Member-only story
Black widow
Clammy under the scratchy, smothering duvet cover, the smell of buttery lemon biscuits jolts Ida awake. Memories are arising, melting at the corners of her mind.
‘Did you know that spiders are nearly blind?’ Bob asked her. ‘Sensors in their legs feel vibration, they tune the pitch of their web and can tell when the sound is off key.’
‘Fascinating,’ she replied, more taking care not to burn herself, than listening, as she removed the fresh batch of biscuits from the oven. When you’ve lived with someone that long you don’t really listen any more.
Ida reaches out to Bob’s side of the bed. It’s cold. Although they’ve lived together over forty years, sometimes it’s as if his once sturdy body has shrunk. Shrunk so small a spider could roll it in a shroud of white. His body’s desiccation leaving only a faint trace in her memory.
She lies there, listening for his slightly catching breath. The emptiness engulfs her. So there it is, that’s that and the house is empty. She took him for granted and now, body limp in the dark, he’s gone. Even if it’s the gaping space where a sore tooth used to be, instead of relief … It’s just her and that spider in the corner of the bedroom.
Bob hadn’t been lucid in the end. He’d developed an unhealthy obsession. If it had been a new woodwork project, or a woman, she could have understood. But an…
