Natural Order
by Carlie Chabot.
Carlie is a Canadian student spending a year in Cheltenham to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University. She is currently working on a novel about the murder of a young girl and the fallout it causes in small town. It fits within the theme of Northern Ontario Gothicism, and explores death, mental health, and justice.
Natural Order
‘I am deeply appreciative of spiders, and everything they do.’
‘Oh, I can’t handle them at all.’
‘I never used to like them. I’m not sure what I’d do if one was on me either. But I can admire from a distance.
‘Do you remember the old house? Where the door connected the porch to the living room? I saw a web there once, and took it down with the broom. The next day it was back in the same spot. I took it down again.
‘But then guess what happened the day after that—another new web. So, I knocked that one down, too, and sat in the porch to read my book. A little bit later, I noticed a spider rebuilding it. And I thought about how day after day, this tiny thing came back to spin and weave and recreate what I’d been destroying.’
‘Persistence in the face of annihilation.’
‘I sat there with my finger still holding my place in the book, completely mesmerized as it worked. It was probably smaller than my pinky finger nail, black, and bulbous.
‘It crawled along the silk, pulling more from itself as it went, attaching it to the web in an intricate dance of legs. It looked tedious, but around and around the spider went until it was done, and then it retreated.
‘I stared at the empty web for a long time. Must not have had anything else to do. And eventually, a fly got stuck.
‘As it hit the sticky threads, the whole thing shook, and the spider shot out of its hiding place. It was on the fly instantly. It struggled in vain to escape, but the spider had it, spinning it around, coating it with thick, white silk.
‘I used to think it was sadistic the way spiders killed flies. Trapping them alive, draining them. When I actually saw it though, it was morbidly beautiful.
‘It actually reminded me of bullfighting. Did I ever tell you I went to Spain? My friend and I planned to attend a fight and protest. I thought that was sadistic, too. We had our signs all ready, rolled up at our feet. But then the fight started, and we did nothing.
‘It was a beautiful, cruel dance. We even watched in the end as the matador slaughtered the bull. Our signs stayed forgotten on the ground.
‘I thought both were cruel. But the slaughter of the fly and the bull, terrible as they may be, were elegant, in a way. They both fascinated me.
‘One is about survival, one is about tradition and culture. But in the end, they’re both about power, aren’t they? How we stack up against each other in life.
‘If I hadn’t seen it, I would’ve kept on tearing down the web. I would’ve killed the spider on sight, or gotten someone else to do it. But I let it crawl back into the shadows, and I went back to my book. When the boys came home that evening, I told them to leave it be.’