Spiders

In the dark ceiling corners and on the dusty floor trim behind the couch and television stand roamed tiny spiders, searching for minuscule areas they could name their hunting ground. More inched and clambered around on lanky thread-like legs in the unused parts of the laundry room and lower basement.

Most of the spiders were small, almost invisible, ghosts with long shuffling legs moving through the forgotten spaces of the house. The majority of these spiders, living in nooks never thought about, lived and died without ever being spied by my grandparents or myself, living in a world entirely human. Did they know their bodies were never designed for the right angles and flat planes that humans enjoyed? Of course not. Did their robust two-part bodies and powerful legs yearn for unevenness, the rotting leaves of a forest floor, the skinny stalks of saplings or grass, the bawdy feel of tree bark and branches? Generations lived and died in an environment entirely new to what their ancestors knew millions of years prior. Did spiders know anything?

Some of those spiders, I remember, were tiny, the kind I could only find by laying on the ground, dropping my chin on the floor, and watching patiently for any kind of subtle tiny movement against the carpet or linoleum. These little arachnids were no bigger than grains of sugar, their wispy legs hidden only by their microscopic size. Did they run from their bigger cousins, I wondered? Did they behave in the same way? Did they craft microscopic webs invisible from the giant eyes of elephantine humans?