him of the first night he had tried to make a fire. He remembered the approaching night, hot and wet. The raw tarantula curled by the stones like a ball of scrunched black paper. The precious clump of dry moss. The stones that wouldn’t spark. The growing thunder that he realised was his own heart.
He excused himself and went up to their en suite to lay down in the bath until the panic subsided, listening to the echo of his heartbeat thrum around the tub. The tile was cool against his cheek.
When he studied himself in the mirror, David knew they’d lied: he didn’t look well, not at all. Two deep grooves hollowed his cheeks and his eyes were sunken. He’d had to punch three extra holes in his belt before it fit, and the end flapped against his thigh like the tongue of a hungry dog.
He returned downstairs and stood with a plate of food. He tried to laugh at the right times, but from the looks they gave him, he didn’t get it right.
There was one perfect, calming moment in the afternoon: one of the feral children roaming the garden found the stiff body of a rat behind the bins and chased the others with it. David studied the flushed face of the roaring boy, the way the mouths of the screaming children formed perfect circles. He wanted to call out to them: It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. This is real life. This is what it’s like.
The boy’s mother, Susan, who owned a boutique, pulled him away. David heard the word ‘boundaries’ drift across the garden, and the sullen boy was made to drop the body of the rat. As she dragged him towards the house, she gave David an angry look that collapsed into sadness. David recognised this as pity—a new experience for him. For the rest of the afternoon, he searched for—and found it—in every face he met.
He went to his table in the shade, and Ross Cavendish barrelled towards him. Ross’s wife had mentioned cocaine in the divorce, and now he only saw his children once a month. ‘No one wants to say it, mate, but you’re an inspiration,’ he declared, breath smelling like a pub carpet. ‘What you’ve been through.’ He gripped David’s arms so tightly the bones ground against his hands. ‘Whenever I think about the shit I’m going through. Carol and the kids, whatever.’ He took a breath, and David realised the man was almost crying. ‘I tell myself, what about David Merchant? He almost died in the fucking jungle.’
He stared into David’s eyes, nodding fiercely. David knew that something was happening between them, that he was supposed to say something, and he used to know what that something was, but there was only rising panic and the hot stink of the other man until Chelsea came and took Ross away, saying she needed help with the desserts, and David retreated to the garage.
They’d never had much use for the space before—it mainly stored the guilty remnants of abandoned hobbies. Crumbling blue yoga mats. A punching bag. One ludicrous yellow kayak. But since his return from the hospital, David had been drawn to it. It was dark and private. Safe from the wind. A perfect place to shelter. He’d swept it out and now went in there whenever he could, making excuses to Chelsea. His time off, he told her, was a good chance to get the house in order. It would keep him busy, but he wouldn’t overdo it.
He kept his spiders in half-litre pickling jars (only $3.99 online) lined up in a metal cupboard above the workbench. One was half full of big orb-weavers from the garden, their vivid colours fading as they died, their legs jerking slower and slower. One held a few house spiders he’d trapped while cleaning up. In the next jar, two huntsmen slowly clambered and entwined. They’d been tough to catch—darting so fast you didn’t see them move and materialising in a new spot, watching you with double rows of wise, tiny eyes. But it was worth it—one was nearly the span of David’s own hand and had some real weight in the abdomen. They could be pressed flat—David’s recent reading informed him that, in the wild, they lay hidden under bark—and this made them ideal for the toasty-maker.
Chelsea had been surprised to see it on the bench. ‘Toasties? We’re halfway through spring.’
David reminded her the doctor said to eat whatever he could. ‘I just had a craving,’ he said.
You had to watch them while they were cooking, or they burned, but if you timed it just right, the contents of a huntsman’s abdomen tasted uncannily like pâté. Luckily, the kitchen and the bedroom were on different floors, at opposite ends of the house, and if he turned the fan on, Chelsea didn’t smell his late-night experiments.
At the end of the row stood his prize—Rosie the funnel-web. He’d first seen the sinister white mouth of her web behind the compost bin and, over a day or two, cleared the space around it. Chelsea seemed pleased he was out of the house, doing something healthy. At night, he studied YouTube tutorials on luring and trapping spiders and finally managed it, in a starving blur, startled afterward to find the furious creature drumming on the glass, the lid screwed tight, his hands unscathed, like he had caught it in a dream. He wasn’t sure what he would do with her, but she had to weigh a hundred grams. He’d tried to estimate how many calories that was and stopped when he started drooling on his calculator.
David couldn’t cook now, he knew, not with the guests outside, but he could eat something small to keep him going. He considered the house spiders. They were tiny and bitter, but the crunch of their legs was delightful.
Just like before, his body drew everything from them. It was more than just nourishment now, he was learning from them every time he took one of them inside himself. Learning patience—how to wait days until you ate. How to conserve energy. Resilience—how to shelter unnoticed in the dark and quiet places. How to survive looks of disgust and apprehension.
The door to the garage slid open behind him, and he slammed the cupboard closed, hiding his jars from the sunlight now spilling from the garden.
Chelsea stood silhouetted in the doorway. ‘Are you okay? People were wondering where you went.’
David leaned back against the bench, blocking the cupboard from view. ‘I just needed to get out of the sun for a bit.’
It was hard to make out her expression against the light. Just wait, he told himself, act normal. When he approached her, she narrowed her eyes and raised an apricot nail towards his mouth. ‘You’ve got something in your teeth.’
David jammed his lips together and quickly explored with his tongue. A shard of spider leg was lodged between his front teeth. ‘Bit of steak,’ he muttered. ‘They were really good, by the way.’ He picked the piece of spider loose, flicked it away and ushered her towards the garden.
For the rest of the afternoon, he was the perfect host. He asked how everyone was doing. He listened and he nodded. He told them it was great to see them. He was doing so well that Chelsea was able to disappear and talk to her friends in the kitchen. Someone put on the Go-Betweens, and David remarked how old music was much better than the crap that was popular now. Everyone agreed. A couple of people made quiet references to his experience, and he laughed them off. ‘It certainly wasn’t my best holiday,’ he said. This was a lie.
The light began to fade, and people began to make their excuses and leave. David shook hands and briefly hugged the women. He tried to play the invalid—tired but grateful for visitors. Some of them looked him in the eyes before they left, like they sensed that he had changed, but he told himself not to be paranoid. Ross muttered something intense and stumbled into an uber.
Chelsea turned the music off and scraped plates into a garbage bag. David returned to his table and watched the sun set behind the palm trees. Everything was going to be alright, he thought, as the sky turned purple. Chelsea finished packing up and walked inside.
When it was dark, he followed her. ‘Well, that went well.’ The announcement echoed in the empty kitchen.
She’d left the dirty dishes stacked next to the sink and a grimy pile of napkins. Her half-drunk glass of chardonnay stood forlornly on the bench.
He moved upstairs and found her, sitting on the bed, her back to him. From her slumped shoulders, he knew that she’d been crying.
‘Chel—,’ he began, not sure what he’d say next. She pulled away when he reached for her, so he knelt in the cramped space between the bed and the window, his knees grating against the floor. ‘What’s wrong?’
She took a deep breath and looked up at him, struggling to keep her voice steady. ‘I know this is hard for you. I know you’re trying. But it isn’t easy for me either. I’m trying to understand.’
David prepared some soft, supportive words, but Chelsea punched his chest, and he recoiled, shocked. It hurt so much with only skin over his bones. ‘What the fuck is all that shit in the garage? Those jars. Jesus.’
David’s mouth worked open. He managed a few croaky words of denial and then stood and swivelled, dizzily, away from her, as she began to sob.
Going down the stairs he pictured it: Chelsea shaking out the jars into the garden, face averted in disgust, her feet dancing away from the tumbling spiders. Or the jars smashed in the bin, dust and rubbish sticking to their precious meat. Rosie impaled on broken glass. The images made his head spin. He gripped the banister and careened down towards the garage.
Barrelling towards his workbench, his hip clanged against a set of shelves he had put up in better times. A drunken stack of magazines spilled onto the floor, and the sound of them sliding against each other was just like the friction in the jungle canopy before a storm.
The jars were still there, intact. At the sight of them, he felt his insides gape, like he had no mouth and could simply suck the mass of glass and spiders straight into himself. He groaned and reached for the jar of house spiders—their upturned bodies gleamed at the bottom of the jar like the aniseed lollies he’d eaten as a child.
Movement felt blurry, and his fingers flexed in the air in front of the jar. He bumped hard against it, it rocked and nudged the jar of huntsmen next door. Panicking, he groped forward to steady them and pulled down the whole shelf.
The jars smashed on the workbench and the spiders scurried away. Flashes of grey as the two huntsman spiraled out. The house spiders skittered to the corners of the bench like dropped buttons. His prize, his favourite, Rosie, lay crumpled. Maybe the fall was too much for the weight of her. Maybe she’d been speared a fragment of the broken jar, but she lay on her back, thick legs twitching in the air like the innards of a smashed machine. Her proud fangs still shone. A single drop of venom beaded at the tip.
All those calories, he thought, and reached for her.
It felt right—his fingers closed around the body of the spider, as pliant and ragged as a discarded childhood soft-toy. Like she was dying just for him. Her fangs slid into the mound of flesh at the base of his thumb and that felt right too—one last dramatic gesture. The agony was like he’d walked into the kitchen and pressed his whole palm against a smoking pan.
He locked his fingers around his wrist, feeling like it was time to run. His heartbeat quickened to a single, frantic thrum as he staggered to the back door, collapsed against it and hoarsely shouted for Chelsea, the fire creeping up his arm, until he crumpled on the cold concrete of the garage floor and started thrashing with convulsions. The terrible racket of the junk falling around him sounded like the whole world was coming to an end.
#
The hospital gave him antivenom. They told him lots of people were admitted claiming they’d been bitten by a funnel-web, but in his case they were sure, his description was so detailed. ‘How do you know so much about spiders?’ the nurse asked. ‘Do you work at the zoo?’
They dressed the wound and did what they could about the pain. David spent the night lying rigid on his back, bullets of sweat all over him, trying not to move. The slightest sensation against his hand caused the fire in his arm to ignite again.
In the morning, Chelsea spoke to a huddle of doctors, and later, one of them—a young man with kindly eyes and startlingly white teeth—said they were a little concerned about his recent behaviour. Maybe he’d consider staying for a few days.
David felt too weak to protest. He lay in bed, his mind quite empty, watching beads of fluid fall in the IV bag.
Chelsea visited the next day. She wondered if he was well enough to talk. Under the bright fluorescent lights, his hand cartoonishly swollen, it seemed insane to lie to her, so he simply fixed his eyes on the ceiling and told the truth: he was starving all the time and all he could eat were spiders.
Chelsea clutched his good hand as he told the rest of his story. When he finished, she didn’t say a word, but simply stared out of the window of his room. This is it, he thought. She’s had enough, but at least she knows the truth.
Chelsea turned back to him. With her bowed head and hands clasped over his, it almost felt like they were about to pray. ‘It’s okay, baby. We can make this work.’ The lack of feeling in her words unsettled David for a moment, but he told himself not to be paranoid. It was a lot to take in. Probably just shock.
#
‘I have a surprise for you,’ Chelsea told him, when he returned from the hospital for the second time.
David arranged his features into a mask of affable confusion. This was the new role he had dedicated himself to—the reprieved husband, flawed but remorseful, who was delighted by the promise of whatever his beautiful young wife had prepared for him—a delicious meal, a new watch, an elaborate sexual scenario.
He allowed himself to be led through the kitchen. He smelled bleach and winced at the blinding spotlessness of the surfaces, trying not to let his mind return to all the things he’d done there. A cup of house spiders popping in the microwave. Blackened spider legs crackling on the grill. How he’d struggled to get the orb-weavers into a pot of boiling water until he realised the solution: gently immerse them using wooden chopsticks.
In the dining room he saw the ring light for her videos, but the sight of it, switched off, hanging down like the head of an exhausted animal, gave him a twinge of guilt. She’d given up so much to take care of him.
His place was set with their best plate and cutlery. Next to it, a black sleeping mask lay on the white tablecloth. Great, David thought. I can play along with that.
‘Just be patient for a little bit,’ Chelsea said as he sat down. ‘Put the mask on.’
David was thrilled by the authority in her voice. This isn’t the end, he thought. It can be a new start. He’d be supportive and emotionally available. She’d be the stronger, more mature woman he’d always wanted. He slid the mask on and for a moment, the swaddling heat of it reminded him of the thick night air in the jungle, but he pushed the thought away.
In the kitchen, drawers bumped closed, and a soft bleep came from one of Chelsea’s gadgets. She must have left something cooking while she retrieved him from the hospital.
David tried to remember the foods he’d used to love. Was it oysters? Was it steak? Whatever she’d prepared, he would savour it. He’d let her know that he appreciated her. All that desperate, secret nonsense was behind them.
He kept his expression blank when she returned. The doors of the dining room swung open, and he heard plates slide across the tablecloth. The food had a strange aroma, bitter and tantalising.
‘You can take your mask off now,’ Chelsea murmured.
David slid the mask away, and Chelsea lifted the silver dome from the plate so he could see his meal: a tarantula perched on her signature roast potatoes like they were the jagged rocks of its desert home. It was a beauty—wide and heavy as his own hand. Big enough to fill him. Protein for a day. The flesh-coloured stripes on its legs marked it as a Mexican red-knee, familiar to David from his lonely, late-night scrolling. Docile. Ideal for beginner keepers. Perfect for deep-frying. Underneath was a substrate of wilted spinach, glossy and dark.
David’s hands twitched on his thighs. He felt like cramming the whole thing into his mouth, plate and all.
‘I steamed it,’ Chelsea said. ‘It’s the gentlest way to cook something you’ve never tried before.’
I should say something, he thought. The most normal thing I can. His throat was tight with nerves. ‘This must have been expensive.’
Chelsea fixed him with her eyes and a smile stretched across her face. ‘They’re from a pet-shop not too far from here. There was a discount for the pair.’ She made a sound between a burp and a giggle and covered her mouth with her napkin. Above it, her eyes were as bright and wild as a startled animal’s.
Of course she’s scared, he thought. Of course it’s hard for her. She wasn’t there. Make this as easy for her as you can. Try and make it normal.
‘It looks delicious,’ David said, raising his cutlery. ‘Shall we?’
Chelsea nodded.
David’s hunger leapt inside him. His guts jolted. Spit soaked his mouth. It was like his stomach had never been filled. He jabbed his knife into the point between the spider’s head and its abdomen. The body trembled and then flattened like wet paper as he pinned it with his fork. Old habits. He slid the knife along the abdomen.
Steaming really was the gentlest way to cook. The skin opened like an eyelid, revealing the bright yellow goop inside, pushing towards him like a tongue. Bitter steam washed over him. He spooned a heap of it into himself and he went limp. The buttery poison of it. He imagined every calorie sinking into the pores atop his tongue, his whole body swelling with the spider’s energy.
Somewhere far away, David heard Chelsea push her chair back and stand. Her acrylic nails decisively clattered on the keyboard. The laptop whined and there was a hum from the ring light as she switched it on. She moved closer, and David opened his eyes, wincing in the glare. She stood over him, the bright glow from behind giving her a halo and darkening her face so he couldn’t make out her expression. Just her silhouette, and the winking phone pointed towards him.
‘Go ahead and eat,’ she said levelly. ‘We’re livestreaming. Lots of people want to see.’
She shifted to get a better angle for the camera, and David could see her face and the laptop open on the table behind her. He recognized her expression—he’d seen it often in his own reflection. It was hunger. He saw the tiny copy of them frozen on the screen. His haggard face staring in the bright light. A torrent of emojis poured down the right side of the screen—tiny happy faces gushing vomit. Bugging eyes and mushroom clouds above their heads. It’s over, David thought, but to his surprise, it felt as though a colossal weight had been lifted. It was such a relief to be exposed. A spider under a leaf. He began to cry, and his tears splashed against the body of the spider, beading in its hair like tiny jewels.
Trembling, he lifted the fork towards his mouth.
~~~
