\u00a0by Carlie Chabot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Natural Order<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I am deeply appreciative of spiders, and everything they do.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Oh, I can\u2019t handle them at all.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I never used to like them. I\u2019m not sure what I\u2019d do if\none was on me either. But I can admire from a distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Do you remember the old house? Where the door connected\nthe porch to the living room? I saw a web there once, and took it down with the\nbroom. The next day it was back in the same spot. I took it down again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018But then guess what happened the day after that\u2014another\nnew web. So, I knocked that one down, too, and sat in the porch to read my\nbook. A little bit later, I noticed a spider rebuilding it. And I thought about\nhow day after day, this tiny thing came back to spin and weave and recreate\nwhat I\u2019d been destroying.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Persistence\nin the face of annihilation.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I sat there with my finger still holding my place in the\nbook, completely mesmerized as it worked. It was probably smaller than my pinky\nfinger nail, black, and bulbous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018It crawled along the silk, pulling more from itself as\nit went, attaching it to the web in an intricate dance of legs. It looked\ntedious, but around and around the spider went until it was done, and then it\nretreated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I stared at the empty web for a long time. Must not have\nhad anything else to do. And eventually, a fly got stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018As it hit the sticky threads, the whole thing shook, and\nthe spider shot out of its hiding place. It was on the fly instantly. It\nstruggled in vain to escape, but the spider had it, spinning it around, coating\nit with thick, white silk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I used to think it was sadistic the way spiders killed\nflies. Trapping them alive, draining them. When I actually saw it though, it\nwas morbidly beautiful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018It actually reminded me of bullfighting. Did I ever tell\nyou I went to Spain? My friend and I planned to attend a fight and protest. I\nthought that was sadistic, too. We had our signs all ready, rolled up at our\nfeet. But then the fight started, and we did nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018It was a beautiful, cruel dance. We even watched in the\nend as the matador slaughtered the bull. Our signs stayed forgotten on the\nground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018I thought both were cruel. But the slaughter of the fly\nand the bull, terrible as they may be, were elegant, in a way. They both\nfascinated me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018One is about survival, one is about tradition and\nculture. But in the end, they\u2019re both about power, aren\u2019t they? How we stack up\nagainst each other in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018If I hadn\u2019t seen it, I would\u2019ve kept on tearing down the\nweb. I would\u2019ve killed the spider on sight, or gotten someone else to do it.\nBut I let it crawl back into the shadows, and I went back to my book. When the\nboys came home that evening, I told them to leave it be.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","categories":[398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5344","project","type-project","status-publish","hentry","category-student-stories"],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/5344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/project"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uniofglos.blog\/creativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}