The Spiders and the Red Jar

Rubber bands tangled like sea creatures in heat. A fossilized tube of superglue, tail crushed. Wood screws, all different sizes. He never puts things back in the right place.
Ellie dialed Mark. 
“What?” he answered. She could hear the sound of a pan scraping across a range top, strains of Motown in the distance. Aretha. Her favorite. 
“Where did you put the jar?”
“Hold on.” The background became muffled. “Okay. What jar?” It was quiet. 
“It’s not in the junk drawer. The bug jar.”
“The bug jar?”
“The one you catch spiders in.”
“Oh jeez. I don’t know. Probably in the cupboard. Above the glasses.”
“It’s supposed to be in the junk drawer.”
“You can’t keep calling for every little thing.”
Ellie stood in her kitchen. She had her sweatpants on, but no shirt and no bra. She had been about to get into the shower when she saw it hovering on an invisible wire just above the faucet. It was brown in the center with legs radiating like spokes, thin and jointed. Her heart caught at the sight and she called out, “Mark!” But Mark wasn’t there. Mark wouldn’t be there.
She found the jar pushed into the dark of the cupboard above the wine glasses. It was light red and glinted with quilted facets. She had bought it at her neighbor’s moving sale years ago in a box of Mason jars and lids, back when she thought she would get into canning.
The jar was the only one in the box that wasn’t clear. The only one the lids didn’t fit on. But it was long, a perfect distance between a hand and a bug. She took the sympathy card off the kitchen table, the one Mark’s friend Lu had sent. It had a blue butterfly on it and the message “even those that never fully blossom bring beauty into the world” in black handwritten script. Mark had told everyone. She had told no one. Perhaps that was when their split was inevitable, in the moments when he couldn’t stop talking and she couldn’t start. 
Ellie put on one of Mark’s old plaid flannels. She didn’t want to face the spider naked in case it jumped on her. The thought of it running across her boobs made her shudder. 
Mark had chosen the bathroom color, a rust orange like tools left out in the rain. Ellie would have picked something lighter and more soothing. She stood next to the tub, the fan whirring like an airplane overhead. The light built into the ceiling above the shower cut through the jar, sending a watercolor wash of red across the smooth white porcelain. She felt the turn of a screw above her pelvis, a memory painted in cochineal. 
She had been using the other bathroom, the one shoehorned onto the guest bedroom, for months. The shower was so small Mark called it “the squeezer.” She would turn in the steaming waterfall and hit her butt against the glass, sending a shock of cold across her skin. Mark asked her why she only ever used the tiny shower and she had told him the truth: It makes me feel safer.
It was time to use the big bathroom again. The proper bathroom. The one with the shower curtain embossed with poppies bending in a breeze. 
“Hey there,” Ellie told the spider. It had settled into a spot just above the tub faucet. It had probably been living there for weeks, getting fat on gnats or flies or whatever wandered through the deserted air that had filled the tub for so long. “I’m going to catch you in this jar.”
If she talked her way through it, maybe she could do it. Mark was always the one to escort the spiders outside. She had always found them frightening with their thin alien bodies. 
When she was nine, she was in her attic bedroom, waking slowly from a nap in the humid heat of the Illinois summer. Coming toward her face, a spider lowered itself from the ceiling. She remembered the jagged yellow pattern on its body, lightning frozen against a blank black. She couldn’t move, until she screamed and her father came to save her, crushing it in his wide hand. 
He showed her the body, the legs broken into a tangle of bent threads. “There. It’s dead now,” he said. 
She cried, thinking of how the spider had died because of her. The nightmares had trailed her ever since. Sometimes black widows entangled across the floor of her childhood home. Sometimes webs with fat tarantulas all around her face, silently crawling across her vision. 
“There we go,” said Ellie, moving with the caution of a cat trying not to be seen. Her heart ticked too fast. She held her breath. She hovered the jar into position, clamping it down against the beige shower tiles with a clap. She held it so hard her hand muscles twitched. She slid the card underneath the lip, wiggling it, working it until it came out the other side.
With a quick flip, Ellie held the jar out at arm’s length, sympathy card tight against the top. The spider circled in the bottom, frantic. 
“Caught you!” 
This must be what hunters feel like in the moment of elation when their prey is subdued, when human dominion is asserted, undeniable. I am Ernest fucking Hemmingway and this is my lion!
Ellie held the jar with one hand, thumb over the card, and opened the front door. The automatic porch light flicked on, illuminating the water-stained wood table under the front window. She pulled the card away and shook the jar like it was paint that needed mixing. The spider popped out, right side up, paused a moment, and scurried away out of the light. 
Ellie’s phone rang. “Hey.”
“I felt bad about what I said. Of course you can call. Did you catch it?” There was the muffled sound of dialogue in the distance. He must have switched from Aretha to a movie. 
“Yeah.”
“You could just get the vacuum cleaner, you know. Just suck it up.”
“I can’t kill them.”
“They’re just spiders..”
“Don’t say that. They’re alive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”

Ellie checked the shower every time. At first, it was just the beige house spiders with tiny bodies, wire legs and dark knees. She got better at catching them. Clap. Jar over the top. Card under the jar. Out to the table on the porch. Shake the jar. Watch them scurry away from the light. 
The first wolf spider gave her pause. Elllie sat on the cold tile, Mark’s old shirt pulled over her shoulders, and tapped “big hairy spider Illinois” into Google. Bite can be felt, but not dangerous to humans.
“Why couldn’t I have been afraid of snakes?” she asked it, peering over to see it holding still as if she wouldn’t notice its thick black legs radiating out across the scrubbed white of her tub. She eyed the opening of the red jar. Measured the size of the spider.
“Fuck it.” Ellie moved in fast and the spider darted over to the chrome drain. “Hold still, you little shit.” Her heart found overdrive and punched it. The spider ran to the head of the tub where the porcelain curved and it tried to run up it, but it was too steep and too slick. 
Ellie aimed the jar to head it off, slid the card underneath, and turned it over like flipping a pancake. The wolf spider was so big she could hear it fall softly to the bottom of the jar. Holding it up to the dressing-room-style lights, it seemed to fill the entire jar, a black shadow reaching barbed fingers out against the red glass. 
“I got you!” Ellie laughed and laughed, her heart like an electric shiatsu massager, turning endless, unstoppable circles beneath her ribs.
The spiders started appearing almost daily, sometimes two at a time. She once caught three house spiders in the same jar, scooping them together. She wondered if they would fight, but when she shook them out on the porch table, they all ran in different directions.
There was a jumping spider, but it was so cute and tiny—like a little puppy—it didn’t raise her heart rate at all. She stored the red jar on the counter by the bathroom sink and not in the junk drawer anymore. She kept the card beside it, upside-down.  

Ellie looked at the house spider, smaller than many of the others. “What are you, spider number twenty? Thirty?” It was standing on the lip of the tub. “You’re a little fella. Or gal. You could be a gal.” She set the jar over it. The ceiling light cut through the glass, sending a splash of red across her hand, down the side of the tub. She blinked. Grabbed the card. Captured it. 
Outside, it had turned cool. Faint stars dashed pinholes across the low night sky. The leaves of the crabapple in the front yard had turned yellow and crimson, but now just looked like pointillism shadows. She shook the jar, but didn’t see the spider. She held the jar to the porch lamp, rotated it until the light plunged into the red depths. The spider was holding tight. Ellie set the jar down and buttoned Mark’s shirt higher as a breeze came up. 
Ellie turned the jar over. Tapped it. Headlights illuminated her and the table and the brown siding of the house. A sedate blue sedan took a u-turn and parked at the curb. Ellie exhaled and spanked the jar until the spider dropped onto the table. It stayed there as Mark got out and walked up the flagstone steps to the foot of the porch.
“Hey.” He made a stray gesture, as if asking permission. His hair was longer, almost covering his ears with a black curtain of curls. If they’d had the child, Ellie thought it would have his hair. 
“Come on up.”
“Sorry to just drop in. I should’ve called, but I was near.”
“No problem. How’re you doing?” 
“Is that?” Mark waved at the arachnid holding very still on the table next to the jar.
“A spider. Just escorting it out.”
“Wow. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
“Um, so I was just going to pick up my shirt I left here. The blue plaid one.”
Ellie looked down at her torso. “This one?”
Mark squinted and held his hand to his brow to deflect the porch light. “Yeah. But that’s okay. It’s really no big deal.”
“Oh no no no! I’ll change.”
“You don’t have to. You can have it.”
“I insist. Just come in and give me a second.”
Mark followed her inside. The wood floor of the living room squeaked as he crossed the threshold. It always makes noises for him. Never for me. He stayed near the doorway and Ellie padded away toward the back bedroom, hearing him shifting his weight. Squeak. Squeak.
She took longer than she meant to. She switched the flannel for the shirt he always complimented her on, the red one with the deep V-neck that showed her cleavage was to be reckoned with. 
Mark didn’t look at her when she came back. He was staring at the spot on the floor where he had spilled his wine on their last anniversary and left a permanent streak of burgundy. 
He took the shirt. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for letting me borrow it.” Ellie had always liked how tall he was, how sure of his world. How he smiled every time he took a spider outside and then returned with a big sweeping bow like a cavalier doffing a feathered hat for his lady. 
“I didn’t really come for the shirt.”
“Oh?”
“I wanted you to hear it from me. I’m dating Lu.”
What she remembered from that night a year ago was the way he smelled, like ashen oak. They had burned a log in the fire pit. Wild, licking flames popped into the air. Later, he found her sitting on the edge of the tub, water sliding in pink streaks down her thighs. He cried and held her on the floor of the bathroom, his stubble raking across her cheek as she thought of a thunderstorm seen in her childhood. How the lightning ripped the sky apart like a zipper. 
“I always liked Lu,” Ellie said. “She was always nice.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to keep saying that.”
“But, hey, you can catch spiders now. That’s something.”
“I guess.”
“I just smoosh them. Throw them in the trash. Flush them down the toilet.”
“No! You take them outside.”
“Only when you were watching.”
He shifted his weight. The floor creaked. He looked to Ellie like a shimmering figure, the lines of his face blurred, his voice an echo emanating from the depths of an endless cave. 

Ellie took her shower in the small bathroom. The glass door caught her hip like an icicle. She sat on the tiles, holding her knees against her chest as the water cut downward, spreading sheets of humidity around her. This must be what it would feel like inside a dandelion puff, all softness and haze. She wanted to sleep there, but eventually she turned the water off. Dripping, she rolled directly into bed and gathered the cotton sheets around herself like a cocoon.
She dreamed of spiders. She walked through a corn field under the splitting peals of electric storm clouds. The stalks rose above her head and the yellow tassels writhed, the green ears breaking open to belch cascades of small brown spiders out into the rows. She was barefoot and rooted. They crawled, cold like water, across her body.

A week later, Ellie again stood looking at the big tub. The red jar was where she had left it. She traced the corners of the shower, checked below the faucet. No webs. No spiders. 
She flicked the faucet on and turned the chrome knob toward hot. She hadn’t spoken to Mark since he had stopped by, but she missed the shirt. Steam spread in clouds. She rotated the shower head until it rained needles and stepped into the cascade. Her hands turned red and she watched the veins distend down her forearms. She closed her eyes.
It’s not his fault. It’s not my fault. I am not broken. There should have been a storm that night. There should have been a tornado. Rip this house from its foundation. Wipe it all clean.
Ellie opened her eyes and saw it in the far corner, up where the shower curtain rod ended against the tile wall. A web, gossamer, geometric, as if it had been drawn by an architect with a pencil. At the edge, a black and yellow spider rotated a brown orb – like papier-mâché, a burnished, delicate globe between its feet. 
Ellie turned off the faucet. Water dripped into her eyes, but she didn’t blink. Slowly, she stepped one foot out of the tub and reached for the jar and the card. 
The spider was near the wall. She could capture it and the egg sac together. She marveled at the coal-blackness of its legs, the sulfur-yellow flashes of frozen lightning across its back. 
The jar was slick with the humid air. As Ellie reached up, the glass rotated in her fingers. She caught it and thrust it upward beneath the spider, but her movements startled it. The egg sac slid into the jar. The charcoal legs of the spider bent into broken angles under the lip.
Ellie’s heart suspended itself between beats. She held the card, read the words, saw the butterfly, used it to push the spider’s fractured body into the jar, red as coral in her hand.
She walked to the door, leaving a slick of wet footprints. It was late, the neighborhood silent. The night air ran crisp across her skin where it evaporated the dew from the shower. She sat on the painted wood boards in the lagoon of radiance of the porch light. She felt the roughness of the boards on her buttocks with nothing between her body and the world. 
Ellie dropped the card and tapped the jar in a steady rhythm. The egg sac, the color of a paper bag, slid out. The spider’s body followed, its remaining legs curled into a fist beneath it. 
“I didn’t mean to,” she told it. “I didn’t mean to.”
Ellie pulled her knees to her chest and held them. The day she told Mark she was pregnant, he was mowing the lawn. She sat on the porch steps, bare feet cooling against the flagstone walk. He was so sure it would be a boy. “What about Declan for your father? Or Jeremiah for mine?” She listened to him plan the decorations. There would be race cars and stars painted across the walls. But she thought it would be a girl. And one day that girl would call for her father and Mark would run to save her from a spider, catching it and crushing it in his hand.
Ellie felt the sensation of a breath across her foot. A house spider, its brown body delicately suspended on legs thin as threads, paused on the top of her big toe. All across the porch, tiny shadows stirred. Daddy-longlegs, jumping spiders, wolf spiders, crab spiders. They tip-toed across the planks. 
Silent and sweeping, the spiders approached Ellie until they paused in a circle around her. She held her breath. Counted. Lost track. Counted again. Ten. Twelve. Dozens. This isn’t real. You can’t all be here. The spiders surrounded the egg sac. Lifted it. Gathered the broken orb weaver like pallbearers. 
The procession flowed away from the light, to the edge of the porch. They poured over into the garden, into the darkness. Ellie sat naked, her body an aurora, a vibration, an incandescence, a lantern unshaded and bright.

That spring, the hostas exploded in green fountains around the house and the crabapple tree in the front yard turned pink with blossoms. Orb weavers—yellow and black—grew fat on flies in between the branches. Their webs shimmered in the morning, spoked wheels turning in the dawn light. Ellie painted the bathroom pastel blue and carried the spiders to the porch in quiet, cupped hands.